[00:01] black hat SEO [music] packages. Or at least that's what shows up when you Google Disney account. That's right. [music] The company that owns Mickey Mouse apparently decided to get into the backlink business. Obviously not. So,
[00:15] did Disney get hacked or did someone in the SEO world just decide [music] to mess with Google for funsies? I wanted to figure out exactly what happened. So, Slack, and Patrick Stocks had a hunch that it was a technical glitch mixed
[00:28] that it was a technical glitch mixed with an old 1990s SEO trick that apparently still works on Google today. And the deeper I dug, the weirder it got, because I think he's right. So, in this video, I'm breaking down what I
[00:40] think happened with Disney and Google. [music] And the first crumb is in HF site explorer. I started by searching for my.d.com/acount. And right away, something looked off in the referring domains chart. For nearly
[00:53] a year, this page had basically no backlinks pointing at it. And for good reason. People don't typically link to gated pages because there's no value to anyone who clicks there. But then suddenly, bam, how does a redirected
[01:08] login page suddenly get 10 times its usual number of referring domains in the backlinks report to see what was going on. And that's where things got going on. And that's where things got weird. Almost every new link was pure
[01:22] spam with anchor text, including phrases like black hat SEO and Google SEO fast like black hat SEO and Google SEO fast ranking. Now, in SEO, anchor text is Google and other search engine crawlers what the page is about. For example, if
[01:36] you look at a healthy backlink profile like this blog post on SEO tips, you'll usually see a mix of anchors. the naked URL, the target keyword, the brand name, or variations of the post title over time. [music] From the anchors alone,
[01:50] you can easily infer what the page is about. So, if Google only looked at anchors to understand Disney's [music] page, then yeah, their slash account page would look like one that sells black hat [music] SEO services. But
[02:02] here's the twist. Google's actually pretty good at filtering out this kind of lowquality link spam. [music] So, the real culprit wasn't the links alone. It was a technical SEO issue hiding in plain sight. The redirect. If you visit
[02:16] my.d.com/account, [music] you'll see that it redirects to a Disney login page. No big deal. Unless you check it with HFSO [music] toolbar, that's when you see it's a 302 redirect. Who cares, [music] right?
[02:30] Well, Google does. Let me explain. There are two main types of redirects: permanent and temporary. [music] As a visitor, you never notice the difference. But to Google, these HTTP [music] status codes signify different
[02:43] things. A permanent redirect tells search engines, this page is officially moved. So pass on any link signals, etc. from the old URL to the new one. [music] And you can actually remove this old URL from your index too. Whereas a temporary
[02:57] redirect is [music] temporary. It says this move is short-term, so keep the original page index for now [music] and don't consolidate any signals. Now, this and the lack of a canonical
[03:09] tag explain why the slash account page is still hanging around in Google's index and why the site link probably surfaced in the first place, but it doesn't explain why Google labeled it black hat SEO packages since that phrase
[03:22] never appeared anywhere on the page or in the title. And the most probable reason is Google's title rewriter. Google has been rewriting page titles and metadescriptions for years. Regardless of what you set in your tags,
[03:35] it usually pulls context from your content and combines that with what users are searching for. But when Google has no onpage content to work with, like a redirecting login page, it looks elsewhere. And in this case, the only
[03:49] signal it had were those spammy back links and their anchor text. [music] So, Google likely used black hat SEO phrases to generate a new title for the site link. So, was Disney hacked? Nope. It was just a temporary hiccup. The kind
[04:04] that happens when a 302 redirect, a weak backlink profile with a ton of spammy anchors, and Google's title rewriter all collide. In other words, it was collide. In other words, it was temporary, just like the redirect.