Immigration and Customs Enforcement Goes BlackHat SEO?

TheWho79 writes: Looks like (ICE) Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has gone old school and playing with a little Black Hat SEO by updating old press releases with fresh dates. Those dates cause Google to surface those old stories — some going back to mid-2000's to make it appear as though they happened recently.

All the archived Ice press releases soaring to the top of Google search results were marked with the same timestamp and read: “Updated: 01/24/2025”. The lawyer noticed a strange pattern. In almost every state, at least one press release from Ice’s website appeared in Google’s top results. Nebraska, for example, surfaced links for two press releases. One said “ICE executes federal search warrants in Nebraska”, the other said “ICE fugitive operations team arrests 44 absconders”. Both displayed their dates of publication as 24 January 2025 on Google search. But when the lawyer clicked through to the report, the actual dates of publication were August 2018 and June 2008, respectively.