Upong learning of a new product advertising:
"...The purpose in RankAttack technology is simple: get the search engines attention and make them want to list your website under the keywords you desire... "
It immediately peeked my curiousity enough to obtain a copy for evaluation. The software advertised at a price of $79.00 on the companies website with an equal price for its sister product SEO Sandbox (A product claiming to reduce a new site from the Google Sandbox). They offer a de-tuned trial version which allows full functionality with some limitations for the speed and duration of its operation which I promptly registered and downloaded.
With recent changes in indexing algorithims and apparant "quality filter" testing across the major search engines this software appeared to target a market desperate for relief. Claiming to have been developed by a software engineer at a "major portal" who was terminated for using the technique implemented in these products added to the taboo allure of the application. The method by which the software purportedly acheives improvements in SERPS is that it "...creates a persona of popularity..." around your site in the eyes of the search engines..." and maintains additional claims of baiting the spiders to your visit site by artificially increasing the effective query traffic for your keywords.
The obvious appeal of a product that can safely deliver the results advertised is too tempting to dismiss. However, the "safety" of the software should be of greater importance then the potential rewards if the cost incurred is that of search engine penalties or bans.
Without clearly defined technical specifications regarding the manner by which the software increases "...popularity..." for a given url and keywords I relegated to packet analysis of outbound and inbound traffic to try and determine if the product was in fact employing "white hat" or search engine safe . The results were sadly not surprising, revolutionary, technologically impressive, or safe in my opinion.
The initial setup is straightforward requiring the user to enter a url followed by a text box to input keywords. The subsequent screen offers a list of more black box options to add additional search engines, directories and 2nd tier engines to improve results. After maintaining the default selection of all options the application launches into a final screen with an option to limit how many threads to employ in addition to an option to "operate in safe mode" which throttles the initial threading prior to starting. The remainder of the process is entirely black box only provinding a report of the serach engines targeted and how many "queries" have been submitted.
The actual data sent is unfortunately equally simplistic. For testing I submitted the url of http://www.wpdfd.com which is currently ranked #1 in Google for the keywords "web design". The following is an excerpt of a tcp stream taken from ethereal:
GET /images?q=tbn:AjOIvuzQYsAJ:www.wpdfd.com/images/squares.gif HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Referer: http://a9.com/web design web design web design wpdfd.com
Accept-Language: en-us
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible
