Dishonest methods involving online reputation management

Norwich University student Todd Renner addressed the issue of on-line reputation management in one of his essays for the Spring 2011 session of the IS342 Management of Information Assurance course. Everything that follows is a close collaboration between Mr. Renner and Mich Kabay.

Search engine optimization (SEO) to raise the visibility of a specific company or person can involve questionable methods. For example, search engines can be manipulated to trick Web crawlers and increase the visibility of Websites to search engines. Methods of spamdexing include

• Google bowling – If you want to be the tallest tree in the forest, cut down the ones larger than you. This term describes the effort of getting a competitor’s Website removed from Google’s indexes (Google ban) by using such methods as pointing an obvious link farm to the site, or leaving links to known viruses in comment sections (which will work if the site is poorly managed).
• Keyword stuffing – “Duplicating descriptive words in the body and/or in the meta tags of a Web page in order to rank the page high on search engine results. Also called ‘word stuffing.’”
• Link farms – sites “containing a very massive list of hyperlinks to different Websites without groupings, categories, or any relationship to the site domain name. Many link farm sites have no actual content of their own or standards for link submission. Link farms are disreputable versions of legitimate sites exchanging links based on related topics to provide visitors with some added content value.”
• Invisible text – text with the same color as the background of the Web page as part of a link farm. The example described in the link above is a recursive link farm using invisible text: the pages in the array of pages link to each other to increase the score of the targeted Web sites in search-engine rankings.
• Doorway pages – “Webmasters are sometimes told to submit ‘bridge’ pages or ‘doorway’ pages to search engines to improve their traffic. Doorway pages are created to do well for particular phrases. They are also known as portal pages, jump pages, gateway pages, entry pages, and by other names as well.”

To continue reading, register here to become an Insider. You’ll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in.

The shadiest practices do not come from manipulation of machines and algorithms, but from deception and manipulation carried out directly by humans. Tactics such as astroturfing, sock puppetry, and flogging are all examples of unethical forms of ORM used by some SEO companies.

• Sock puppetry is the practice of pretending to be someone else and using the same techniques as astroturfing, the difference being the scale (sock puppetry is mainly done with individual reviews). For a hilarious send-up of sock puppetry, see the article in “Uncyclopedia, the content-free encyclopedia.” Just do not take any of the content seriously.
• Flogging is, in current marketing parlance, a portmanteau term made up from the two words ‘fake’ and ‘blogging’, and refers to the practice of companies employing fake bloggers to write glowing reviews of certain products.”

M. E. Kabay, PhD, CISSP-ISSMP, specializes in security and operations management consulting services and teaching. He is Chief Technical Officer of Adaptive Cyber Security Instruments, Inc. and Professor of Information Assurance & Statistics in the School of Business and Management at Norwich University. Visit his Web site for white papers and course materials.

source : www.networkworld.com