Black Hat SEO the Twitter Way

Angelo Racoma at the Blog Herald talks about Twitter and Jaiku being the next step in developing an SEO program that could be used by Spammers to increase their page rank, or otherwise dupe people into going into their sites.

The key issues in the article are that the way that Twitter works, is that every subsequent user under twitter has their own directory IE twitter.com/person while Jaiku has person.jaiku.com as their directory/domain structure. Twitter is also deeply integrated into Word Press, while Jaiku is not (at time of writing). This gives them a huge lead when people write to their blogs and does a tweet along the way. No thinking, all automatic, easy.

The ability of Splogs to exploit the blogging platforms has become a standard fair issue, in that yes, they exist, we know it, Google and Live and the other search engines do what they can in the shifting landscape of Black Hat SEO to keep them from rising to the top of search results.

Racoma wonders if the search engines are doing the same thing for Twitter, or other micro blogging platforms. It is a good question, with our thoughts on this being a resounding No, Black Hat SEO might have thought of this, but before the Racoma article, nothing from the prevention side that we know of had been posted.

These, among other reasons, make me think Twitter, Jaiku and other microblogging/presence services may be ripe for the picking for SEOs. Unfortunately, spammers might also start to mass-produce tweets with links to their own sites. At least they won’t be disturbing anyone, unless they have friends/subscribers in their networks (which can be done with some social engineering). Source: Blog Herald

If Racoma is right, then the micro blogging systems are going to have to put some controls in place, and the search engines are going to have to put some controls in place. The only real major difficulty is accurately determining a splog from a real blog, and not knee jerk reacting to a problem cutting off legitimate users.

Since the internet has a history of knee jerk reacting (IE DMCA) rather than thinking things through, we really hope that if people do put in controls, they will be well thought out, and that there will be a way for people who are legitimate but adversely impacted by those controls to have a way to protest them or at least have some input into them.