SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a dark art practiced by armies of minor wizards marching on the Eye of Sauron that is Google. Google decides if a site makes it onto that first page of search results. They constantly tweak it, while every SEO operator tries to crack it.
I’ve managed to mostly steer clear of SEO; alas, it came looking for me.
###
A year ago, my friend, riding partner and psychotherapist by trade asked me to look at her website. She’d been getting emails warning that her domain name was about to expire and the agency that built her website fourteen years ago wasn’t responding to her calls or email.
If a domain expires, you have about thirty days to reclaim it before getting it back becomes harder and more expensive.
I cloned her site so she wouldn’t lose anything, and set up a replica under a similar, shorter domain name.
I figured we’d buy back her original domain after the grace period passed.
Then I got busy and forgot all about it, until last week when she called me with news that her old site had been hacked:
This page should have listed all the workshop trainers in my friends practice, not a purple car flanked by clones and ringed in Indonesian atop a chaotic layout.
My friend was not happy.
###
My first thought was that after the site had lapsed, someone had bought up the name to inject this doorway to Indonesian Gambling.
While my friend’s site is small, it’s been around a while and reputation is something Google prioritizes, and correspondingly SEO operators covet.
Still small potatoes, but enough potatoes make a tasty dish.
But while the registration did expire a year ago, it was renewed 28 days later — two days before the grace period ended. It never went to auction, it was never re-registered.
Maybe someone hacked her old WordPress site. An aging, poorly maintained build is full of back doors.
Wrong again.
I checked her old server; it was offline.
Yet the website was up. Only the domain owner can repoint a name to a new server … did my friends old agency sell out to a Jakarta SEO Syndicate?
The logo and gallery images were coming from the Wayback Machine. Someone had pulled images of my friend’s old site from the Internet Archive and used them to build a convincing copy. The purple car was still just one click away.
Clever trick, that.
So where was this new server? Finally I caught a break. It was the same server hosting the actual SELALUBET gambling site:
How they hacked and repointed my friend’s domain to this server turned out to be the easiest part of the mystery.
I looked up the old agency email on the data breach repository Have I Been Pwned? It showed up 17 times.
One of the 17 was one of the worst breaches in history because not only did Adobe lose 150 million accounts, they included poorly encrypted passwords along with their hints.
Hackers have been playing password bingo with this dataset for years.
I finally had the story: the domain got on a list when it wasn’t renewed. An SEO affiliate in Indonesia got the list and cross referenced it with compromised accounts. Got into my friend’s account, repointed it at his server and remade the homepage from archive content so Google wouldn’t notice. Finally, the payoff — he filled the most popular sub-page on the site with flashy AI content leading to his customer.
SEO juice to find a gambling site.
How big was this operation?
###
My friend’s site was but one in a scheme that undoubtedly spans 1,000s of abandoned websites.
It was easy to find some more.
A hobbyist coding site called pythongrid, now instead of coding tricks featuring Jimmy Neutron and Anime pointing the way to SELALUBET:
A pet site called allsmallpets now home for psycho monkey and sleepy sloth:
more. lots more.
I had enough evidence now: I opened a fraud ticket with the hoster and asked for the site to be taken down.
But why Indonesia? Who are these people?
###
They signed their work.
The Capybara with the pink sunglasses and boba first caught my eye. This guy’s handle was Kapi_Bara — he’s the one who hacked the old vendor and built the new web server mimicking my friends old one as bait.
I imagine Kapi_Bara as a seasoned SEO affiliate that got his start building websites for the family shops (warungs) in his neighborhood. Now in his thirties, he’s switched to SEO for the money, running his business out of a small Jakarta apartment above the same warungs that got him started. Kapi shares the space with his wife and toddler, working on a cluster of screens in the corner of the living room. It’s a quantity game — on a good day he’ll stand up two or three new sites.
Kapi is using AI to scale his operation, repurposing money saved for an AC upgrade to buy a used gaming PC good enough to run open weight models that crank through workflows overnight, building servers, content and copy.
Soon he’ll have enough for a new AC and another gaming box with a better GPU.
AUDY303 is also working for SELALUBET; she’s run into Kapi online. Audy protects her art with watermarks and adds her polished Panda logo. One of Audy’s roommates is Chinese-Indonesian — Audy met her in a programming class during her short stint at university (the tuition was more than her family could carry), and the Panda is inspired by a similar statue that sat by the register at her friend’s pharmacy.
Audy tags the number 303 onto her handle as a brash nod to the old Indonesian legal code that makes gambling illegal. It traces back to when Indonesia was a Dutch Colony. The Indonesian government aggressively goes after gambling setups — shuttering millions of websites a year — so Audy does a little dance with danger. She doesn’t mind.
She does mind her dad gambling his paycheck away.
Audy got her break when she showed her uncle what AI could do spitting out flashy images, and so he took her under his wing, giving her a slice of his long standing contract at another bigger gambling operation POLTARTOTO. Audy is developing her craft, working on the go, setting up her laptop in a different internet cafe every day, buying time on pirated servers quietly humming away in a corner of the university lab.
SEO JIMBOY is AUDY303’s uncle Jimy and mentor. Her mom’s brother, he’s been in the biz longer than Kapi and Audy combined. Jimy doesn’t waste time on fancy logos, he’s all about scale.
Nowadays it takes more work to make the same money.
Jimy hires out most of what he used to do. He’s trying to expand his client list while bringing in AI natives like Audy to increasingly automate site buildout. He’d like to get more work from legitimate legal businesses, but gambling is a $20 billion dollar industry in Indonesia and there are no legitimate businesses of that scale in his reach.
AI does in minutes what used to take Jimy days, but it’s also cheapened the work and made it easier for new operators to break in. Prior tech waves have nearly put him out of business and he’s increasingly unsure how this one is going to play out. While AI-powered competition heats up, organic search traffic drops — replaced by AI answer machines.
Does SEO have a future?
###
On Monday, the hoster acted on our takedown request, and my friend’s hacked site went offline. On Tuesday I scrubbed the copy I had made; it was a mess. Software ages quickly when exposed to the Internet with its armies of hackers grinding for a buck.
My friend is back in business.
Meanwhile, a hemisphere away in Jakarta, the largest city in the world, the SEO industry carries on, fueled by inertia. The value of my friend’s domain has passed. The world of SEO feeds on the next crop of abandoned domains, and they hit the black market daily.
By tech standards, SEO is an old business, but it’s nothing compared to gambling. Search engines have been around for thirty years; people have been placing bets for thousands. Just as AI accelerates practices like SEO, it’s driving a shift at the Internet’s core.
SEO will disappear like my friend’s old server. It’s too soon to say when. But whatever AI ushers in, the house will keep taking bets, and Kapi, Audy and Jimy will be waiting to welcome you in.
First, if/when I get bad-hacked, I will reach out to you ASAP. Second, great question here I was thinking the entire time until you said it: "Does SEO have a future?"
Clearly, finding information is still very valuable, but now it's more like AIEO or something. Old MacDonald had a botfarm, EIEIO!
Good work! Excellent forensic sleuthing. Are you for hire? 👦