What is the Future of Blackhat?
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Over the past bit I’ve been mentally going back and forth over some complicated and personal issues about the future. And I found myself examining my various methods of income, and thinking “how will these be in the future”. Blackhat is by far the most interesting in this respect. Matt Cutts himself has stated that hackers are going to come in and take over the blackhat space. There’s been speculation by some whitehats it will die out entirely. So which is it?
The Limiting Factors of Blackhat
The limiting factor with blackhat right now is links. Search engines still suck at detecting cloaked pages, relying heavily on manual spam reports. But links on the other hand are worth less as the spammable sites are building up reputations within the search engines that make their links worth less or nothing. They also serve as great profiles to try and find blackhat sites in advance. I believe this is the reason Cutts believes BH will blend with hackers more.
The 3 Evolutionary Paths - To deal with the decreasing value of link spam(according to some it’s decreasing anyways) I see 3 legal paths to choose that can still work
- Stealth - This is the path being chosen by several much more skilled than myself. It’s basically the idea that a proper blackhat site is indistinguishable from Whitehat. More or less automated whitehat, with blackhat running behind the scenes enhancing it. It could be via redirected domains, it could be via cloaking(or Mosaic Cloaking if I ever see Fanto/Perk publish anything more on the topic). This is a somewhat advanced path, because there are whitehat SEOs that are quite skilled at tracking. But if you can beat them, Google will probably not be able to detect it. Remember, heavy reliance on manual reports?
- Speed - This path is for those with a true architecture in place. They cannot reuse spammed links in their database, but must seek out fresh ones. Fresh forums, fresh blogs, anything up to the minute. (Hint: use Google advanced search to pull things like inurl:phpbb using the time restrictions like “only in the last 24 hours”)
- Do-It-Yourself - This is the one I’m personally considering going into(or rather mixing it with the tactics in #1). We’re in Web2.0 guys. Webhosting is cheap and free. Sites give you “spaces” to put HTML content. This is perfect for building a massive link farm. I have vested interest in not speaking about this one too much, so yall will have to deal with that. I will include one tip I myself am not using though. Look at social networks. Tiny ones. Many do-follow your profile data. Parasite hosting, while it is grodey, is one of the few ways to get a substantial amount of non-sequential IPs. Most hosts, afraid of e-mail spammers, will fight any request for this tooth and nail. This approach requires a lot more than just listed here, otherwise it sounds like a standard blog farm. But come on now folks, that’s not the case. I just can’t say much more. Strap your hat on Matt! haha.
What COULD Turn Blackhat into a Legally Dubious Methodology?
To figure out what COULD cause the ultimate union between blackhat SEOs and blackhat hackers, look no further than the e-mail spam industry. IP-Based blacklisting. Making reporting spam too easy. When IP based blacklists came into heavy use, spam levels actually increased, and were just taken over by more criminally minded entrepreneurs and organized crime. Thankfully, mail servers are run by admins who may upgrade, but most software installations on servers are run by random people. So centralization/widespread adoption of any true anti-spam technology is unlikely.
Conclusion
Blackhat will always exist in some form or another. The bottom may fall out, sure. And I’m sure in the future us blackhats from the United States will still wish we could live in Russia without it being..Russia(yay lax internet law). But I don’t see it going away anytime soon, or turning into a criminal enterprise.
Yeah yeah, I’ll give you guys a tech entry next time.
-XMCP
March 31st, 2008 at 2:35 pm
Grodey?
Don’t think I’ve heard that since around the time you were born. lol
I’m already moving in the direction you are talking about above. Better to be ahead of the game than behind the 8 ball.
March 31st, 2008 at 3:07 pm
[…] Slightly Shady SEO put up a post about the future of the black hat side of things. It was pretty much to the point and […]
March 31st, 2008 at 3:26 pm
What’s your view on xss/sql injection ect?
March 31st, 2008 at 5:54 pm
I use Google Alerts for queries like that to monitor most niches and make sure I get my hand in the hottest/latest pages, threads, etc. I also monitor Google HotTrends, so I guess I’m going for #2.
March 31st, 2008 at 11:04 pm
@adam taylor: I’m still deciding on a personal philosophy about those. I find them on my own pretty regularly, but I don’t use them at all promoting sites. They’re definitely going to become much more common though.
April 1st, 2008 at 6:47 am
Very interesting post XMCP.
I’ve added your blog to the list of white hat blogs I read daily. Your blog continues to be the most interesting though.
I don’t have any useful comment to add but did want to say I enjoyed this post and most of your posts in general.
Brent D. Payne
April 1st, 2008 at 9:07 am
You gotta be careful about what Matt Cutts says — like Alan Greenspan, he tries to work with intimidation as much as actual power.
The basic problem he’s got is that Google’s current algorithms work pretty well on the current web. Even good sites have spammy (had to get them to beat the bad competition) or spammy-looking links (good sites get forum links too.)
A serious attack on any kind of spammy link will cause immense collateral damage, and might even make Google’s results as bad as Yahoo and MSN. So far, Cutts has focused on intimidation and making an example of those who are easy to make an example of: such as textlinkads.
On the timescale of years, however, Google is going to refine methods of descrimination that help the SERPs more than harm them, and that’s what you’ve gotta worry about.
April 2nd, 2008 at 12:29 am
I definitely see #3 as the best method for “legitimizing” BH SEO efforts. Networks of various sites (blogs, directories, forums, etc) totally under your control. This would serve as the big base of links, references, etc.
You still have to add in some high quality links from various IPs - but the bulk comes from your own world.
And with the number of ISP’s available, you can deal with the non sequential IP issue that way.
Enjoy your blog. Look forward to more post like this that are more strategy level thinking.
May 9th, 2008 at 11:54 pm
The future is what happens to be. Think of myspace, youtube and facebook. Whoever learned to exploit the early shortcomings of these sites before people caught on made all the dough. The newbie-blackhats leaked the method if the admins didn’t catch on. But then that goes back to you saying how volatile this way of life is.
I say if you see a site you can piggyback on (read: parasite hosting via profiles, stat pages, whatnot) then jump on it.