Black-hat SEOs are people too

I'll confess to a certain interest in knowing how to do bad stuff. I got a copy of the Anarchist's Cookbook when I was about 10 years old. I sent away for Paladin Press catalogs, despite having no interest in the weapons-geek parts of their offerings. And so from time to time I look into black hat SEO.

Definitions vary, but essentially “Black-hat SEO” refers to the manipulation of search engine results by creating automated internet traffic that almost everybody would regard as spam. And as in other usages of the term, “SEO” (Search Engine Optimization) refers both to the practice itself, and the people (“SEOs”) who actually do it. The heart of black-hat SEO is automation, from the creation of quasi-real-looking websites to the dropping of links on forums and blogs to the all-important defeat of anti-spam tools such as “captchas.” Outsourcing to cheap manual labor has its place, but mainly black-hat is an automation game.

So who are these black-hat SEOs? Many of them are just ordinary hackers, out to make a living. My most revealing view of them comes from one of their forums I joined. There I learned that, for example, one of them planned to use some of his ill-gotten gains to support a growing family – and in particular planned to grow that family by adopting a special needs child. (By no means do I want to suggest black-hats are all noble Robin Hoods. Still, that was an eye-opener ...)

What's more, they're normal businesspeople, with normal concerns about price, service, quality and the like. I was reminded of this by receiving an emailed product advertisement from the proprietors of that forum, which I shall now reproduce below:

Hey [UserName]

[ProductName] has been pimped to run at lightning speed and getting backlinks has never been so easy or fast.

I now have a team of excellent developers behind me in [SiteName] so we are trying to push the boundary and make the best `automatic promotion` tools on the market.

Most of our tools will be for link building because that's where most Seo`s have difficulty.

We may occasionally throw out a content generator or two but they wont be just average so we have to keep working on the text and sentence structure to make them the best ever.

As you have registered but never posted in [SiteName], i thought i would just send you a quick message just to let you know about [ProductName] desktop version.

[ProductName] submits to hundreds of thousand of Pligg sites.

For those who didn't want to use serverside [ProductName] we have now ported it to desktop so you can run it from your computer.

[ProductName] desktop is pretty much a point and click application.

[ProductName] desktop is multi threaded and runs many times faster than the serverside [ProductName].

With the desktop version we have the same capture breaking, proxy support and the same obsessive support for users.

I would say people are pretty happy and still nobody (apart from pligg owners) have said anything bad about the tool.

White hat, black hat, any hat! this tool is rocking the industry.

If you haven't already got your copy you can buy it now.

Any questions? Just post them in the support thread here.