Episode 9: Cygnus | OMReport.com

Today’s interview partner is “Cygnus“, which is obviously a nickname. Why a nickname? He is a BLACKHAT!!!

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Transcription is included in the post as always.

Alpar: So today’s omreport we do with “Cygnus” which is obviously a nickname; it’s not his first name, neither his last name. And we’re at SEO Oktoberfest. Cygnus, probably you can tell us, what do you do?

Cygnus: So for the last fifteen years or so I have been involved in organic search. Primarily of a black hat nature.

Alpar: So what does black hat mean in your case? I mean there’s people who hack sites–

Cygnus: Sure.

Alpar: — who just, are not really perfectly sticking to what Google says you should do so, what kind of area are you active in?

Cygnus: So my definition of “black hat” is anyone that’s going outside the written rules of Google. So even buying a link technically would be black hat.

Alpar: Is that gray?

Cygnus: While, I’ve–in my view–it’s perfectly normal and it’s you know, it’s just natural business. In their view it’s black hat. So hacking, I’d actually put that on the crap hat side of things where it’s just not a good business strategy, it’s just more short term cash.

Alpar: So what’s the difference? It seems that there’s even large corporations who buy a link and then still what you do is a little bit more automated if I understood well. What you told me before.

Cygnus: So, yes, there’s certainly elements of automation. So it’s a matter of determining what particular tactic seems to be working on a manual level and then applying that with, you know, algorithms if possible to push it to a higher level. That’s all that really means in terms of automation.

Alpar: So how did get into that? Were you a programmer–

Cygnus: Yes.

Alpar: –and then just suddenly figured out, I can even earn money with programming except for, you know, hourly fees or?

Cygnus: Yes, so I, I spent a couple of years developing tax software which is extremely boring and does not pay very well. And so, you know, I applied–

Alpar: Poor programmers.

Cygnus: Ya, poor programmers. I managed to parlay that into doing affiliates for financial institutions and that payed significantly more–

Alpar: And then this kind of changed everything?

Cygnus: –it changed everything. It’s an accidental career.

Alpar: You talked about negative SEO yesterday. How come that this topic didn’t seem to be there for quite a while and since Penguin, it seems to be like a huge topic.

Cygnus: Well, I guess, unfortunately or fortunately–depending upon your point of view. Negative SEO is easier now than it ever has before. Mainly because Google is admitting that it exists. I mean, for the longest time they said nothing could effect your competitors and a large percentage of the population believed that. That’s no longer the case. Additionally because the thresholds have been made so simple to trigger, it’s so easy to put your own site in the Penguin, therefore, by logic, it’s easy to put someone else’s site into Penguin.

Alpar: So do you think they’ll adjust that? Just try to find some other solution like, you know, devaluing single webmaster tools, la la la?

Cygnus: I would prefer that they de-value links but I don’t know that it’s going to happen, you know, in the next year. I think ultimately, they may make it more difficult to tank a site as hard as they tank within Penguin, but ultimately they’re gonna do whatever’s best for their bottom line and if ad words revenues are holding steady, I wouldn’t look for a fix anytime soon.

Alpar: OK. And I would bet quite a bit of money that Edward’s income will stay steady for them.

Cygnus: Ya, well, if organic search is simply good enough for the average user, then it’s not going–given their market dominance, especially here in Europe, it’s unfathomable to think that anyones’ gonna credibly compete against them.

Alpar: Let’s imagine somebody’s less technical and has a regular, local, e-commerce shop. What can they do to defend themselves against negative SEO?

Cygnus: Not a lot. I mean, the best thing that they can possibly do is to try to improve their overall authority. I mean that’s their only weapon in the game. As well as monitor what kind of backlinks are coming in. If they do notice that links are coming in that seem to be of a rather spammy nature, uh, they can be proactive. They can–

Alpar: Then do what?

Cygnus: –well, I hate to re–to abuse the reconsideration requests system, well sometimes, but I think for a small business owner, they can say, “Hey, these links are coming in, these aren’t ours.” Just be proactive. Say, “This is not ours, I don’t understand. My rankings are fine currently but I just want to let you know.”

Alpar: The fun thing is that gives it, that puts them in a strong contradiction I’d say because you are, on the one hand you say and I’d totally agree on, that they should improve their authority so when you think about what I should do to improve my authority, something may, you know, be in the light gray area already–

Alpar: Well…

Cygnus: –and then again, use, you go to the consideration requests and tell the search quality team to please look at your site more intensively so that kind of–

Alpar: I mean but if all their ducks are in a row, so to speak, then having the engineer come by their site shouldn’t be an issue. I mean, if they’re doing some things on page they should not be doing, then yes, don’t use the reconsideration requests but for building up authority for a local business, I assume local business has addressing, I would more move toward citational links, just to try to improve, uh, the authority on that base level.

Cygnus: So what’s a citational link to you?

Alpar: For me it’d be local directories. I would get involved within forums and blogs that are relevant to my specific niche and just be actually active and not just fake it. And you know, you’d have your profile everywhere with your business information, your contact information, and that will, that will boost a local site. I’ve done that part many times.

Cygnus: OK. So what kind of negative SEO do you mostly see? What are the three most common types you can see happening? Obviously you haven’t done anything, it’s just like for informational, educational reasons.

Alpar: We’ve done a lot of research and the top one is link blasts. I mean, right as the unnatural link notices we’re taking place and then with Penguin, that was the easiest way to do negative SEO. You would load up a large list of–

Alpar: Somebody would…

Cygnus: –wikiblasts or blog comments, you know, a bad guy would do a lot of this type of stuff, forum prohostess, a big blast like X-rumor. That would be one way. The second way was more of a social engineering.

Alpar: How about just renting them through a local marketplace for links?

Cygnus: You could.

Alpar: Is that a little bit more expensive?

Cygnus: That, that is expensive.

Alpar: Then somebody knows what you’ve done.

Cygnus: And you could use third parties to do that too. You could always contract a terrible agency to go and rent links and say that you’re this competitor’s site. It does work. But the social engineering aspect is utilizing link removal emails to your competitors from someone else. And all you’re trying to do there is your trying to get your competitors links removed, pretending to be a person that you are not. And that works rather well as well. Unfortunately.

Alpar: There’s actually this entertaining trend that seems to have come up since Penguin that people charge for the removal of–

Cygnus: Yes!

Alpar: Even more than for setting up a link. What do you think about that?

Cygnus: I think that–

Alpar: It’s probably a great way to earn money?

Cygnus: It is. It is. I think that was actually the most intelligent business that came out of Penguin, was the people that immediately created link removal service. Like, “Remove’em” was the first one that I, um, I’m aware of.

Alpar: There’s really services in the U.S. offering that?

Cygnus: Yes!

Alpar: Come on. What’s it called? Remove’em?

Cygnus: Ya, Remove’em. I don’t know what their costs are off the top of my head but you know, there’s not been any evidence yet that says if you remove your links and do a reconsideration request you’ll get back. There hasn’t been any evidence but there’s been suggestions that possibly this could work. And these entire business models have been created to do that. Which is fantastic for the people that are thinking about it but they could be a mixture of snake oil.

Alpar: Ya, I think so. It sounds snake oil because there’s so many, if you think about a natural link profile, there’s so many links, you can’t just easily remove–they’re like a whole bunch of work. It would cost, I don’t know, a couple hundred dollars per link probably to remove one on average I think.

Cygnus: On big links, ya. On the real tiny links, no.

Alpar: Even on the tiny links. Imagine someone has done, has had an over-active intern, done a couple hundred blog comments, you know, how do you remove those? That’s a whole pain in the ass of work.

Cygnus: OK, so there’s a few ways. If it was through like a blog network, you would try to get the network closed down. Or you know, make them go offline. Um. And then there’s various legal threats that can take place.

Alpar: I thought the play to earn money out of that would be even the other way around. You would think, you would look at who rents really, really well, then create your own blog network, set up a bunch of articles that have like, exact match anchor-text links–

Cygnus: Contact them and say–

Alpar: No, no, just wait until they contact you.

Cygnus: So I mean–

Alpar: A new source of income for you?

Cygnus: It sounded like, it’s almost like a form of extortion, but unfortunately that’s the world that I think we’re currently living in during this transitory period before Google does the next Penguin refresh and we can see as an industry, OK, here’s what has changed in the last five months that we can now say, this is what Penguin definitely is.

Alpar: What do you say about the multi-apperance of–I mean it’s not really black hat, it’s more like a general question–the multi-appearance of certain domains?

Cygnus: Domain crowding. Yes, yes.

Alpar: Ya, the domain crowding so the diversity has suddenly gone down. So I have seen examples where a domain appears on seven out of ten results on a certain–

Cygnus: And it’s frightening…

Alpar: Does it make sense for a user?

Cygnus: No, it doesn’t. To that degree it certainly doesn’t. If they’re doing a purely navigational search where they’re looking for, uh like, moneysupermarket.com and that was their query, OK, I would understand, you know, seeing that. But if they’re just looking for “money”, I would not expect to see multiple domains for one query. Ya, there are certainly where some where pr-web was having the seven out of ten. it was silly. I think they made a mistake. I think that’ll ultimately get fixed because it makes them look stupid.

Alpar: Yes. How do black hats kind of, how do they progress, I mean, who do they exchange their experience with and where do they actually get information because it’s not really a perfectly open, talked about topic? It’s not like–

Cygnus: No, it’s not.

Alpar: –everyone is showing the others on conferences what’s happening. It’s more like a…

Cygnus: Well I think a lot comes from just experimentation. In some cases, over time, like any industry, you will develop a level of trust with certain individuals. You will share knowing that they will share back. That’s like any other industry but at the same time, most of what is learned is through trial and error. You learn not to point thousands of links to your own domain in one day because it comes back to bite you. Believe me.

Alpar: Sure, sure, sure. So where do you draw the line for yourself? Where do you see what is OK and what isn’t? Probably for somebody new to the industry, they’ll just see one thing and then come to the next and the next and then be starting to, you know, do deeply illegal stuff and probably they didn’t even want to do it, they just fell into it somehow.

Cygnus: For me, the line has always been that if a tactic is illegal, do not do it. And so, I am in the U.S. so there’s certain laws that I have to abide by that they’re probably different than your laws to a certain degree. And to a large degree, like, neither of us can go and hack a domain in order to place our link on it.

Alpar: I agree but then again I heard other people saying: “Oh, ya, I hack Japanese websites because they’re out of where I live and I’ll never go there.” What do you think about that kind of logic?

Cygnus: I personally don’t do it. I cannot condone nor condemn, you know, a lot of the practices out there because I can’t put myself in their shoes but I prefer and I just choose not to do that. Unfortunately I see that activity increasing quite a bit in the last year.

Alpar: It seems that like most of the hacking stuff that happens a lot in black hat SEO is WordPress based.

Cygnus: Well, the reason that it’s WordPress based is that’s the easiest footprint to find. It’s like writing virus software. For the longest time you’d write it only for Windows because it had the largest install base. So if you’re looking to exploit the maximum number of computers, you might look for the largest install: WordPress. After that you’d go to down the line, you might say OK, Answers CMS is fairly large, OK this Opens CMS is fairly large and unpatched, go for that. And just right down the line.

Alpar: So what is your maxim? You’re kind of, you’re basically doing automation texts and link wise. And that’s kind of the level of black hat that you’re willing to do and say it’s OK because it’s not against any real laws.

Cygnus: Additionally I will try to work with just my own network too so a lot of times when I’ll place a large amount of links, it’s through my own sites and my own forums. I feel a little bit better about doing that.

Alpar: Oh OK, so like a light black then.

Cygnus: Yes, yes.

Alpar: Thanks a lot for the interview.

Cygnus: it’s a pleasure, thank you.

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