Just lately, igaming associates have been complaining about one thing that to a lot of them appears like unfavorable Website positioning in opposition to their websites. A variety of individuals have reported seeing hyperlinks to their websites from pages that appear like this:
Nevertheless, this isn’t unfavorable Website positioning in opposition to any particular websites however a byproduct of a hyperlink spam scheme that goes roughly like this:
- The offender hacks plenty of websites, largely powered by Joomla, largely 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 some other random websites discovered rating for no matter key phrases they use. That is how these websites get their “unfavorable Website positioning-like trying” hyperlinks.
Affected associates, excellent news for you: in case your website obtained into one in every of these parasite pages, it means it’s rating. Unhealthy information: you bought hyperlinks from hacked websites. These will not be as simply ignored as simply any poor high quality spam hyperlinks, so when you have seen numerous these in your hyperlink profile just lately, or when you’re nervous that your rankings have already been affected, you might wish to disavow them (or discuss to me and I’ll assist you to with a hyperlink audit and make sure whether or not or not yours is a case like this and what your greatest 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, when you test the hyperlinks of this one, you received’t see something:
However when you test one of many hacked parasite pages redirecting to it, you will notice a totally 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 may’t report its backlinks (which might solely be redirects anyway). It’s not going to be crawled by Google, both – however the offender will not be nervous about it as the location will get all its visitors from throwaway redirected parasite pages on hacked third get together websites. However, affiliate applications received’t know the place his visitors comes from, both. Jogs my memory a little bit of this setup a number of years again – solely in that case, it was WordPress as an alternative of Joomla.
Speaking of Joomla, it appears like hacked websites are utilizing an outdated model – here’s a Sucuri scan outcome for one of many hacked websites:
So when you’re a website proprietor, it goes with out saying that it’s best to be sure you are operating the most recent model of no matter CMS you might be utilizing.