Professional Search Engine Optimization with ASP.NET: A Developer's Guide to SEO

Chapter 8. Black Hat SEO

It may sound quite obvious, but system administrators — those who manage the computers that host your web site, for example, must be acutely aware of computer security concerns. When a particular piece of software is indicated to be vulnerable to hackers, they should find out quickly because it is their priority to do so. Then they should patch or mitigate the security risk on the servers for which they are responsible as soon as possible. Consequently, it may also not surprise you that some of the best system administrators used to be hackers, or are at least very aware of what hacking entails.

Why is this relevant? Although it is totally unfair to compare "black hat" search engine marketers to hackers on an ethical plane, the analogy is useful. The "white hat" search engine marketer — that is, a search engine marketer who follows all the rules, must be aware of how a "black hat" operates.

Understanding black hat techniques can help a webmaster protect his or her web sites. Nobody, after all, wants to be caught with his pants down advertising "cheap Viagra." This chapter shows you how to avoid such problems. In this chapter you:

• Learn about black hat SEO.

• Learn about the importance of properly escaping input data.

• Learn how to automatically add the nofollow attribute to comment links.

• Sanitize input data by removing unwanted tags and attributes.

• Request human input to protect against scripts adding comments automatically.

• Protect against redirect attacks.

There ...