Mediaboss Marketing

If youre reading this, I dont particularly have to convince you of the importance of search engines. You know this.

Your paychecks are the manifestation of research and analysis.

We as humans want answers.

With schools, libraries, and sources of record all closed or operating by appointment only, were doing the best we can: were asking Google.

Heres the thing: Why do you trust search engine results?

As SEO professionals, we tend to have a bit more discerning eyes.

Advertisement

Continue Reading Below

We can spots the more subtle (than dinosaur gender black) elements dont seem quite right.

Its what our clients pay us to do.

Its more important than ever for clients to know and curate how they are represented in search results.

Silly things happen.

What do we do when misrepresentations contort from silly to intentional deception?

What do we do when the fundamental structure of a political system is under threat of disinformation?

Disinformation is false or misleading information that is spread deliberately to deceive.

The information spread is false with the intent to harm a person, social group, organization, or country.

It has a sister, mal-information.

Mal-information uses information-based in reality in a context intended to inflict harm.

Google publicly addressed the grandeur of government-backed phishing.

Smaller but equally as threatening are attempts to alter maps so people cant find their polling station.

The SERPs themselves are a battlefront.

SEO-savvy propagandists can spread disinformation and even muddy up the search results in many ways.

Advertisement

Continue Reading Below

You could argue the entire webspam team is dedicated to fighting disinformation, but theres another Google team you might not be familiar with.

Jigsaw is a unit within Google that forecasts and confronts emerging threats.

As part of their efforts to research and document disinformation, they paired with Atlantic Councils DFRLab to create a Data Visualizer tracking disinformation.

Search engine manipulation is listed in Googles glossary of methods, but no data is available on actual attacks.

The absence is notable, particularly when paired with the disclaimer modal that pops up when opening the tool.

Endorsement and transparency have never particularly been strong suits for Google when it comes to search engine marketing.

It seems a fair response in light of the sordid history of SEO, when it comes to manipulation.

Have you heard of Dr. Bukkake, the renowned facial expert?

The name is enough to be a red flag in 2020, but back in 2008, this persona became an SEO legend.

Dr. Bukkake was a fictional *ahem* facial dermatologist.

The character had a website complete with fake research and a fake research fund.

Real medical sites and funds linked to it!

The doctor was created by an SEO seeking to drive traffic to a porn site client.

Advertisement

Continue Reading Below

Once the link builder had enough credibility, cloaked redirects began taking users clicking SERP results and from external links (like those from trusted medical research centers) to the clients explicit content.

In July 2020, U.S. Jewish newspaper The Algemeiner published an article from Oliver Taylor.

The student from Englands University of Birmingham already had bylines in the Jerusalem Post and the Times of Israel. He seemed credible.

The article accused London academic Mazen Masri and his partner Ryvka Barnard, of being known terrorist sympathizers.

Marsi, best known for his role in an Israeli lawsuit against surveillance company NSO, was taken aback and denied the claims. He never had a chance to confront his accuser though.

Oliver Taylor doesnt exist. His headshot was deepfake.

His University has no records of such a student. Taylor gained enough credibility to be seen as a reputable author by pitching articles over email.

Reuters elaborates on the scam. The article reads agasp at the deceptive tactics.

Advertisement

Continue Reading Below

These are the same strategies I used back in 2010 when I worked as a link outreach manager.

When my cold-call pitches worked, the articles never used my real name or photo.

Instead, the agency I worked for attributed them to personas they could continue to bolster after I left.

Technically, the gentleman kind enough to hop on a call with me doesnt do black hat SEO its gray.

Gray enough that Ill simply refer to him as K.

I tell K about the article Im working on and shared the details of Oliver Taylor.

K specializes in local SEO and online reputation management (ORM).

His voice sounds like a grin as he says, Heres the thing. ORM can be manipulated. People can be faked.

Fake personas are part of his everyday tactics.

He introduces me to This Person Does Not Exist and SpeechLeo for user images and voices.

Advertisement

Continue Reading Below

MugJam is a new favorite tool. It allows K to make fake video reviews with unique faces and voices.

Google puts a great deal of credibility behind video reviews because they foster user trust.

K explains how MugJam uses Amazon poly to fake the voice.

Im equal parts impressed and horrified at the ease of the process.

How can I spot a fake review like this?, I ask.

Fake voices sound tinny, he says. Listen for the s and th sounds.

These sounds are known as splosives in audio engineering.

Robotic audio smooths it out.

While Wikipedia was once the black hat go-to for manipulation, Googles partnership and crackdown on the tactic required black and grey hats to evolve.

They didnt have to go far.

Why go through the trouble of manipulating the Knowledge Graph when you can simply bind keywords to an entity via a knowledge panel result?

Advertisement

Continue Reading Below

The weakness was known and talked about by SEO professionals for years.

You could simply bring up a sites knowledge panel in Google and click on the share link.

The share link contained parameters for the Knowledge Graph ID of the entity and the original query.

By manipulating the q= parameter, you could associate that knowledge graph with any keyword.

K shares with me how he used the vulnerability to disambiguate the knowledge graph.

Imagine I tied the keywords dance studio to Not a Robot. Googles no longer confident in what Not a Robot does. You drop the entity below the confidence threshold and it drops from SERP.

He shares over a screenshot from an ambiguation experiment he ran on a rival SEO agency.

The tactic was effective and the loophole only closed earlier this year.

Ks new favorite trick is baking information in the data layer of images using Google Cloud Vision API or Google Lens.

Advertisement

Continue Reading Below

Hes placed 10-15,000 word articles in the metadata.

This information is invisible to humans but as long as he spoofs the correct required data points, Google sees the image as a direct upload of a Pixel device and passes the keyword-stuffed data directly to the index.

I ask K how this is possible. He says hes leveraging Googles assumed trust in image publishers.

Is Amazon a trusted authority? Azure? What about Google? Theres no check-in place for this kind of manipulation.

Assumed trust in a source allows K to leverage iframe stacking, nesting hidden manipulative data in trusted sources.

For Google if theyre going to target iframes, YouTube is built on iframes. If you destroy iframes you dismantle YouTube. It is a calculated risk.

In the years Ive spent as a Product Owner, Ive had similar conversations with my C-levels during roadmapping and risk analysis.

There is always risk in digital. We simply place our bets on the best path forward.

Advertisement

Continue Reading Below

Search engines are vulnerable to disinformation because of technical dependencies and assumed trusted sources.

What about the human aspect?

Here is the original post:
Digital & Disinformation: What the SEO Industry Can Do to Fight Manipulation - Search Engine Journal