Viggen at SERoundtable forums asked if the search engines ever hired prominent spammers to help their search quality control teams. It's a very logical question, but as far as I'm aware (or Barry is aware), it's never happened. Why would that be?
I can think of some great advantages to a search engine's algo team having access to a high level search spammer, but little downside. The search engineers would have access not only to the specific tactics of how spam operates, but the spammer could continue to operate in the community, run spam sites and help the search engine get them recognized by an automated algo. Black hat folks also have a terrific idea of how the indsutry and community functions, so new patterns and changes could be caught up to quickly and spam prevention could be at the same level of innovation and development as spamming itself.
The only reason against that I can think of is that the spammer could be duplicitous in his/her agreement and secretly leak data from the engine or continue operating spam sites. It seems like a small issue and one that's easy to control, but clearly, there must be a good reason why those with dark caps don't find themselves in Mountain View or Redmond. Any ideas?
Greg - can't believe I didn't think of the money angle. I guess I just figured that with a spammer's help, the consulting fee, no matter the price, would have terrific ROI for the engine. Perhaps it's still on the horizon.
The very BEST spammers wouldn't want to give up their tricks I imagine... too valuble... Unless Google paid them more than they are being paid... but it wouldn't be a long term job. Google would leach what they know and tell them to take a hike! Nobody prominent in the spam world would do that!
Having dome some consulting with search engines, I can tell you that those types of offers have been made. But the problem the engines face is they aren't willing to pay the kind of money it would take to get a prominent dark lord to come to their side.
An engine like MSN has 2 or three years of growing pains to go through before they will even be close to having the same kind of filtering and detection capabilities of Google. That fact will generate a significant amount of money for those who exploit the holes.
If you are one of those people, helping MSN fix the holes ends up costing you a lot of money. In order to overcome that, MSN would have to be willing to shell out enough money to compensate the SEO for his potential lost income. So far, they haven't been willing to do that.
As per apulls example, cops do and always have used insiders as informants. And they could definitely keep the information compartmentalized, where the blackhatter would be on a need to know basis.
And Rand, this comment is spot on: Black hat folks also have a terrific idea of how the indsutry and community functions...
I can confirm that atleast one spidering search engine have a SEO on their payroll. I am pretty sure all of them do, it makes sense. But it would not make sense to hire a spammer or a "black hat", it would be the same as to hire a Al-Qaeda operative to work with the DHS.
Seems a little dangerous--but you could have a blinded relationship, where the spammer only provides information, instead of being involved in tweaking the algo.
Of course, then you have one Drug Lord helping the cops take out all the other Drug Lords so he can have a much more lucrative market...
But the drug lords are coerced violently into giving up that info on movies... Threatoned, beat, etc... Well spammers would have to be threatoned and beat to make them talk too perhaps ;)
I have no doubt they do. The worst spammers are the ones that do a bit of whitehat and preach white hat but in secret they assault the serps on a daily basis. Ones like me that shout about black hat are just beginners compared to some of the high profile white hats that we see daily on the forums saying serp spam is bad.