This post will examine the manner in which Black-Hat SEO can
damage an innocent party's Google site-rank (which can
have massive knock-on financial effects for an organisation), what
English Law can do about it, and what evidential hurdles a litigant
may face when collecting data to support a claim.
Search Engine Optimisation works broadly in two ways: White-Hat or Black-Hat. White-Hat SEO
engineering involves improving your site and its content,
encouraging people to link to you, which increases your site's
relevance to automated search engine "spiders" or "bots" which crawl the interweb analysing
pages which leads to you appearing higher in search results.
Black-Hat SEO engineering works by trying to "trick" search engines
(usually Google, as this is by far the most popular search engine)
into increasing the page rank of your site or by decreasing the
page-rank of your competitors' sites.
The rules for what is and isn't allowed are determined by Google (or whatever other
search engine). These are not a matter of law, but a matter
of discretion for the search engines, who can change their policies
at will. However, there is a lot at stake for websites when
they do.
How to vandalise a competitor's website:
As SEO engineers now know, buying links off people is
now disallowed by Google. Google can have a very good
guess if a link is paid for or not. If a link has absolutely
nothing to do with the originating page (e.g. a cat food
manufacturer linking to an accountant's website), Google will
suspect that you've paid for the link. If there are a few of
these Google will assume that you have been paying for links
and act accordingly.
If your site is found to be selling links there are a number of
theories about what may happen to you: your other (bonafide) links
lose their "link juice" (their ability to contribute positively
towards other pages' page-ranks) or you may be penalised by Google
yourself and knocked down the rankings.
More worryingly, where Google believes you have been buying
links from other sites, you'll lose your page rank and you could
find yourself dropping from page 1 or 2 of Google to page 10 or 15, with
potentially devastating financial implications. The message
from Google is "don't buy links". A cynic may say that Google
is sending the message: if you want to spend money with another
website in order to appear on page 1, use Google's own
pay-per-click system.
So some bright-sparks have come up with the idea of buying links
for competitor sites, alerting Google and hoovering up the sales
that may otherwise have gone to their competitors, whilst laughing
at the competitor-site as it crawls its way back up from the
doldrums of double-digit Google page-rankings.
The Law and what can be done about "site-rank vandalism":
Site-rank vandalism is almost certainly against the law.
It is unlikely that the act is criminal, but as you will be
damaging a commercial interest, there will almost certainly be a
civil law against it. But here comes the rub: there is
nothing, as yet, in English Law which has tested why this practice
is illegal and what the measure of damages should be.
There is no claim in contract against the malicious party.
There may be contracts between the site-rank vandal and the site
offering a paid link, however, there is no contract between the
linking page and the victim of this scam.
There may be a claim in the English laws of tort against the
site-rank vandal: you could sue for malicious falsehood, deceit,
and possibly defamation. Success in a claim for any of the
above would result in the victim being put in the position that he
would have been had the tort not been committed. If a site is
used primarily for trading, this could include recompense for lost
sales (both actual and prospective). There may also be
an element of aggravated or exemplary damages.
Aggrevated damages would be awarded
if the victim suffered injury to their "proper feelings of dignity
and pride". Exemplary damages could be awarded
where the defendant's conduct has been "calculated to make a profit
which exceeds the compensation payable".
The claimant would also be able to sue for injunctions against the
perpetrator to a) stop them putting up paid links to damage the
victim's site-rank, and b) take down the offending links already in
existence.
Evidential problems:
A large hurdle to enforcing the law and getting proper
recompense through the courts is how to prove who is behind
site-rank vandalism. A victim may have a hunch, such as
having had an argument with a competitor, or noticing there is a
competitor who is obviously benefiting from the lack of
competition. However, in order to succeed in any of the
claims described above, the victim must prove "on the balance of
probabilities" that the person he suspects is actually
guilty. This burden of proof is not as high as the criminal
"beyond reasonable doubt" burden, but nevertheless, it requires a
good body of evidence in order to succeed.
Firstly, you have to locate the links that Google finds
offensive. Any SEO engineer worth their salt should be able
to discover this.
Secondly, you have to find out why the website owners have put the
links up. People may be initially reluctant to let you know
whether they put up paid links (either out of loyalty or for fear
of retribution from Google. If they choose not to communicate
with you, there is very little that you can do to compel them to
give away details. If there are enough paid links out there,
you may be able to get together some sort of picture of who has
been paying for the links.
The links may come from a competitor firm - from the
horse's mouth as it were - in which case the victim is in luck
and you may have enough evidence to take your competitor straight
to court.
Alternatively, the links may come from a single black-hat SEO
company. You would then claim against the SEO
company. The SEO company may then claim that they had been
instructed by their client to take the course of actions that led
to the victim suffering loss, and they might join their client to
your claim so they would share liability.
Finally, the tracks may be well covered, with cheques coming
from a number of different bank accounts or from different
countries. It is sometimes possible to get court orders
forcing the issuing banks to provide you with details of who owns
the accounts, but this can be extremely expensive to achieve and to
enforce.