After receiving a complaint from Canada’s Attorney-General,  GoDaddy, one of the largest Website Domain and Web Hosting Agencies based in Arizona, has recently shut down an extremest website used by Salman Hossain of Mississauga, Ontario. Among other things, this website called for genocide of the Canadian Jewish community, the National Post reported earlier.

How SEO (Search Engine Optimization) was Inadvertently Used by Hossain

Over the past three years, the 25 year old Hossein has used the internet, and by extension SEO (Search Engine Optimization), to disseminate his hateful propaganda. Through content writing and blog articles, he had been encouraging terrorist attacks in Canada, cheering the killing of Canadian troops in Afghanistan and urging fellow Muslims to “exterminate” Canada’s Jewish population. Mr. Hossain, who says he was raised partly in Ghana, is a self-described ” regular Muslim supporting the jihad overseas” and is reportedly a friend of the Toronto 18 terrorists.

On July 8, after a five-month investigation, Ontario Provincial Police pressed charges on Mr. Hossain with three counts of disseminating hatred and two counts of encouraging genocide. These charges have been approved by Ontario Attorney-General Chris Bentley. However, Mr. Hossain, a Bangladeshi-Canadian, vacated the country before the police investigation was completed. He currently remains at large, and until yesterday, had continued to advocate racist violence on his website.

Mr. Hossain wrote in his final post prior to the site going offline that “the Jews” had pressured Go Daddy to take down his website but that he was in the process of moving it to another site, which used the same URL but with a different web host. In Mr. Hossain’s words, “Like I stated earlier, it makes very little difference if they try and take down the server as I am moving it to another country’s server where it will be much more difficult to take down and where they really and truly hate Jews.”

Mr. Hossain has also posted his commentaries on Filthy Jewish Terrorists, a conspiracy theory website with headlines such as “The Jews and the West must be nuked” and “The destruction of the West is the only way to exterminate the Jews.”

Bernie Farber, CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress has said that that they will make sure Mr. Hossain does not find a new home on the Internet, and that they “will be a thorn in his side.”

Mr. Farber said the CJC would notify Internet servers of Mr. Hossain’s fugitive status who is wanted for hate crimes. In his words, “Any reasonable corporate citizen, once they see exactly what this man is saying, wants nothing to do with him. Nobody wants to be associated with such a horrible, disgusting person.”

Content writing is part of standard Search Engine Optimization strategies, which by extension is a form of online Internet Marketing. From an online marketing perspective, without us having the luxury to view his website, Mr. Hossain’s 5 years worth of content writing on his website and blog had earned his site a sizable amount of web pages and page rank. Putting up a posting every other day has likely ensured that his content is rotating and is fresh. In this manner his site eventually was noticed enough to be shut down.

Conclusion about SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Online Marketing, and by extension SEO (Search Engine Optimization), are merely tools. They can be wielded for the right reasons or the wrong ones. The wrong ones will usually bring short-term results, but long-term disasters such as having a website blacklisted.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 21st, 2010 at 9:42 pm and is filed under News, Search Engine Optimization, Web Hosting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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