
Inside a Hacked SEO Backlink Network - jitbit
http://www.elite-strategies.com/inside-a-hacked-seo-backlink-network/
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jitbit
This got me intrigued: "we got a notification from Google that stated a client
website was hacked" \- so Google actually does have some kind of an algorithm
that detects this. And - what - kindly informs webmasters? Nice...

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patrickfl
Thanks for reading really appreciate it. Yes Google sends a notification via
email via Google search console ( formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools) a
lot of times when a site gets hacked. A lot of times they catch it long before
the webmaster does most of the time it is a shared hosting with an absentee
admin or webmaster.

I know a lot of people in this crowd probably run across these situations all
the time but a lot of people don't realize why exactly their sites got hacked
and what the purpose is. Thank you so much again for reading and checking this
out.

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gcb0
that's a bold statement. Google does notice that when they see some link
network get too big. or maybe they have honey pots and they consider your
server hacked if they see your pages linking to that honey pot.

but thinking they know when a server if hacked is giving them too much credit.
they may know when it's part of a widely know black link network. in fact,
most search engines seems to know that.

reason your links are for Japanese sites is because there everyone uses the
cellphone operator default search, which is crappy, but still better than
Google for native language. they may be slower to react or worse at detecting
black link networks.

disclaimer: i work for one of the biggest western search sites in Japan. but
this is my opinion.

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johnward
Google analyzes pages for malware in some cases.
[https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/45449?hl=en](https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/45449?hl=en)

They even warn you, I've seen an interstitial popup (from google) before for
one of my sites that was compromised.

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rcarrigan87
I really wonder how effective these link networks are at SEO nowadays.
Obviously it's a short term strategy either way, but can you get to first page
of google for competitive terms by doing this stuff?

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paxtonab
This is 100% not effective anymore. This is just a slightly more malicious
version of the the spam bots that post back links in wordpress comments,
except in this case they were adding entire html pages to the sites. This is a
violation of Google's duplicate content rules and if anything would be viewed
negatively by Google.

The efficacy of this hack is nil as the "money domains" that were profiting
from these backlinks had little domain authority or relevant traffic according
to the author's article.

The only only way that linking strategies are viable anymore are gaining links
from domains with authority or huge numbers of links.

Maybe if the hacker would have created tens of thousands of back links from
vulnerable fashion blogs (same category of site as the money sites) they
would've gotten some SEO juice.

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etcet
I work in webhosting so I get to see a lot of this shit. What's interesting is
seeing how backlinking has changed. These days, I think that it hurts your
ranking to have a bunch of junk backlinks. This doesn't mean it's not
effective for SEO though.

If I'm on page 2 of a search and I want to get into that precious top 10 I can
spam the site which is ranking above me until I'm there. Or I can threaten to
do a really shitty job trying to blackhat SEO optimize someones site unless
they pay me $x.

We often get abuse@ emails from people who have their link spammed on one of
our clients domains and want it removed. We just link them to
[https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-
main](https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main) and wish
them luck. In some cases these people paid for that 'service' in the past and
now regret it.

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rcarrigan87
I have a friend who worked in coupons and the first part of his day, every
day, was to sit and go through their backlinks and basically disavow
everything. Coupons is so competitive literally everyone is link-bombing each
other trying to trigger a Google penalty.

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paxtonab
Wow. Reporting blackhat seo websites (of competitors) used to be one of the
worst parts of my job. Having to defend myself against blackhat seo attacks on
a daily basis would have sucked my soul...

