Instead, Mr. Hobart quit. There was more opportunity, he thought, in evaluating the risks investors incur due to SEO than in performing it himself. “I looked at the attention I was getting for my posts on Due Diligence and just decided that it was time to strike out on my own,” he said, noting that he is now scouting office space.
Despite the occasional scandal, search-engine optimization is now a $19 billion business. One of New York’s more prolific SEO gurus, who agreed to speak to The Observer anonymously, sees the industry in zoological terms. “It’s kind of like we’re all gazelles running past a big crocodile” he said. “You just keeping hoping you don’t catch the monster’s eye.”
Rather than simply paying for links, which often means relying on poor quality sites that are easy to identify as cheats, this “black hat,” let’s call him Merlin, uses his legitimate business as a cover. He created a simple, easy-to-use template for small-business owners looking to build their own inexpensive sites, then sold the templates well below market rate, quickly building a network of thousands of perfectly legitimate websites run by independent users.
Since he controlled the template, he was able to attach a bit of fine print to the footer of each page in the network. “Let’s say I had a client who wanted to rank very highly for a keyword, maybe ‘squash racket’ or ‘snow boots.’ I had hidden links inside the text at the bottom of all these sites, and I could just turn the switch. Suddenly, 6,000 sites agree my client is the most relevant source on snow boots.”
The insistence among SEO experts on defining certain tactics as legitimate and others as underhanded strikes Merlin as absurd. “Ethics, where search is concerned, is a luxury few companies can afford,” he said. “Let’s face it, the distinction between ‘white hat’ and ‘black hat’ changes all of the time. Those of us who ended up in this business are surprised to discover we’re making good money. We’re wearing a tie.”
Shops that strive to uphold a higher ideal find that many clients arrive on their doorsteps chastened after past transgressions. “We have a lot of people come in who have been burned,” said Rhea Drysdale, CEO of Outspoken Media. “We had a client come in from the world of online poker. They had swapped links with other sites,” a practice she considers a no-no. “The attitude was, you had to do it in order to survive. It sounded kind of like a joining a gang; you needed to be initiated.”
Mr. Hobart isn’t yet 25, but he’s already nostalgic for SEO’s heyday. “I started off in this game as an intern, writing little articles to improve the look and feel of sites,” he said wistfully. “But the time when an intern could get your site to rank are gone. eHow and Demand Media manufacture thousands of articles a day–there is no way to match that scale.”
The future of SEO will demand different skills more suited to social media. “That’s the scary thing, thinking about how things like Facebook and Twitter will change the game,” Hobart said. “It’s one thing with Google, trying to outwit the machine. It’s different when you’re trying to optimize on real people.”
bpopper@observer.com
