SEO hacking cpanel
There’s a thread on Search Engine Watch puzzling over server side search engine cloaking of an innocent third party’s website (thanks Joe for the tip).
After the conversation had died down, Brian White (works for Matt Cutts at Google) came around and told them:
“…We’ve discovered that the likely explanation is that a third party gained access to a number of sites and dropped files in these accounts (including a modified .htaccess using rewrite rules) for the purpose of rewriting the home page through a proxy script. The proxy script adds links when Googlebot visits, and in a sinister twist, adds the rel=nofollow link to cap off PageRank bound for any external URL not under control of this third party. As Danny noted, they also add a NOARCHIVE meta tag to disable the cached version in results…”
“…We don’t know how the third party got the files on the webhosts, but cPanel seems to be the common denominator. We’re in touch with some hosts who appear be affected by this….”
I guess it was bound to happen. Hacking for SEO…
The silver lining is that if people are doing things like breaking into servers, that’s clearly illegal.
Matt — we thought that in the email anti-spam community, too.
When you deploying sandbox, all peoples look forward to “old domains”.
Deleted domains, buying old domains and etc.
IMHO no matters what you use to get ranking higher ?
[...] Doorways, spamming, hacking, cloaking , etc. Can be really effective if you know how to. Short term success - always. No long term perspectives - only recurring actions. Build a doorway, promote, get high SERP position, get banned, build another doorway … Circle of life. [...]
Google discovered a hidden link on a site yesterday which led me on an interesting expedition. Seems that the currently top ranking site for “download movies” has been employing someone to hack into DNN (dotnukenet) sites and add an invisible link in them pointing back (with varying anchor text, of course) to the movie site. Makes me wonder how prolific hacking is for some black hat SEOs.