While Wikipedia was once black hat for manipulation, Google's partnership and crackdown tactics required black and gray hats to evolve. They didn't have to go far. Why bother fiddling with the Knowledge Graph when you can just link keywords to an entity through a knowledge panel result? Advertising Continue reading below The weakness was known and talked about by SEO Banner Design professionals for years. You can simply bring up a site's knowledge panel in Google and click the share link. The share link contained parameters for the entity's Knowledge Graph ID and the original query. By manipulating the q= parameter, you can associate this knowledge graph with any keyword. K shares with me how he used the vulnerability to disambiguate the knowledge graph. “Imagine I linked the Banner Design keywords 'dance studio' to Not a Robot. Google no longer trusts what Not a Robot does.
You drop the entity below the trust threshold and Banner Design it drops from SERP. " He shares a screenshot of an ambiguity “experiment” he conducted on a rival SEO agency. The tactic was effective and the loophole was only closed earlier this year. blackhat entity ambiguity results on organic visibility Vulnerabilities are a technical requirement Banner Design K's new favorite trick is to embed information into the image data layer using the Google Cloud Vision API or Google Lens. Advertising Continue reading below He placed 10-15,000 word articles in the metadata. This information is invisible to humans, but as long as it spoofs the correct required data points, Google treats the image as a direct download from a Pixel device and passes the keyword-filled data directly to the index. I ask K how this is possible. He says he's taking advantage of Google's supposed trust in image editors. “Is Amazon a trusted authority? Azure? And Google? There is no place of registration for this Banner Design kind of manipulation.
Assumed trust in a source allows K to take advantage of iframe stacking, embedding hidden manipulation data in trusted sources. “For Google – if they target iframes, YouTube is built on iframes. If you destroy iframes, you dismantle YouTube. It's a calculated risk.” In my Banner Design years as Product Owner, I had similar conversations with my C-levels during roadmap and risk analysis. There is always a risk in digital. We are simply placing our bets on the best way forward. Advertising Continue reading below Search engines are vulnerable to misinformation due to technical dependencies Banner Design and supposedly reliable sources. What about the human aspect?