Eyjafjallajökull volcano not used by black hat SEOs

Its name may look like someone has dropped a paperweight on their keyboard, but the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull has been dominating news headlines for the last week or so due to the impact it has had on Europe.

Now, when a major news event such as this usually comes around, such as the death of Michael Jackson or the death or Brittany Murphy, the black hat SEOs get right on the case and start optimising their spam and virus sites to catch people looking for more news. However, in the case of Eyjafjallajökull – the black hat SEO community has been somewhat quiet.

Can you guess why?

That’s right, no one can spell the darn thing. Eyjafjallajökull is probably the biggest news story of the last decade that hasn’t had any impact at all on black hat SEO. Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Birmingham, London and other cities in the UK may be cut off in terms of air travel – something that even a major terrorist scare wouldn’t do, yet black hat SEOs haven’t lifted a finger to optimise their spam sites for Eyjafjallajökull.

PandaLabs’ Luis Corrons was right on the money when the volcano erupted, commenting:

When the volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupted causing a chaos in the air traffic, on the one hand I remembered all my colleagues who were in Barcelona at the BlackHat Europe and on the other I thought about the typical attacks we see everyday using the search engines.

However, this time I made a bet: ‘I bet anything that there is no SEO attack using the name of the volcano’”.

Black hat SEOs have had a go at optimising for related searches however, searches that are a little easier for people to spell. They have instead been targeting searches for keywords such as ‘Icelandic Volcano Eruption’ and ‘Icelandic Volcano Images’ – meaning Internet users should always be careful before clicking on any links to do with news.