Why we called it SEO Sink
Nobody names a product after a bad outcome by accident. "Sink" is the word SEO uses for everything that goes wrong: rankings sink, PageRank dies in an equity sink, domains get sinkholed. We put it on the door precisely because the industry needed the word aimed the other way for once — at the people causing the sinking.
The sinkhole we deliberately aren't
A sinkhole, in security, is DNS-level redirection of traffic to a controlled server — researchers sinkhole botnets; attackers sinkhole your rankings. It's also the metaphor negative-SEO commentary reaches for when your traffic vanishes: "it fell into a sinkhole." We counter-position against that on purpose. A sinkhole is where things disappear, innocently or otherwise. Our sink is where hostile things are sent — on purpose, with evidence, with their campaign named.
The analogy we do claim: the heat sink
The better mental model is the one bolted to your CPU. A heat sink doesn't argue with heat and it doesn't pretend the chip isn't running hot — it draws the heat off the part that matters and disposes of it, continuously, so the part that matters can keep working. That is the entire shape of our product: your site is the chip; the attack is the heat; we sit between them, permanently.
Same job — draw danger away from the thing that matters. Different ending.
Where we part company with the hardware
A heat sink dumps its heat into the air, uncondemned — gone, but nobody's fault, free to come back as weather. That's not good enough for us, and it's the whole point. Everything we sink is identified (which farm, first seen when, who else it's hitting), attributed into a campaign graph built from real attacks — and reported: every botnet we fingerprint goes to its hosting provider's abuse desk on our tenants' behalf. The junk isn't just moved somewhere else. It's condemned — named, documented, and made expensive to run again. Dissemination just spreads the problem around. We end it where we can and starve it where we can't.
So: SEO Sink
The word was a casualty report. Now it's the sentence the attack gets. Spam-link waves — sunk. Forged-referer floods — sunk. Verification botnets — sunk to The Tarpit, to the bottom of the sea, with an abuse report on the way down. Every other "sink" in SEO is still bad news. This one works for you.
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Keep reading: real attack data from our own estate · what is negative SEO?