Google is believed to change its search algorithm 500-600 times every year. These are mostly minor tweaks. But every few months, the search giant rolls out a major algorithmic change which impacts the manner in which it searches the web. These changes can drive a flood of new
traffic to websites, or alternately relegate them to the equivalent of cyber Siberia.
Examples are numerous. Technorati, the blog search engine whose ranking has taken a hit on several occasions, and Answers.com, the knowledge exchange which once forfeited on a planned
acquisition after its stock tanked following a Google algorithm change in 2007,
comes to mind immediately. Still others have been punished for running afoul of
Google's webmaster guidelines. Retail giant JC Penney's website (jcpenney.com),
along with its SEO agency Searchdex, were outed after a New York Times expose in
early 2011 for buying links. Some years ago, the German site of automobile giant
BMW (BMW.de) had been erased from the Google index for creating doorway pages. 
 Another retailer, Overstock, was penalised in 2011 for benefiting from giving discounts to students linking in from prestigious .edu domains. Last year, SEO company iAcquire.com was briefly taken off Google's index after complaints about providing paid links to its
client Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp. The penalties imposed on SEO agencies by way of loss of prestige after being outed, or the even severe banishment from  Google's index, are pointers to the risky nature of the business. Clients are often able to wash their hands of any responsibility by channeling all blame to the SEO agency.
In the case of Dun and Bradstreet Credibility Corp at least, its top leadership, starting from CEO Jeffrey Stibel, has serious internet marketing chops, and cannot escape some responsibility for not closely monitoring the actions of its SEO agency. As Stibel himself puts it in his book Wired for Thought in a passage mentioning the woes of Answers.com: "This happened to no small degree
because Answers.com did not understand the internet as well as it thought __ and certainly it didn't understand the brain. It built its castle on the confidence that it could trick Google's algorithms. And for a while, it did..." Prophetic words indeed!
SEO practitioners function in  a pressure cooker like situation. On the one hand, there's the constant demand to prove that they are indeed providing value to customers and are not, as many allege, peddling snake oil. On the other hand is the severe pressure from clients who want to occupy prime real estate in the SERP for keywords of their choice.
This pressure is in direct proportion to the growing importance of online transactions. Global eCommerce sales have topped the $1-trillion mark for the first time in 2012, growing at a
healthy 21% over the previous year, according to eMarketer. They are poised to grow at a steady pace this year, which means the pressure on SEO agencies to provide the magic recipe for higher listings in organic search is bound to increase.  
The stakes are indeed high. Not surprisingly, some very smart people and heavy duty machines are at work, parsing the search giant's algorithm to discover loopholes. SEO practitioners who discover such loopholes quickly monetize it, and when word gets around about their success, they face a deluge of eager beaver clients only too happy to sign on. It's easy to refer to such strategies as 'black hat optimization',  the dark art of raising the profile of a Web site with methods that Google considers tantamount to cheating. But these are indeed gray areas so long as the strategy adopted does not explicitly run afoul of Google's guidelines.
Let's take the case of the Overstock penalty. The company has a legitimate right to provide discounts to select  customers. And strictly speaking, it was indeed not paying websites to provide
inbound links. It just asked college and university websites to make anchor text out of keywords like 'bunk beds' or 'gift baskets' in links to Overstock product pages in exchange for 10% discount on merchandise. The SEO agency which worked out this arrangement by exploiting the high PageRank enjoyed by University sites (Cornell 9; Harvard, UPenn, Princeton, Columbia, Yale, Brown 8 each) may have considered it a genuine strategy. 
But Google thought otherwise. And Google is always right!
Good SEO professionals study the  art day in and day out, and perfect very precise techniques to raise the  organic search rankings of their client websites.  Since there's a premium on such techniques, such maestros keep them very close to their chest for the benefit of only their high paying clients. The nature of the beast is such that the most widely known SEO thought leaders may not be the ones delivering the most value for their clients. This is an important factor to be considered by anyone who is out looking for an agency to recruit.
e.o.m.


 

I had never encountered the term 'Human Flesh Search Engines' until I read the book Digital Assassination by Richard Torrenzano and Mark Davis. Apparently, the term sounds weird since it's a direct, word-to-word translation from the Chinese. The event which gave rise to the term occurred in the mainland in 2003, when a woman posted a 'crush video' of herself smashing a live kitten's head with her stiletto heels. Zhu Guang Bing, a Chinese netizen, used crowdsourcing to track her down after the video vent viral. What gave away her identity was the online sleuths' discovery of her recent purchase of footwear from an internet auction site. In the end, both she and the man who shot the video lost their jobs and were shamed nationally. Game, set, match to online vigilantes.
In effect, Human Flesh Search Engines tap social media to activate digital mobs against the targets. The anonymity offered by the internet emboldens such vigilante attackers to get very offensive and personal. Often, their appetites are not whetted by mere exposes. Bomb attacks and physical violence intended to  cause bodily harm are not unheard of. In the case of the crowdsourced vigilante attacks against British animal testing firm Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS), hate mail, delivery of unwanted sex toys, listing of executives' wives and mothers' phone numbers in swinger magazines, mailing of letters to executives' neighbours, falsely charging the former to be  convicted paedophiles, etc. went on unabated even as the cars of affiliate company officials were bombed. The woman responsible for mass emailing a particularly offensive threat  to company officials later claimed to be a "harmless animal lover" once she was arrested, says the book. So while Human Flesh Search Engines tap the internet to get their work done through shaming and identity exposes, the danger they pose is often very raw, and very physical.
Their success is primarily due to their ability to farm out work to a large number of people by tapping the social media networks. Doxing is the term used to refer to the process by which vigilantes unearth the real identity of anonymous individuals.  
Their destructive capacity can be hijacked by governments too. Torrenzano and Davis talk about the Chinese government letting loose the collective power of hired bloggers on critics to isolate and punish them. I found it similar to the NSA hiring hackers in the US. We won't venture to answer the question of who inspired whom!
Human Flesh Search Engines can easily turn on its own creators. Zhu, the Chinese netizen who outed the kitten killer, later became the target of a vigilante mob which accused him of cashing in on the tragedy when he tried to auction off websites for an earthquake charitable relief. He eventually lost his job after being bombarded at home and office with hate phone calls.
So how does one face up to Human Flesh Search Engines? Torrenzano and Davis advocate ethical operating principles and proclaiming good deeds from the rooftops as the best line of defence against such attacks. They stress on the importance of building a reputational cushion through good deeds to withstand any attacks. In this way, though it still remains intimidating to face up to a mob, you get a "crowd of your own to stand behind you".
e.o.m.