Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Four Kinds of Hackers - the SEO kind

"Hack" -- the word won't leave the headlines. Today Rupert Murdoch appeared in the British Parliament to answer questions about the phone hacking scandal roiling his news empire. Lulz Security, a hacking group, recently claimed to have broken into the websites of the CIA, the US Senate -- and Murdoch's own The Sun newspaper. And last month hackers stole more than $2.5M from Citibank and caused the bank to issue 100,000 replacement bank cards. Not too mention.. THEY HACKED PLAYSTATION!!!


(Thank God I play Xbox)


ABC news article goes on to list...
Mobsters, Taunters, Activists and Anarchists...

and he's done a pretty good job, except.. 




You missed one.. SEOs...


Those are the ones that the flow of data from Social Networks, the ones that control the search results you see..


Yes.. these SEO Hackers can be 4 types as well.


1. Spammers - they don't care.. about you, about Google, about your kids seeing porn, they just don't care.. once they find a hole, they will exploit it until they get caught by whomever's name they are trading on, (unlawfully), 


these are bad people.. the people that employ them usually end up in jail. In Texas we castrate sex offenders.. i'd like to see a federal penalty of fingers.. or maybe just thumbs.. for these bad seeds.


2. Black Hats - There are a Million ways to do SEO.. they know them all, some push the envelope, some do not. They are about automation, (or not...) They know the methods of the spammer and use some of them, they just don't get caught.. ONLY Spammers and Novices get caught.


GreyHats and Novices : Read something on a blog, in someone's comments.. then did it on someone's website.. it worked.. some have an excellent track record of this. it's called "chasing the algo", things change..  realize 70% of SEOs fall into this class. Sometimes they work in-house for a business.


"But we were told it was ok to have a social profile for each keyword.. - Novice.. "tried it again.. got the client banned from Google".


3. Grey Hat is the Novice after 4 to 5 years.. they now know better but still chase the algo.... ,they study SEO and they read it all, usually do fine job for clients. 


4. White Hat - your Corporate SEO, it's not that they don't know how to break the rules.. they just can't. This top level hacker usually was one of your 4 like, the Black Hat above, but now he has insurance, benefits, a mortgage, a family.. they are hacking google to make sure when you want what their client has, it's it at the top of the results for what you typed in. 


They aren't deceiving you, they are helping you, they ONLY want you to find their client when the search term you used fits the client, and/or their product. If you went to their client's website and it wasn't what you wanted when you got there, they could lose their job. Some of these have been doing this for 15 years or more. 




The Black Hat is the White Hat but when he is an Entrepreneur. There is also one called a conical hat.. a tinfoil hat and spammers are also known as craphats.


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