How Google’s algorithm updates are screwing over Hollywood and a US presidential candidate

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Google continues to bow to international pressure to reduce the prominence of websites that link to copyright-infringing material.

As a result, hackers are targeting “clean” (non-piracy) websites, including the blog of Green Party US presidential hopeful Jill Stein, to hijack Google visibility and send traffic to their illegal sites.

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton may be taking center stage in the 2016 presidential election, yet Jill Stein bizarrely outranks them in the top Google results for this summer’s Hollywood blockbuster film “Sully”.

Such tactics have caused Hollywood blockbusters like Sully, featuring Tom Hanks, to continue to stream online illegally – despite Google having taken action.

Ranking in Google

Ranking websites in Google is hard, a fact that thankfully keeps me and other SEO consultants employed.

Search is the cornerstone of Google’s products and the engine that raked in almost $70 billion in revenue for the company last year.

So it stands to reason that Google employs some of the smartest engineers in the world and rains rockstar salaries upon them to maintain the integrity of the results that the search engine serves up.

Getting traffic from Google takes time and effort; a new website needs to invest the hours in building up its reputation and develop “Domain Authority”.

This is done by consistently producing good value content and getting strong links from other trusted websites.

But if you’re a blackhat spamdexer, you have no time to waste building up trust and authority in order to push your products. Far better then for a spammer to hijack the profile of established websites, subvert that trust and authority to hawk their wares, and move on once Google catches their jig.

Recently, I have seen a marked increase in this behavior online, particularly in the space of illegal online movie streams.

This approach can be broken down into three distinct variations:

Spamming public forums

Abusing legitimate platforms

Exploiting a security hole in a target site

What does this all mean for searchers?