It's a fairly lucrative "business practice". Getting <i>juicy</i> links from authoritative websites can skyrocket your rankings within a few days, even if that. Yet, this isn't a new thing or something that someone just came up with.<p>Such gamification has been going on since the early 2000s, it's just kept lowkey enough that people don't see it as the biggest deal ever. However, it's a big deal for people who pay for such services.<p>If you look at certain job advertising websites for bloggers/marketers, you'll find plenty of job listings where the employer is looking for writers with "access to high-authority editorials" -- because naturally, they know that those links are worth a hundredfold more than 50 links from an average blog.<p>Whether it's a problem on Google's side is up for discussion. Giving sites high authority and then bumping up other sites who are linked from those places is definitely a weird way to implement a ranking system. But rest assured, it's there and it works.<p>And as for the title, it should read "bloggers are paying hackers to break into websites", rather than blaming one side only.<p>A lot more could be said on this, especially from experience, but there's really no point. Addressing an elephant this big would require Google to be actively involved in the discussion. And that's unlikely to happen.
Yes and sometimes you don't even need to break into the sites. When I was doing some "blackhat seo" about ten years ago I discovered a high PR forum in the same niche that allowed anchor links in the username field. This meant that I could I put something like <a href="mysite.com">keyword</a> as the username and it would just appears as "mykeyword" on the forum index page.<p>Just one of the many ways I've learned to game Google. Social engineering also works well for link building and plenty of other grayhat methods. While I had considered the possibility of outright breaking into systems to place links, I never believed it worth the risk. Not surprised others have started doing it (or started getting caught doing it).
I see a distant analogy with something I got to know from a private investigator. Burglars also changed their game in the similar spirit. Instead of stealing your big TV, jewelry or other physical goods they try to escalate the physical breach into digital one, e.g. installing spyware on your laptop instead of stealing it. Wiping a bank account pays better than stealing physical stuff.
Years ago (2006-2013) I ran a personal site that used Wordpress for its front page/blog, with the remainder using very simple hand-rolled PHP templating and text files. The front page was a constant source of trouble — if I didn’t stay perfectly on top of keeping Wordpress up to date I’d get hit with the same kind of hidden link stuff mentioned in the article. Crazy thing is that my site barely even had an audience to speak of… can’t imagine what it must be like for more popular blogs.<p>If I were to spin up a new personal site I think it’d be with something like gohugo.io deployed on Netlify, making it as static as possible with no room for exploits.
Gaming Google is an old sport. Long ago we had a company here give free hosting for small sites. The catch was the their server inserted porn links when Google Bot visited the page. So many people were merrily creating their subdomains while secretly helping the porn rankings. It was infuriating and amazing at the same time.
Not exactly related but I realized quite often now that sometimes when I search for very specific things, usually like some sort of coding bug or error, Google returns some results that look seemingly legitimate with sensible preview text and stuff but when I click on it it's a full on Japanese porn site. Yummy. At first I thought it was some sort of malware in my computer but then I realized it really was something wrong with google's links. It's happened enough frequently to be noticeable now
The whole backrub/pagerank/backlink thing was from the 90's. Don't you suppose Google is weighting other things more highly in their search algorithm these days?
The amusing thing I get from this is pleading ignorance to what's being sold after being rumbled.<p>I've seen some of those 'vendors' lord it up about how great they are at SEO, and when it comes to them getting limelight outside their own circle, they are acting like they were born yesterday and had no idea.<p>Their service pillows the hacked links with other sources like SAPE to provide volume.<p>All lucrative of course, but quite scummy IMO and SEOs should stick to legal avenues of promotion.
Re title: I think the phrase 'bad actors' in place of 'hackers' paints a less-broad portrait of the a-holes that do that kind of stuff. Takes a real dope to drop the kind of stuff that Molly found in her blog.<p>Of all the places to find the term 'hackers' abused ...
A strange emphasis in mentioning the "open-source version of Wordpress" is the one being hacked into. I doubt a proprietary solution would be any less vulnerable.
I posted this article 3 days ago. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21858520" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21858520</a>
> There were [links] for, you know, anal bleaching, which is apparently a thing. I mean, just truly, incredibly inappropriate things. And there was even some links to Russian pornography sites. I mean, we're talking about horrible, horrible things.<p>Does she mean anal bleaching and porn to be "horrible, horrible things" or was there something else, really horrible? Perhaps porn is something many old-fashioned people still are uncomfortable of talking about but I wouldn't rate it as horrible - most of the people watch it and are okay.<p>> runs on the open source version of WordPress<p>Everybody knows this: running WordPress without 24x7 professional support means you are 100% guaranteed to get pwned.