Gaming Google a Gateway To Crime? 162
netbuzz writes "Merely hiring a blackhat practitioner of search-engine optimization may be indicative of a willingness to 'cut corners' — the kind that land business executives behind bars — says Matt Cutts, Google's top cop regarding such matters. It's an interesting theory, as generalizations go, but there would seem to be quite a leap between risking the death penalty from Google and risking a stint in prison."
it's not even cutting corners (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not even cutting corners, the Google guy is euphemistically describing "illegal" activity by Google's rules. And while SEO activities that break Google's rules aren't technically illegal other than sanctions brought by Google for getting caught I think Cutts makes an interesting and probably valid point.
Just because something isn't codified into law doesn't make it ethical or right. Law can and will never model completely human behavior, nor should it. But outside of the law there are behaviors that demonstrate or point to probability someone would also break codified law. SEO like any other discipline has approaches that work and are within ethical boundaries. But it also, like any other, has approaches that are not okay.
IMO it's about boundaries, and the ramifications when activity infringes on another's ability to freely engage in their own activity. Competition is one thing. Subverting a mechanism is quite another, especially when subversion comes at others' expense.
As for the quasi-argument from the summary:
The whole MO of people like this is they don't think they're risking a stint in prison. They completely rationalize their behaviors beyond any reasonable state of self-denial. Watch some of the videos of the Enron depositions... these guys (IMO) truly believe their actions were within the bounds of legal activity. (Actually some probably were, the shame of the whole Enron scam is a lot of goats took the fall for the more powerful, though it was nice to see at least a couple of high level execs finally taken out.)
Re:it's not even cutting corners (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked in a Fortune 100 retail environment for many years and was amazed at the moral lapses that seemingly otherwise upstanding managers would commit on behalf of the company. One manager in particular, who was particularly hard on shoplifters (always prosecuted no matter the amount) and employee pilfering, would routinely shave hours off of employees' timesheets. His "thefts" added up to thousands of dollars per month and he felt perfectly justified in doing it.
Re:it's not even cutting corners (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll bet you we see a lot more of this in the future, because internationalization has introduced an element of nationalism into the competitions between companies. Nationalism enables our tribalist ability to slaughter (i.e. rip off) any human who is from a different tribe. Wow will it be nice when genetic engineering allows us to remove the tribalism gene.
Also, the middle-class is heavily involved in the stock market now, and companies are responding by becoming increasingly short-sighted. Short-sightedness means cutting corners and selling out the long run, as we know.
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It's no longer about making money. Making money is the point of business and hey, that's just fine.
But no, it's now about making MORE money.
You can't be happy that you spent a million dollars and made a billion. Because you made 2 billion last year, so you should have made at least THREE billion.
The stock market and its investors tend to, I've noticed, ignore the concept of averages. Sometimes, a store will do better than average. Sometimes, it will do wors
The stock market is all about growth (Score:2)
No - it's never good enough to make a lot of money, if it's the same amount of money as in the past.
The word that describes the issue is "growth". Growth is what drives the stock market. If a company is not growing, it's stock price goes down. Stock prices are based on future earnings. If the future does not include growth, a company is in trouble with their real customers - stockholders.
The result of this is that companies are insane about growth. And there are some (many) who will lie, cheat, and ste
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I think that calling this "nationalism" is to give it too much credit... it's more like a retreat to a medieval attitude, a worship of the divine right of your local warlord. There's this general sense that whatever Big Corporation wa
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The stock market was always a form of usury gambling, and ownership control over key assets and a way for them to increase their wealth exponentially, and also way for the upper classes to offload risk onto the middle and lower classes. The whole idea of investment is fucked up to begin with. Gaining money without working for it through ownership loopholes (i.e. 'passive income') which offloads risk onto other people (i.e. the workers working
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You certainly touched on it and I'll add my bit here, focusing entirely and only on that last sentence fragment.
The entire logic and reasoning behind that fragment is quite questionable. Frankly, I have to wonder about the character of the person that wrote it. To them, it would appear, the only reason people do not do wrong things, is because they are afraid of the ramifications of their actions. Put another way, the logic of that sentence fragment states that the only reason people do not slit your thr
Re:it's not even cutting corners (Score:5, Insightful)
Thats actually not clear at all.
Re:it's not even cutting corners (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:it's not even cutting corners (Score:5, Insightful)
It isn't about revenge. The hope is that the system will try to rehabilitate. Revenge only teaches a criminal to be more careful and/or armed.
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I think you might have revenge confused with assault.
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You do realize there is no 'undo' button on the electric chair do you ? Of course by your reasoning it's all gods will anyway, even when somebody is sentenced to death when he/she shouldn't have been.
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This wholly depends on the context, if someone tried to rip you off and you killed them, then that's 1 less criminal in the world. The truth is we have become too compassionate in many regards and criminals become a drain on the economy by having to pay for them.
There was a reason our ancestors killed off criminaals because they knew it was a waste of time nad resources to 'rehabilitate' people who's nature's are fundamentally criminal to be
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If rehabilitation were not one of the goals, why let them back out? Wouldn't it be assumed they would simply revert back to their criminal ways? I think under those circumstances, criminals would have been locked up for good, regardless of the crime.
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How is revenge any worse than the arbitrary punishment decided in a courtroom or municipal office ?
Three things:
1.) Everybody has differing ideas about what a punishment for revenge should be. I'll give you an extreme example. I know somebody who was pissed off at somebody else for logging into his MySpace page and wiping out a bunch of pictures. He thought a fair revenge was to call the cops and try to have the guy busted for drug use. If that had worked (and thankfully it didn't) the 'punishment' for this guy's wrong-doing could have been jail-time. Bit excessive, don'tcha think? Well, when peop
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When people are given the opportunity to take revenge, their response is often way out of proportion to the crime. Because there is something about being victimized that makes the victim no longer see the victimizer as fully human, someone who hasn't been victimized is more likely to be fair. I know it sounds magical, but its true. Judges don't decide punishments in the same way that someone taking revenge, be
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1) the "punishment decided in a courtroom or municipal office" isn't arbitrary, it's according to the guidelines that were (hopefully) set out following decades/centuries of experience
2) many of said whackos aren't in office - one would hope that such offices are held by people of rather more considered temperament. Certainly here in the UK witness the number of times that the tabloid press laments an apparently lenient sentence (often) versus a harsh one (never that I can remember in 3
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It is interesting that when I spoke of morals and law, almost everyone responded about how the legal system was intended to mitigate revenge, or how the act spoken of above was an act of revenge, and on and on. However, absolutely no direct moralizing was done on that specific act.
Morals exist in parallel with the law. Law tries to be moral, but only succeeds by chance. It's too arbitrarily stated, to broad to truly be moral.. and some laws are indee
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Beating the tar out of someone =! killing them, or leaving them for dead
It's not uncommon for there to be a story on the news about someone who's died or suffered massive head trauma after being punched in the face once (usually outside a bar). Never underestimate the damage that can be caused by someone falling and hitting their head on pavement. Letting the courts decide on the punishment makes it much less likely the perpetrator will come to unintended harm (although our prison system isn't exactly perfect).
Also, you speak as if morals are an absolute truth, shared by ev
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That's because laws can never precisely describe "intent", only "action."
i.e. You can follow the laws to the letter, and still act unethically.
That's why laws are open to interpretation to determine the "spirit of the law." For every law, you can almost always think of an exception in a special circumstance.
Maybe it's breaking the rules (Score:2, Insightful)
Any success in breaking Google's rules could result in increased profits from a higher pagerank giving the rule breaker a sense that it pays to cheat. So why not cheat somewhere else with another set of breakable rules? Taxes? Mortgages?
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Not to say that success as an SEO couldn't encourage branching out into other, more ilicit fields, but spending $10/year on a domain and $40/year on a cheap host, then plastering a page with ads and gamin
SEOs Lie to Robots to get them to Lie to People (Score:2)
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Just because something isn't codified into law doesn't make it ethical or right.
How true. Also true is the opposite, just because something IS codified into law doesn't make it unethical or wrong. Bring forth the DMCA.
Suprise (Score:5, Insightful)
What a surprise.
How about, "People who don't think about what larger effect their actions will have are amoral, while people who recognize that their actions will have larger, detrimental effects on others and still engage in those actions are evil."
People behave according to their character.
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How about "People who don't think abou the larger effects their actions will have are reckless, while people who recognize that their actions will have larger, detrimental effects on others and still engage in those actions are moral, immoral or amoral, depending on whether the
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Right. They "accidentally" went to a black hat SEO to push up their site rank.
More abstractly, there is a difference between being reckless, which involves jeopardizing you
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People who are anti-social, who attempt to game the system for their own gain at our expense, are known to engage in other anti-social acts to bring about their own gain at others expense.
I was going to say something like that. But you said it much better than I was going to, so I'll just say "Bravo" and "Ditto."
This should have been dumped in the Firehose! (Score:5, Informative)
Can I definitively claim that there's a connection between a willingness to embrace blackhat SEO and a willingness to cut corners in other areas of business? No, of course not.
So in other words, he's drawing a conclusion based on one (or a handful, who knows) of cases and then this particular author made a story out of it and Slashdot picked it up?
Yeah, non-issue; move along.
It *is* an issue (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, non-issue; move along
The mere fact that Cutts can't prove definitively that there is a correlation between use of blackhat SEO techniques and cutting corners in other areas doesn't mean that his statement is without merit. Anecdotal evidence has shown me that in the business world if you cut corners in one place, you're likely to do the same in others. Hire undocumented workers. Pay people under the table. Don't divulge some earnings. Mix your personal and business accounts. Tarnish other businesses with innuendo. Hire a blackhat SEO specialist.
I think it is important to recognize that SEO is in the mainstream of most big business operations these days, and it is no longer appropriate to think of blackhat SEO as just a "geek topic." It's a front and center business ethics issue.
Makes sense to me (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are willing to pretend you are something you are not to the search engines (which is basically what black hat SEO consists of) in order to lure customers to your site, there is a good chance you are willing to do something similar to the customers in order to ensure a sale.
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Cutting corners (Score:2)
Sounds a lot like Microsoft noises ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Google will never be Microsoft (Score:2)
Gateway to crime? (Score:4, Funny)
Kid: "YOU, alright! I learned it from watching you!"
in the late 80s (Score:2)
now, new york city just recorded its lowest yearly count of murders since they started counting. real estate values are soaring in previously bombed out blighted neighborhoods
and people have thought alot about the philosophies during the 90s that helped clean up the city, and two stand out:
1. compstat. computerized, statistical analysis of crime trends, up t
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Well, I wouldn't equate the two quite so strongly. Gaming a system is one thing, violent crimes are another.
However, there are reasons why people game the system. In a search engine like google, new web sites are at a distinct disadvantage to older, more established web sites. Olde web sites have longer histories, have more links back to them, are more "poplar", etc than newer sites. The barrier t
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So, I would equate the two. They are just two different levels of deceiving a person or organisation into investing ti
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1. compstat. computerized, statistical analysis of crime trends, up to the minute, down to the apartment building and block. this allowed the police brass to stay ahead of trends tactically
2. the broken window theory. which is the point of this entire comment:
Funny, I recently read a book, which stated that the explosion of the prison population and the large number of abortions 20 years earl
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Speaking of cutting corners (Score:2)
I guess the summary decided to join in on the corner cutting...
This reminds me of a commercial I saw... (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re: Fscking downloading cars... (Score:2)
"I have a 3-d industrial form pattern-molder and 7,000 pounds of steel. Now all I have to do is download the pattern..."
leads to
"Materials Economics don't work that way anymore - that's what Replicators are for."
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A bit off-topic, but the tagging here is odd (Score:2)
Did hundreds or dozens of Slashdotters not know how to spell Chewbacca? Sounds pretty much impossible, given the kind of crowd.
Surely there must be some other explanation? *shrug*
Anonymous taggers (Score:2)
1) Slashdot's tags are obviously manipulated. I don't bother to tag anymore because I know that the only ones that show up are from people with bots or some other scheme with the ability to promote any bizarre tag they think up.
2) Tags that pass judgement on the article, rather than merely classifying it, are the lowest f
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Well, at least... (Score:2)
Cutts makes no sense (Score:3, Insightful)
Cutts makes a lot of sense (Score:2)
Matt Marlon of Traffic Power was arrested for running a mortgage scam, not for [...]
Yes. Exactly. But that just furthers his POINT, Venik. Black hat SEO is just another scam, albeit one that is not illegal. Unethical, but not illegal.
It does not surprise me in the least that someone involved in black hat SEO was also involved in outright criminal activity. Loose ethics are loose ethics, no matter the business.
A side note to other posters... please keep in mind, guys: standard, ethical SEO and black hat SEO are NOT the same. Neither he nor I are talking about all-- or even most-- SEO
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My 5 cents... (Score:2)
In this optic people exploiting google's deficiencies are just giving google the chance to make their algorithms better... and being better is how the become #1 after all.
I'm pr
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Correlation != causation.
bad summary! bad, naughty summary. (Score:2)
Might I suggest you put "death penalty" in quotes?
I don't think Google wields quite that much power, at least not yet, and it's a very confusing sentence with an opposite meaning until the metaphor part kicks in.
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Google (Score:5, Insightful)
I know that a lot of the things they push may be in the best interests of the tech industry but at the same time it doesnt seem right that they have anointed themselves as the police and lawmakers of the internet. (how many lobbyists do they have again trying to get laws written which are friendly to them?)
Trolling for fun and/or Profit! (Score:2)
SEOs have a pretty straightforward objective as well - take customers' websites that aren't actually interesting or relevant to humans and lie to the robots so the robots will give the page a
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You sound like for you Google is the end-all and be-all of algorithmic searching. That's fanboyism pure and simple. Check out some other search en
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Oh come on now, how much of a fanboy do you have to be to think that modifying your own web pages in a way you see fit is equivalent to committing a crime because Google doesnt like it?
Well, the thing is, Google search "optimization" does not only involve your own website, but other websites as well. I don't know exact what Google's ToS says, but I do remember that the mother-of-all Google search "optimization" was Google bomb---in fact, being immune from simple keyword flooding was what made Google so effective early on.
And for the Google "bombs" of the commercial sort to support, these black hats have to place lots of links around the web. These show up as comment spam, link spam on Wi
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I'm too young to be a dirty old man
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If a fast food company wants to set up websites that link back to their main website with keywords like "fries" and "shakes" then that is their right. It isnt unethical just because it makes life more difficult for google's algorithm writers. (and I would argue that it do
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Some of the more extreme stuff black hat SEOs do may be unethical. (ie setting
MOD PARENT UP (Score:2)
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Google is merely an indexing service, not the police or the government. Especially with their record, it's not Google's job to play moral cursader and tell others what web behaviour is morally acceptable. It's Google's job to reflect the web as it is.
Unsuprising (Score:2)
Eventually it becomes "please remove the copyright info from this jscript", then send an email to this "single opt-in" list of 10 million addresses, and lastly "Can you use an Ess Que El injecion to insert our website address in other people's sites?".
One big slippery slope to crackersville.
Wazzat? (Score:2)
What else would you expect him to say? (Score:2)
Google Cuts Corners on Taxes With Irish Subsidiary (Score:4, Informative)
It's funny - laugh. (Score:4, Insightful)
But it's Google, so they get a pass and people take them almost seriously.
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How do you figure?
You posted the usual "Isn't it hilarious how people here respond differently to different companies?", I posted my usual suspicion that it's because Microsoft and Sony spend more of their time being dicks.
Seems fairly straightforward.
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This is tangentially related to my current hypothesis that the health of a society can be measured by how strangers are treated.
When will they learn? (Score:2)
It's just like caffeine is a gateway drug for meth addiction.
I expect a whole new government agency and "War on " campaign soon.
How to help? (Score:2)
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Correlation != Causation (Score:5, Insightful)
The same holds true for marijuana as a gateway drug. People think that taking marijuana almost always leads to harder drugs. That's simply not true. The fact that someone jumps from mary jane to cocaine does happen, but it has nothing to do with the drug, but the person using it. Just like people continue to think "prostitution" is a gateway crime and therefore want laws strictly enforced. If government would simply make it legal and regulate it, crimes tied to prostitution would be drastically reduced, but that would require going against the moral majority and thinking outside the box.
If you are willing to do one dishonest and illegal thing (and do it with no remorse), you are likely to do others (i.e. correlation). It all has to do with the morals of the person committing the act. The article doesn't say much but it makes sense in all other areas. But stop calling it "Gateway crime," I'm sick of that label because it implies causation and leads to stupid crime prevention policies.
Kind of a stretch for me (Score:2, Insightful)
Bottom-feeders, crooks, and all that. (Score:2)
Since we run a system for filtering bottom-feeders out of search results [sitetruth.com], I've had to look at this issue.
One of the basic requirements of SiteTruth is that a web site that's selling or promoting something must have an identifiable name and address on the web site. A "contact us" form isn't good enough. Legitimate sites selling something usually have a valid name and address on the site. Commercial sites without business names and addresses are generally "bottom-feeders". They may or may not be fraudul
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If google wants to improve the quality of the content they could do a very simple thing, stop linking to *any* commercial webpage. It would be pretty drastic, but I guarantee you that without ad revenues, off-site links to be sold and commerce to be conducted on the pages that google links to SEO spam would drop to 0 overnight. After all, the only people that are willing to invest in SEO are the people that expect it to make t
I confess! (Score:2)
Not long after that, I began taking
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Note it is not a reliable indicator of criminal activity, as there is quite a leap from cheating a search engine to mugging old ladies on the street. But it shows a certain tendency to break the rules and promoting one'Äs own goal at the expense of others.
So I would not be overly surprised to read about Google executives being caught with some outright illegal actions.
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Neither of those is actually, actively, intentionally dishonest. Black-hat SEO is.