Legalities and Moralities or ...

.. illegalities and immoralities ?

A question I ask myself quite often is, "Does this idea breach moralities or legalities?"

As an SEOer I ask myself similar questions every day, putting a hypothetical group of people in place to answer them. This group contains a search engine employee, a priest, a mega capitalist, a policeman, a judge, a jury.

If all the above say that an idea I have is immoral then I smile and carry on with it.

If some of them start to say it is illegal I start thinking harder and when it gets towards the end of that group of people and they too say it is illegal then I am pretty sure the idea gets binned.

But there are those occasions when although an idea will be thought of by some as immoral but others as perfectly legal and some again as potentially illegal. It is these that get me thinking about whether the risk is worth the reward.

The risk is high (well to me anyway) and it is sharing a cell with a guy called Bubba, who weighs 300lb's and enjoys playing kids games. Specifically mummies and daddies!

The rewards can be pretty high as well. We all know what certain keywords equate to in financial terms when a high ranking is gathered.

The fear of Bubba is what stops me 99.999999999% of the time, but there will be occasions when someone isn't scared of Bubba and he can use that lack of fear for his SEO gains. So when does black hat immoralities become illegal?

Let me ask you what would happen in this instance.

A person lives in country A
He works for a business incorporated in country B
The business trades in country C
The web server is located in country D
The domain is registered in country E
with WHOIS information in country F

The business only markets to people in country G

and even then it goes to an affiliate program in country H
that is run by a business incorporated in country I
that trades in country J
whose web server is in country K
and domain is in country L
and whose WHOIS information is in country M

I could go on but 13 variables are enough I think :)

Anyway.... What country's laws are we talking about here? There are bound to be someone's laws broken at some point in the chain whilst still being legal in others.

Because of this chain the actual risk seems to be reduced so looking for ways of gathering that high SEO listing goes on and when does a spam link become a hacked link?

Is an automated tool that sends data to blogs and forums to add a link illegal or a hacking attempt?

I believe it is not illegal or a hacking attempt as the web was designed in a manner of following links. Some of those directly entered and some from other web sites. It is the job of the web server to parse and decode URLs and either allow or deny access to its resources. It could be argued (and I agree with this argument) that blog and forum spamming are perfectly legal and it is the lack of the web server resources in defeating content the owner doesn't want.

If you open a site up to interaction then it is the site owner, or his code's job of allowing or denying interaction. If allowed then it is legal. If denied then blog spammer 0 site owner 1

Thankfully there are a lot of 1st graders to pick a fight with. Why pick a fight (spam a blog) where you can't get your content on there.

If it is not illegal or a hacking attempt and merely immoral then what difference is there when an automated tool delivers data to a URL that delivers the same aims. I.E. Links. ?

Let me put the following question to you.

There has been a worm at work over the last few weeks named Santy. It has spawned quite a few variants since the first but essentially it works by sending data to a search engine, parses the results and sends more data to the multitude of URLs it has received from the search engines.

The searches that is undertakes on the search engines is not illegal. It definately breaks the TOS but that is a civil matter not a criminal one, and it is for the search engines to decide their course of action to stop it.

They can sue someone or they can block the requests or they can do anything in between.

Both Google and Yahoo decided to block the requests.

Anyway, let's move back to the data that is sent to the URLs that it (used to) gathered from the search engines. In the case of Santy it defaces pretty much every possible page that shows content to an end user. The author doesn't really gain any financial gain, but I guess he gets bragging rights etc.

Now let's presume that instead of defacing the web sites it threw a link up on every page on the server.

How is that different from blog spamming?
Isn't it just black hat SEO on steroids?

Is there a difference between what some would say is legitimate posting of data to URLs versus posting data to a URL that (if different data was posted) could be used to take control of the web server?

P.S. Just over the last week there have been over 18million pages on just over 9 million domain names (not including phpBB) that someone has written an exploit for and these could be used to deliver links instead of the server being 0wn3D!!