The New York Times ran a long investigative piece on the US department store JC Penney’s amazing rise to the top of a host of coveted Google results three days ago. The reporter, David Segal, found that Penney’s excellent rankings were due to black hat search engine optimization techniques that violate Google’s guidelines. But that’s not the only thing the story uncovered.
Segal couldn’t get a comment from the SEO firm the Penney used, so he found another expert, who claimed to be a black hat expert. This person is 31-year-old Mark Stevens, who Segal describes as “a native of Singapore”. ‘Stevens’, it turns out, is not Mark’s real name. He uses that alias professionally instead of his “Chinese” last name. Here’s the whole paragraph describing Stevens:
Mr. Stevens turned out to be a boyish-looking 31-year-old native of Singapore. (Stevens is the name he uses for work; he says he has a Chinese last name, which he did not share.) He speaks with a slight accent and in an animated hush, like a man worried about eavesdroppers. He describes his works with the delighted, mischievous grin of a sophomore who just hid a stink bomb.
Segal also made it a point to report that Stevens took the Times up on its offer of a free dinner, “cheekily” suggesting a meal at a USD118 a head French bistro in Palo Alto. Kiasu, much?
Another detail about Stevens is that he has access to the Stanford Engineering alumni list, which may make him an alumni there himself. He reveals this when he describes how he posted a job posting for a black hat SEO position (great idea!) to the list and then later found his company erased from Google’s search results.
So who is Mark “Stevens”? How did he train in the dark arts of bamboozling Google’s algorithms? And how many more like him are there in Singapore — or for that matter, the rest of Southeast Asia?
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