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?