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HomeHomeOur CommunityOur CommunityGeneral Discuss...General Discuss...PowerDNN - Black-Hat SEO, gaming their own customers.PowerDNN - Black-Hat SEO, gaming their own customers.
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6/1/2008 5:34 PM
 

I’m just curious how would you feel if your web hosting provider was injecting hidden links in to HTML output of all your pages to boost their own PageRank?

 

I have recently come across a hosting provider that has done just that; Injected a hidden CSS link to every customer DNN site and page that they host. The link is stuffed just below the <body> tag,  the CSS is used to hide it from being visually rendered by the browser. The link is in the HTML source-code and is picked up by google as a valid link-back to their site. This is obvious black-hat SEO on behalf of the provider, but to use their customers as pawns in dirty SEO games is a completely new level of unethical behavior.

 

To see the evidence for yourself, follow these steps:

1)      Use google’s link-back search query: link:www.powerdnn.com to list all sites that are linking back to www.powerdnn.com. Or follow this link http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1T4GZHZ_enUS229US229&q=link%3Awww.powerdnn.com

2)      The google search results will return list of all websites that are linking to www.powerdnn.com. Visit as many of the sites as you want, majority of sites listed in that query are hosted by the same hosting provider. Try visually locating a link or use browser text search function to locate “powednn.com” string within the website text. The majority of sites will not have any visible links pointing back to powerdnn.com.

3)      Now try viewing the HTML source on one or more of these websites, then search html code for “powerdnn” string. You should locate the following HTML tag just below the <body> tag <p style="display: none;"><a href="http://www.PowerDNN.com">DotNetNuke DNN Hosting</a></p>

 

This means following; every single dnn installation that is hosted by powerdnn has been modified to output cloaked link back to their own site in order to gain google PageRank. They are gaming the search engines and their customers.

 

The question is, how would you as a paying hosting customer feel if you were to discover the same thing occurring with your sites? Most webmasters are aware of Google spam report http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html and sooner or later they will end up dropped from the index. However, what about those webmasters and site owners that are unwittingly are part of cloaked link farm and as result will be penalized when google updates its spam filtering algorithms? Most importantly, do the powerdnn customers know about this practice and how it will affect them when google will nab this link farm?

 

It’s one thing to ask for a link back from your customers, but to inject hidden link on every page is outright tresspassing and fraud. If powednn gets away with this, does that mean every other hosting provider can distribute “customized” DNN version to their customers with a built-in link farm to boost Google listings for the provider?

 
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6/1/2008 10:17 PM
 

Art,

This is actually a subject that is quite old.  Many months ago we at PowerDNN noticed that there were quite a few DNN hosting providers out there that were putting links back to their site either in the DNN skin or somewhere in the html.  The reason why we were aware of this, is we were getting many of their customers transferring over to us and they wanted us to get rid of the link.  We had just recently rolled out a service that makes it easier for DNN users to use google analytics in their installations without having text/html modules on every page or buying a module.  We basically added a siteheader file and added it as an include in the default.aspx.  This is a service we still offer and MANY of our customers use it.  Well we decided that instead of putting a link to PowerDNN in the siteheader file.  We rolled it out to about 25% of the clients to see what the reaction was, and many of our customers did not like it so we promptly discontinued it.  Nearly all of our decisions, whether business or technology, are heavily based on feedback from our customer.  People pay a premium for our service and we want our customers to have a voice.  While this was a very astute observation on your part, and I am flattered that we could be part of your one and only post, there is very little news here.  We did run a utility to go back through and get rid of the link, but obviously there are still some sites out there with the line of code.  We host nearly 6,000 domains so its difficult to know if you get every site.  Not every new product/feature/initiative is successful, our customer feedback was not positive,so we adjusted and did what our customers wanted. 

 

 
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6/1/2008 11:32 PM
 

John,    

                I have been hired to do SEO for “other” hosting providers.  I have been carefully watching the Google index over the last year and a half and this “issue” is definitely news to me as it has only started appearing in Google index over the last few months.  However, this is not even the point!  The problem is that you hide link-backs to your site and embed them in your unsuspecting client’s sites.  Do you believe this to be ethical?  As well, I fail to see how this black-hat tactic would benefit your clients seeing as how this practice is clearly against the Google spam policy.  http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291

 

 

Perhaps you should take this notice to your benefit so that you may “fix” your remaining link farm before Google does it for you and your unfortunate clients.  Now I will have flattered you twice, as I normally would not have any need and very little interest to post anything here.  Any professional SEO expert would never advise his/her client or attempt to create a cloaked link farm. Especially, on a third party sites that you have been entrusted with. What’s next, a cloaked page that shows different content to search engine bots, or perhaps its doorway pages hosted on your client’s domains? Where does it end and at what expense?

 
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HomeHomeOur CommunityOur CommunityGeneral Discuss...General Discuss...PowerDNN - Black-Hat SEO, gaming their own customers.PowerDNN - Black-Hat SEO, gaming their own customers.


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