Last week, one of our clients’ sites was hacked. In hidden text on the front page, they had links for all sorts of things from prescription drugs to pay day loans. Even though we didn’t build the site, our expert web team was able to track down the problem and put a stop to it. I was fascinated about who would do something like that, so I decided to find out.
Apparently, somebody in Amsterdam was working for a group in Russia that hacked the site and sent links to a broad set of websites. It looks as if the whole set up was to get the hacker’s sites better page rank from Google.
Google judges a web page’s authority and authenticity based on page rank, which it assigns to every page based largely on what links it has from other, more established web pages. Page rank is essentially how much Google trusts a page.
Working in search engine optimization and web design, we often hear of people using “black hat” techniques to manipulate their page rank, but I’ve never run into anyone who actually did that. So, I decided to call them up and find out what they were thinking.
Did they know what was going on? Or did they just hire an SEO expert and suddenly their page rank shot up? I scoured the list of sites and left out the ones that seemed shady from the get-go. Prescription drugs, online gambling, pay day loans, dating services, all fell in the “scum bag” category for me. But a few sites stuck out as being possibly innocent.
One was TheFirstAidKits.com, which has an address and phone number in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It has a page rank of 4, which is pretty good. They also appeared to be selling real first aid kits. So I called up their customer service number, told them that I was writing a blog entry for Advent Creative in Utah, and then asked if they knew how their link got on our client’s site.
The woman on the phone was nice, and said she had no clue about any of it. She said the webmaster was unavailable and she didn’t know if anybody had recently hired an SEO or search engine marketing company. I did notice, however, that she had a Russian accent. So I checked out the site’s registration. It turns out it belongs to some guy in Moscow.
Now, just because it’s a Russian site doesn’t mean that they were complicit with the hack. They still might have innocently signed on with an SEO “expert” who then broke onto our client’s site. In fact, one of the clandestine links was to a Russion SEO company.
The next site was more interesting. It’s called SamsonBlinded.org, a fiercely Zionist website with a respectable page rank of 5. They advocate a “Machiavellian” approach to the Middle East conflict, which boils down to essentially destroying or enslaving all the Palestinians. Let’s just say that this isn’t a website that most sane people would link to. What’s funny about this site is they have a press release page where they brag about their connections to hackers. I also found it hilarious when they complained about how Google Adwords had recently rejected one of their ads for strong political language.
Here is what they wanted to run:
Down with moralizing
Any means are good against terror
Read Shoher’s new book - free on web
As a Qualified Google Advertising Professional, I could have told them that the ad wasn’t going to fly. Oh well.
Here’s the point:
Black hat search engine marketing and search engine optimization may work in the short term, but never for the long term. I have a friend at Google and he’s a freaking genius. They’re all geniuses. Sooner or later, they’re going to figure out all the scams. The only long term strategy for SEO and SEM is to make a great site, share it with great people, and to constantly provide good, relevant content. Still, my hat’s off to those scrappy hackers who keep trying, just the same.