What do I mean?

Advertisers pick the inline, or anchor, text they want to be the link through a search bar.  Inlinks combs through its database of content to find blog posts with that particular inline text, and serves up a listing of such posts, that are sorted according to Alexa score, PageRank, and Date of post.  Once the advertiser selects the blog post, some magic happens, and the link is rented.  The starting rate for many links are about $10/month.  

On the blogger’s side of the equation, the a static link is created on a given page to the advertiser’s designated landing page / URL with no “nofollow” attribute — pasing along the linkjuice accordingly.

The trick? Unlike other marketplaces, such as ReviewMe.com, you never get to see *who* those bloggers ar.  And also unlike Payperpost, no one is asking you to write about, or review any particular thing.  And obviously its not advertised *as* a paid link (under a helpful heading such as “advertisers”).

Translation: the hope is that Google will never find these paid links, as they are truly in the dark and under the table.  

Why? Only because Google frowns upon paid links, and has even encouraged people to report sites which are thought to have engaged in the practice.  

I won’t delve into the larger issue of whether its ethical or not, as I know arguments on both sides of the equation — that larger companies do it en masse, creating a difficult situation for smaller companies, but will never get penalized; that it pollutes the index with meaningless drivel; that Google is responsible for creating a link economy and so on and so on.

From a bloggers point of view, however, its just one more means to try and monetize their blog through a convenient marketplace that’s set up for you.  If you don’t care about such things as pagerank, or how Google thinks of your site, or perhaps those of your peers (if they care about such things) then its probably worth a go.  But then again, you’ve probably agreed to (or were sorely tempted to) rent out links private to people who approach you about adding blocks of text to some of your older and more popular posts, right? 

And lastly on the issue of hiding paid links from Google, I do vaguely remember Google being able to algorithmically piece together who is selling links from their “snitch” reports in a pretty easy way.  

As always, caveat emptor on all sides.

UPDATE 4.7.08: Looks like ZDnet was hacked as well (although they’ve since cleaned up)

So in some innocent conversation earlier today with Allen Stern, he noticed that Tailrank was getting hammered with spam, via Tailrank’s River — something Duncan Riley also noticed. To be honest, I’ve noticed it as well, noting snarkily that perhaps it wasn’t so much that Tailrank was getting hammered, as much as Tailrank’s algorithm was getting fooled, as it looks to grab content by skimming the content of feeds. That is, perhaps Tailrank was grabbing rotten spammy content.

Or … was it?

I had a closer look at many of the blogs concerned that had spammy content — pages promoting credit cards, pharmaceuticals and the like, and I realized that if you go to the root domain they are all legitimate blogs. Not scraper blogs that were being auto-generated with adsense / affiliate links, which was extremely curious, and actually reminiscient of something that hit home a few months ago.

A few months ago, this blog got hacked — but in a sneaky way. Not only did the hackers insert “invisible” code into my template, so that I was getting listed in Google for all manner of sneaky (and NSFW terms), so that people could click on those links with the hacker getting the affiliate cash — but *actually*, said hackers also inserted fake tempates into my wordpress theme.

I didn’t notice, because Dreamhost automatically installed a ton of themes, and so they were buried in there, but I only noticed when I started looking at my analytics and really odd pages started getting hits. Randomly.

I never got around to blogging about it before because it was all too strange, but with Tailrank, its clear that I’m not the only one that was buggered — its happening to a TON of blogs, and people don’t even know about it.

There seems to be two kinds of hackery going on, just like I’ve described:

1. Inserting “invisible” HTML full of links (for NSFW sites) into your WP template that isn’t obvious when you go to your blog, but is VERY obvious when you look at the source code (and start seeing that you’re getting traffic for some “peculiar” terms).

2. Inserting whole new source code / new sneaky themes that copy other blogs / content *exactly*, which is full of spammy content and affiliate links.

Why are there two? Why would you have any pages with nothing obvious to the reader?

Read on, because this is where it gets really nefarious.

First here are some examples.

• http://www.helmethairblog.com: Blogs about motorbikes. Has a ton of invisible code inserted into the WP theme right in his header. Check out the source code or try this file (I saved it): helmethairblog-source Note how all of the adsense if for *credit cards* (and not on motorbicycles)
  
• http://www.andysummers.com: A professional site for a guitarist named Andy Summers. Inside the press directory you can find at least six directories that contain pages for pharmacy, credit cards, and loans. Here is one of those pages.
• http://blog.jimnovo.com: the marketing and productivity blog for Jim Novo, who has a book called Drilling Down. This is probably one of the sneakiest (yet to be verified personally from Mr. Novo however) — the blog is running on WordPress, however, it looks like someone has sneaked in some extra php code, under a separate file called news.php. Given a particular value for the variable “blog”, it serves up different pages. For example, serving up “credit”, serves up this page which is ranking very well for Mr. Novo (accidentally of course).

The devious thing? The entire site is ripped off from CreditHit.com, and its a little unclear if this is therefore something perpetrated *by* CreditHit (because links are tracked and go back to them), or an affiliate *of* CreditHit (which would be strange, as the site is an affiliate portal for credit cards).

At any rate, if the number of blogs on TailRank are any judge (through the Tailrank River –> tailrank.com/river), there are a HUGE number of blogs / sites that are hacked and don’t even know it.

http://www.internmentcamp.com –> silent HTML spam
http://www.vinokeeno.com/ –> silent HTML spam
http://www.alexharford.com/ –> silent HTML spam
http://www.gossiportruth.com –> silent HTML spam
http://amandabanana.net/ –> silent HTML spam
http://license2code.com–> silent HTML spam
http://selfportraitchallenge.net/–> silent HTML spam
http://www.firstcrackpodcast.com/–> silent HTML spam

So, let’s get back to the two kinds of spam. Why is there all of this content that is “invisible” (and even selected out to be invisible by some CSS?)

The *REAL* Devious thing, and the heart of the matter, is that the pages full of *silent* spam are tracking back to a few particular sites, such as the jimnovo.com site and the andysummers site. The reason why? One need only look at the TailRank.com/River site to know why, as Jimnovo.com’s blog is headlining almost every node.

The other blog that many of those blogs link to is Interaccess.org, which is a site for a not-for-profit organization that focuses on art and technology. Its blog is here, called Axon, Interaccess.org/blog. But of course, the money is in the pages that have been sneaked in, like this one: http://interaccess.org/blog/?drug=4/pill-377-tramadol.html

What does this really all mean?

It means that these silent pages are a blackhat SEO tactic to *promote* a few select blogs / sites that have been hacked with prominent affiliate / spam links and spam content, thereby bumping up their relative standing on Google.

That’s right.

Some enterprising hackers have put together a scheme whereby they hack a number of blogs, so that they can create their own network pages and links back to a few select blogs, to pages that are not easily visible. It takes advantage of the organic and real page rank of all of the sites in question, and probably makes some bucks for the hacker involved.

Why is this bad for *you*?

Other than the knowledge that someone is profiting off of your back, what can happen is that if you’re running Adsense, Google might notice all the hidden text and penalize you and pull you right out of the Index.

De-indexed. It happened to me, and the above, in retrospect, is the very reason for it.

So, at this moment you might be wondering — what can I do to protect myself? How can *you* tell if your blog has been hacked?

Here are three ways (pray it doesn’t get to the three).

1. You start getting traffic from google for terms you never write about (say, credit cards)

2. If you use Adsense, you start seeing ads on your blog for stuff that in no way matches your content (credit cards for example)

3. If you get banned from Adsense for promoting content in a sneaky way.

My suggestion is that if you find yourself in this position, comb through your templates carefully to find the hidden HTML and delete it.

THEN, go through your blog / site directory with FTP, turn ON the “look for hidden things” and start hunting for any potential directories that look suspicious — i.e. you didn’t put them there.

Bottom Line: This all happened to DJI a few months ago, both as a “host” site for the affiliate / spam content (I’ve since deleted the fake WP theme) and a site that hosted silent / invisible links, but I didn’t have the wherewithal to figure it out.

I’m not a security expert, so I can’t tell you if the security breach is through WordPress (perhaps an older version) or higher up — on a wholescale level through hosting providers.

But irrespective of where the leak is, I think this should be a bit of a wake up call to everyone. Look real carefully to see if your blog has been compromised — because you in fact, may be the stooge for someone else’s nefariously devious Blackhat tactics.

ADDENDUM: oh … and Tailrank should also get its act together and realize what kind of content they’re promoting. They exposed this large scale hackery, but did so unintentionally. :P

Update: Looks like JimNovo.com *was* hacked … he removed the offending piece of code, and so you won’t be able to see the changes. Interaccess.org was also fixed as well.

So I am showing you this not just to show off that this blog has ranking for some pretty obscure terms, but that blog post on my blog outranks VTech itself when it comes for what I think is a relevant search term. I am only casual observer for SEO topics, but looks like a clear example where VTech needs a hand — not just in terms of being the right one to rank for the appropriate topic, but from a public relations point of view, as well.

In fact, VTech has solved the problem as of a few weeks ago, as it did release a new software update so that its now Vista compatible, with the page in question over here.

[edit: or, over here where "VTech released a Vista compatible update for their Skype phones" -- VTech, please thank Andy Beard by sending him something (like a free phone, maybe?) after the exchange I had with him below]

Where is does that page rank in the scheme of things? Well, nowhere to be honest. Why is this important? Only because about a year ago VTech made some noises about never releasing an update that would work with Vista machines, which have been (obviously) received quite negatively.

Chalk one up under “why SEO is important”, I think.

Granted, Google Sites looks like its under the “Google Apps” umbrella, which means that you probably have to own a domain first (to give the appearance, at least, of having a “business” that the app can go under), but on the surface there does seem to be some similarities here, not the very least, including the fact that it doesn’t outwardly support ads (nevermind Adsense). That is, its not natively offered as an option. Links as well, are not direct links, but get parsed through the Google url.

For example, links get changed into –> http://www.google.com/?url=XXXXX

Where “XXXXX” is the URL you are pointing to.

Anyway, I’m sure much more will be written about Google Sites in the coming future, but as it stands, it seems like Google’s intention is certainly to keep it SEO neutral (neutered?) for the time being.

Interesting: When Google bought Jotspot initially, there was already some thoughts about what kind of SEO implications this might have, this being one of them.

Keywords?  For real?

Call me naive, but I didn’t think there was an association — and perhaps neither would you, unless you began to wonder if machines (i.e. software, i.e. algorithms) are sorting out resume’s.  And in fact, perhaps, this is the case at some larger companies.

To wit:

“Keep in mind one huge technology change in the way your submitted resume is “read”: by software, not humans.

Writing resume for a headhunter for side money many years ago I discovered one critical job-finding tip: most resumes now are scanned and parsed by software in HR departments and only a small number of those get to hiring managers hands.

Tip? Increase your odds by placing your qualifying keywords (software experience, certifications, etc.) at the top of your resume where the scanning software will lift it and match it with any job keywords the employer has listed in the job notice.

It works. Because I’m a technical writer and people ask me, I’ve volunteer re-written resumes for many people over the years, from ex-White House guys to geeks just out of school.

When I’ve rewritten their resume to include keywords at the top where the scanning software can read it (and not buried on the second or third page)…they get interviews and then that converts to a job.”

[emphasis my own]

Hmmm.  Identifying keywords that match the goals of your resume.  Having it close to the top, or above the fold.  Now, all I’m wondering is if we need to be careful about keyword stuffing! (Or inserting paragraphs of keywords near the bottom of the page … )

Now, I have absolutely no way of verifying if any of these kinds of claims are true, but of course they make total sense in a general hand-waving kind of way: software is getting more sophisticated; it can help with parsing out and searching for Stuff; resume’s could be that Stuff; the way that it parses and sorts and organizes could be based on keywords, which is what Search Engines do (and what Google has built its multi-billion dollar business on — yes, and Adwords / Adsense).

Bottom line?

Maybe knowing a little bit about SEO that you’ve picked up creating your blog has some portability into your other offline life [there's probably, as well, an entire commentary on how software algorithms may soon play an integral part of our lives, but that's a post for another time]

Who knew?