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This really seems to be the week in which entire litters of cats are being let out of the bag: First, Project Black Mask, spilling the beans wholesale concerning black hat SEO, next Michael Martinez Busting the Relevant Link Myth, then some fairly unknown techniques focused on How To Get Those Nifty .EDU Links, our writeup on Trackback Spamming And Black Hat Link Building, the CIA FOIA’s site hack discussed in Spook Links – The Ultimate Black Hat Link Building Technique, and now it’s black SEO (not to be confused with black hat SEO, though the two may easily intersect in various technical areas).

Black SEO (also termed negative SEO) is a technique employed by search specialists to hurt any given web site’s rankings using inverse optimization tactics in various flavors.

Unsurprisingly, it’s a very controversial approach frowned sternly upon by the search engines and the vast majority of online marketers alike. As it’s entirely an underground thing, you won’t find a lot of empirical statistical data backing up or refuting some of the rather wild claims informing the discourse.

Up until now negative SEO was only discussed at any length within the SEO industry. Two recent examples are RustyBrick’s indispensable Search Engine Roundtable which featured a piece titled Companies Offer to Damage Your Competitors Search Engine Rankings only yesterday. Incidentally, yours truly contributed a short but fairly summary comment on the issue there which you might be interested in reading as well. (If you happen to have lived under a rock for the past years you may really want to subscribe to his blog as it’s probably the best overview of all discussions going on in search you’ll find anywhere.)

The post itself refers to an ongoing discussion on the SearchEngineWatch Forum titled Give me money or I will drop your Google Rank where it expires that some blatantly clueless amateurs seem to be trying to pull off a black SEO variant of the protection racket scheme using all the wrong buzzwords, duh.

It’s a strange coincidence that even venerable Forbes has now caught on, featuring a fairly lengthy article by Andy Greenberg, The Saboteurs Of Search, tied to which is their piece In Pictures: 7 Ways Your Site Can Be Sabotaged, a fairly basic but essentially well researched overview of techniques you’d rather not be at the receiving end of, ranging from Googlebowling via bogus copyright infringement claims to downright DOS attacks.

In the main article you may be surprised to witness Google’s very own Matt Cutts actually admitting to it, albeit adopting a stance soft as warm butter:

Matt Cutts, a senior software engineer for Google, says that piling links onto a competitor’s site to reduce its search rank isn’t impossible, but it’s extremely difficult. “We try to be mindful of when a technique can be abused and make our algorithm robust against it,” he says. “I won’t go out on a limb and say it’s impossible. But Google bowling is much more inviting as an idea than it is in practice.”

Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?

(Hat tip to TheFounder of the currently moribund Threadwatch forum for pointing me to this piece!)

We for our part have written up a piece on the subject back in March which we were planning to use on a black hat resources site we’re currently developing, presenting a new, direly needed consultation and protection service of ours we wanted to roll out later this year.

So in view of the above and the buzz it will expectably generate, we’ve decided to publish it somewhat prematurely as a separate post following this one:

Black SEO Tactics – Fighting Dirty

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