The phenomenon of consumer blogs having such a disproportionate influence on major brands, which we highlighted in our “Search is Brand” study, derives in part from the failure of brands to create functional, easily indexed sites for themselves, and to produce lively, relevant and topical content.

But some companies get over this by cheating. They do deals with unethical agencies who use spam and dummy websites to create phoney relevance and push a brand up to the top of a search term willy-nilly. We have been anxious for a while about this, as large brands have been using this technique not realising the risks (pace the BMW ban) or suffering from the fact that their competitors are doing so.

Ashley Friedlein, writing on e-Consultancy’s forums, points out that some black hat tactics appear to be working for some SEO-related consultancies. A company called Oyster-web seems to have got itself up to number 2 in the “Search engine optimisation” search, but its business seems to be selling leads to SEO companies.

At the same time Google appears to have woken up to this to the extent of going after first BMW and now some SEO companies to punish. It’s very surprising that they have picked a highly reputable agency like Scotland’s Bigmouthmedia to zero-rank. Bigmouth have some very respectable clients and it would be surprising if they have knowingly done anything unethical, but it is a chilling development.

BMW are back. German web search guru Alan Webb writes about it on Public Relations Online. Apparently the speed of their reinclusion in the Google index has caused some raised eyebrows. Scandic Hotels are still in the outer darkness of zero page rank many months after being booted by Google for similar offences.

Google’s BMW blacklisting is an affair with many ramifications.

We have noticed a huge increase in “black hat” SEO by a number of companies, although few as high profile as BMW. This gives us issues because it has a big effect on blog spam. Suddenly a humble keyword search on a customer’s brand is flooded with a blizzard of bogus sites. The sites look like this:

http://www.mownhose.com/

They have no archive, the content is nonsense and the sole function of the site is to spam a keyword.

I got this one by using the search term

“aluminium”

What is intriguing about this is that the link is misformatted.

It looks like this

http://www.mownhose.com/7//

and gives a 404 error.

I don’t entirely understand why this is so …

These companies are using techniques which are designed to give them authority in particular search strings. They are then selling this authority to … well, who knows, but probably someone in the Aluminium business.

The fact that companies as big as BMW, as Ricoh have been doing this shows that spammers have evolved from working for the gambling and porn industry into having a roster of “legit” customers. Work done by our company recently identified a highly respectable company as the beneficiary of a web of complicated links from affiliate schemes via invisible sites. Google say that they have a fix for the problem, but my guess is that they wouldn’t have chosen as big a beast as BMW to blacklist unless they wanted to fire a loud shot across the “black hat” SEOs’ bows.

Update:

Even weirder: here is someone trying to spam the name “Alan”

http://alanblog.morsalan.com/