Improve Your Internet Marketing

Can A Third Party Really Hack Your Site Out of Google? That’s a pretty bold headline, and the sort of thing you might expect to see as a scare tactic come-on for some scammy IM product: “Don’t Let Your Competitors Remove You From Google - Get ‘GoogleSafe™’ Right Now, Just $97 - Includes Over $10,000 In Bonuses!“…

Well, I received an email today with that exact headline. If it hadn’t come from Andy Jenkins at StomperNet, I probably would have paid it no mind. But it did, and so I read it. This is not intended to be ‘alarmist’, though it is certainly alarming. For the vast majority of those reading this blog, we fall well below the radar of the kind of hacker with the time, skills, and resources to manage this sort of thing. Still, awareness is the best defense.

(Andy Jenkins and Brad Fallon are President and CEO of StomperNet. I know Brad Fallon, having done a very successful JV with him. He is one of the sharpest minds in the biz. Dan Thies, one of Brad’s StomperNet staff, is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading SEO experts.)

One week ago, Dan Thies posted the details of a devastating Google hack that he claims to have shown Google engineers exactly one year ago this week. By using cached documents found in Google’s own index, he discovered a method to fool Google’s indexing spider into thinking that a legitimate document contains cloaked or duplicate content.

This technique, termed “Google Proxy Hacking”, is completely “Black-Hat”; Dan’s disclosure is intended to be cautionary. You can read the full post on Dan’s blog: http://www.seofaststart.com/blog/google-proxy-hacking