If your site is not listed in Google, your site simply doesn’t exist. Today I take opportunity to write about Black Hat SEO and give you a list of all not not-right-minded tactics that could be picked up by your competitors in order to finish your website & business. All features that Google uses to penalize buddies interested in Search Engine Optimization to improve their rankings in can be also used to cut one’s own throat as well. I decided to go the limit and share all of my knowledge about this stinking issue - I’m not afraid to do it ’cause it’s only a tip of the iceberg, also all of these doings are already described at both SEO forums and mass media (I think I have seen an article in Forbes!). Next week I’m gonna post there one another entry titled “how to protect yourself against this sort of bitchy attacks“, so stay tuned 
1. Flooding the SERPs
This one is inspired by post about Wiki Jacking published some time ago by Michael Gray. Flooding search results can be dangerous especially for people that provide some services, I think. Why? There’s a question - what your customers gonna do when they want to visit your site? Do they type URL into browser’s address bar? No, most of them just type name of your company into Google. What of it - if Google doesn’t show your business within first 10 of results for company name, you can loose most of your potential customers. So it’s enough to make 10 sites optimized to rank well for name of your company, then drive all traffic to your business competitor. Pretty spiteful, isn’t it?
2. Bitchy Kind of the Link Love
Have you read a post about bad neighborhoods in web? Event if not, you must know that there’s a sort of sites hated by search engines. Google’s Webmaster Guidelines says “avoid links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links“. Just guess what if somebody possess 1,000,000 of this sort of links and would like to share all these stinking stuff with you.
3. Google Sandbox Course
Sandbox is a measure taken by Google to avoid spam websites abusing search engine optimization, it could be caused even by social networking. So let’s say you don’t need to owe any spam sites - it’s enough to do a case study and figure out which keywords give much traffic, then do a “pushy SEO” with thousands of hypertext links added at once. Link exchange systems might be pretty useful.
4. How to became a copy of yourself
Generally there are two possible ways to use Duplicate Content to damage your site, both of them are automated. First - someone can point his domain to your server’s IP address, then do SEO for that domain. Second - your content can be scraped by smart scripting. Result? One’s site is in, your site is out. Conclusion - when your site is too fresh to be trusted by Google, you can be easily washed up.
5. All your rankings belong to us
If your CMS is full of bugs, there’s an opportunity for someone to set 301 redirect and still all of your SEO power to other site. This might be a VERY bad trip, especially if there is a risk that you won’t even notice it. Srsly, only script kiddies hack sites in order to leave “h4ck3d by” message nowadays.
6. Denial of Service
Shared servers are not able to manage dramatical increase of system usage. Fortunately - building a network of synchronized zombies is challenging a lot, in fact it’s reachable only for advanced programmers. However, there could be one another way to use a backdoor - if there’s a way to show all of data filled in your database (for instance - by playing with URLs), it may dramatically decrease number of pageviews needed to make your service unavailable.
7. Data bandwidth Fatality
This one is similar to DOS, but maybe a little bit easier for one to put across. This time you don’t even need a network - all that you need is a smart script & fast internet connection. In fact, you only need the script that will be able to do a never-ending download of all site content ’cause there are hosting companies that offer test accounts for free.
PS: 302 Hijacking doesn’t work and hasn’t in almost 2 years
September 23rd, 2007 #
We have had a ddos attack before and it cost us almost $1m from the downtime.
September 24th, 2007 #
Some good pointers there, however, I do think Google are wise to some of these things and make it a bit more difficult to harm a sites rankings (or atleast offer a complaints procedure to report this stuff).
September 24th, 2007 #
“If your site is not listed in Google, your site simply doesn’t exist.”
I have to disagree with that Bart, even though Google has sent me about 4,000 visitors so far this month, that only accounts for 3.6% of my total traffic, whereas referring sites account for close to 90%.
Of course it all depends on the nature of your site. Mine, as a blog, doesn’t really depend on Google so much as social sites likes Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc. But for a business yes it would be imperative to have your brand listed high on Google.
So, maybe a better way to write that first sentence would be, “If your brand doesn’t exist on Google, your company doesn’t exist online.”
September 24th, 2007 #
Ethan: And how did you solve this problem?
Neil: I don’t think so. New domain names are dramatically too cheap
Jon: Yes I do mean business websites, traffic from social networking services is “unmonetizable”. Also it’s pretty difficult to build a readership without ANY traffic from Google, you just need it as a “base” to begin IMO…
September 26th, 2007 #
I agree that traffic from social web sites is for the most part not profitable (unless there is a ton of it), but you can easily build a readership without Google. Get on social sites enough and people will start subscribing to your Feedburner.
September 27th, 2007 #
Natch. But we are not talking about blogs, we do talk about money making business websites