Just lately, igaming associates have been complaining about one thing that to a lot of them seems like destructive Search engine optimization in opposition to their websites. A lot of folks have reported seeing hyperlinks to their websites from pages that seem like this:
Nonetheless, this isn’t destructive Search engine optimization in opposition to any particular websites however a byproduct of a hyperlink spam scheme that goes roughly like this:
- The offender hacks a lot of websites, principally powered by Joomla, principally unrelated to casinos, and locations his parasite pages just like the one within the screenshot above;
- The content material of this web page consists of a bunch of key phrases a few of that are linked to the offender’s different parasite pages on different hacked Joomla websites;
- Generally, to dilute the hyperlinks to their very own parasite pages, in addition they hyperlink to every other random websites discovered rating for no matter key phrases they use. That is how these websites get their “destructive Search engine optimization-like trying” hyperlinks.
Affected associates, excellent news for you: in case your website acquired into one in every of these parasite pages, it means it’s rating. Unhealthy information: you bought hyperlinks from hacked websites. These is probably not as simply ignored as simply any poor high quality spam hyperlinks, so you probably have seen lots of these in your hyperlink profile lately, or if you happen to’re fearful that your rankings have already been affected, it’s possible you’ll wish to disavow them (or discuss to me and I’ll assist you to with a hyperlink audit and ensure whether or not or not yours is a case like this and what your finest plan of action can be).
How the offender monetises it: the banner and the header underneath it are linked to but different parasite pages on hacked Joomla websites, however on this case they’re set to redirect to their cash website, slots2018 . on-line. Now, if you happen to examine the hyperlinks of this one, you received’t see something:
However if you happen to examine one of many hacked parasite pages redirecting to it, you will notice a very completely different image:
slots2018 . on-line robots.txt disallows each bot from crawling the location, therefore Majestic and different instruments can’t crawl it and might’t report its backlinks (which might solely be redirects anyway). It’s not going to be crawled by Google, both – however the offender is just not fearful about it as the location will get all its site visitors from throwaway redirected parasite pages on hacked third celebration websites. Alternatively, affiliate packages received’t know the place his site visitors comes from, both. Jogs my memory a little bit of this setup a couple of years again – solely in that case, it was WordPress as an alternative of Joomla.
Speaking of Joomla, it seems like hacked websites are utilizing an outdated model – here’s a Sucuri scan consequence for one of many hacked websites:
So if you happen to’re a website proprietor, it goes with out saying that you must be sure you are operating the most recent model of no matter CMS you might be utilizing.