Comments on: Outting Unethical .gov Link Techniques

By: Say No To Illegal SEO Techniques

Say No To Illegal SEO Techniques — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:09:59 +0000

[...] Outting Unethical .gov Link Techniques | Search Marketing Standard Share and Enjoy: [...]

By: James @ Realicity Internet Marketing

James @ Realicity Internet Marketing — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 17:33:44 +0000

Black Hat Spammers use to have to buy .edu & .gov links and now they can learn how to do it themselves! Now the only ones who buy those links are just the lazy ones.

I agree with the need to provide a solution, otherwise this is just self promotion. You might try emailing this article to any and all edu & gov webmasters you can to at least get it in front of the right people.

Just a suggestion.

By: Proofreading

Proofreading — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 23:59:35 +0000

Crazy.

By: Interestingly_Average

Interestingly_Average — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 15:02:15 +0000

Testing this a bit further, I can not find any benefit to this XSS attack. Search engines use an interstitial page so that they can track which listing a user clicks on, and this uses a 302 redirect. No major search engine puts any weight on 302 redirects, so the link gained through this method is, in most cases, worthless from an SEO purpose.

By: Hyper Dog Media SEO

Hyper Dog Media SEO — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 21:29:18 +0000

The robots.txt file of the search.*.gov subdomain wouldn’t be queried, because that isn’t the host to be indexed/ranked. The redirect host would be checked: It’s the address that a person(good, bad, or ugly) would be trying to get indexed.

By: Christoph C. Cemper

Christoph C. Cemper — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 21:07:11 +0000

So, brand new. “an truly make a difference in an SEO campaign.” ???

this is called XSS attack or whatever term the folks gave it 14-16 months ago… I think I read it on forums around April last year and a ton others posted about this , not very effective , way to get links….

christoph

By: Interestingly Average

Interestingly Average — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 17:35:35 +0000

For me it’s not so much the SEO, that you can use this to create inbound links. You could embed almost anything into that search results page, including small javascripts that could send session data back to a third party. This could be used for identity theft and more. If this gets added to the search engine, the user thinks they are going to a trustworthy web page because it is on a government domain, but malicious code embedded through this trick opens them up to any number of vulnerabilities. Imagine if you used this method to embed an Iframe or a link to a hostile applet.

By: Pale

Pale — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 22:43:51 +0000

Kun Dang >> The fact that the link points straight to one site in particular means nothing.
Perhaps your competitor did it all to cause you some grief, perhaps he managed to make the link live by posting it parasitically on some other poor suckers site.
Where’s the evidence to incriminate anyone in particular.
Hell if detection was that easy my in box would not be full of spam every day.

Whilst I bow to superior knowledge outlined above I find it difficult to understand why merely using a search box on someone else’s site should lead to a criminal conviction. If they want to create an orphaned page with a link on it that’s their business. If I want to link to it that’s my business. Can anyone outline why and where its illegal?

By: Kun Dang

Kun Dang — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 21:01:03 +0000

Nice tips, but aren’t you missing one critical point, if found out, don’t you take the risk of what is probably highly unethical and even downright illegal?

You may have hidden your IP, but isn’t your calling card left on the .gov site with the link pointing right back at you?

By: pale

pale — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 21:11:29 +0000

Doesn’t the use of no-ip.com make tracing the abuser very difficult?