This story is actually about a week old, but in case you missed it, Google Video was recently hacked by blackhat SEO types and had their search results manipulated.
The way it went down is this. Someone went to Google Video and did a search. The video results were shown. When any of those results were clicked on, the user was sent to a porn site instead of an actual video. They then received a message saying their Flash player was out of date and to watch the videos, they needed to update their version of Flash.
Naturally, a nice, convenient link was provided that user’s could click on to update their Flash player. Problem was, when they did click this link, their computer was infected by malware (a virus). All in all, it was reported that around 400,000 search results in Goolge Video were affected by these hackers.
Now certainly, blackhat SEO (also called spamdexing or intentionally manipulating search results) is nothing new. People hacking web sites is nothing new. And viruses are nothing new. However, attacking prominent video sharing sites is new.
And given the popularity of online video sharing sites, I’d expect attacks like this to continue to grow. But ultimately, that’s not such a bad thing.
Why?
Because it will make the owners of video sharing sites scrutinize their system architecture…and the videos being uploaded to them…much closer. Which means everyone wins in the long run, because they can rest assure (hopefully) that the results they receive when searching for videos will be relevant and “safe”.
Essentially, video sharing sites are now being forced to tighten their ships, just as the search engines had to back in 2005. What I’m referring to specifically is the “blog and ping” era…where anyone could easily spam search engines with junk (yet optimized) web pages and get ranked easily for thousands of keywords.
It wasn’t until the search results were getting so poisened by these pages that the search engine’s reacted. And when they did, they did so swiftly. Overnight (literally), most of these pages disappeared…along with the fortunes a lot of people who were making these pages. Google even followed up with “quality scores” for their AdWords program…which elimated non-relevant results from the advertising appearing in Google search results.
But how exactly will video sharing sites deal with these new threats…and will they act as swiftly as the search engines did? I don’t know. No one does. But ultimately, there may be some extra hoops you have to jump through to get your videos on these sites. Which isn’t a bad thing. After all, the results coming up in search engines these days are a whole lot better than they were in 2005. And because video sharing sites are morphing more and more into defacto search engines, I’d expect them to follow a similar path.