I might be getting slightly paranoid over it and maybe some will say this is not even worth worrying about. But doing black hat SEO you’re better off being paranoid where there’s no real danger than missing something and getting smoked on it.
Since Google has provided all the spammers with a great free tool called Gmail, Gmail invites have been flying over in masses, and I doubt there’s any serious black hat out there with less than a dozen Gmail accounts registered all for different (but equally shady) purposes. However, have you ever thought how large a footprint you’re leaving? I’ve been thinking about it for a while already…
Here’s a possible scenario to consider. Say you register a domain or 50 with one Gmail address, build those sites, then send yourself an invite and open another Gmail account, and go and register another 50 domains with that new address, build the sites, and link one of them from one of the first 50 sites registered with the first Gmail address (suppose that site has been out for a while by then, accumulated some backlinks and PR and stands well in SERPs so it does a good job for indexing the new one). Now, some evil bot goes to index the new site, checks its Whois info, checks the linking site’s Whois info, checks where the second Gmail account got its invite from, does its math and….. you get the picture. Not like it’s a totally unrealistic scenario either – Google watches already how many invites you send out, how many of them actually get used for registering new accounts and based on those data decided whether to refill your invites supply.
On the other hand, we have a nice example of different services not really communicating much or at least turning a blind eye on this kind of data – AdSense user ID, if taken into consideration by the indexing Google bots and Google’s algos for SERPs, could have been an even more serious footprint. (Well, there just might be a very good reason behind not using that info 😉 – but that’s a different story)
So, while there’s no direct proof the above described thing actually takes place or ever will take place – I’d still rather watch where those Gmail invites go…
Comments are closed.