Searching Google for to monitor the top ranked sites for high dollar key terms is a long time habit of mine, and a useful way to find trends in search engine optimization; both organic and black hat. Today I was performing a search or “payday loans” and came across a site which is ranked #1 for this term and caught my skeptic eye, IdealPaydayLoans.com.
There were numerous reasons why this site and its top position alarmed me:
- It’s the only site in the top 10 results with a keyword stuffed title.
- The site is only one year old where most sites in the top 10 serps are much older.
- The site only has 8 pages indexed in Google
- Despite its small size, youth and obvious usability issues, it has almost 4,000 backlinks tracked via Yahoo
These observations led me to investigate the inbound links to IdealPaydayLoans.com and found some even more interesting redflags for this site. There seems to be no rhyme nor reason to the styles of sites, a majority of which are home pages, sending links to this Payday Loan site.
The first 10 inbound links to IdealPaydayLoans.com tracked by Yahoo are:
- Kleebs Music Center : http://www.kleebs.com
- Michigan Gun Shows : http://www.migunshows.com
- R&B Recording Artist Site : http://www.kissandsaygoodbye.com
- Church of Christ : http://www.traces-of-the-kingdom.org
- Chillhowie, VA Town Page : http://www.chilhowie.org
- Taunton Public Library : http://www.tauntonlibrary.org
Note : A backlink check on Google shows plenty of spam too, but the Yahoo backlink results show much better and shocking examples.
These incoming links from so many different styles of sites are a giveaway of obvious link spamming, but at first glance, none of these pages have text links pointing to IdealPaydayLoans.com, nor a mention of Payday Loans on their sites.
So, a quick look at the source code of these pages and a search for “payday” in that code led to something revealing.
All of the top sites which are linking to IdealPaydayLoans.com are running a hit counter powered by HitcounterMaster.com which is using various techniques to serve both image links and hidden links to IdealPayDayLoans.com.
On most of these sites, the hit counters link directly to IdealPaydayLoans.com, but on some of them they do not. On some of these sites, a NOSCRIPT tag is being used to feed non-existent links to search engines, making it appear that all of these sites link to IdealPaydayLoans.com, when they actually do not:
<noscript>
<p>The following text will not be visible on your website but is necessary to keep your counter active. Thank You.<p/>
<p><a href=”http://www.idealpaydayloans.com” target=”_blank”>Payday Loan</a></p>
<p><a href=”http://www.yes2cashadvance.com” target=”_blank”>Cash Advance</a></p>
</noscript>
Unlike some other linking schemes like link farms or mass link buying however, the sites running these hit counters and transparent links are not fully aware that they are being taken advantage of by link parasites which have infiltrated their web sites disguised as harmless hit counters (although under further investigation it seems the hit counter company is somewhat open about this).
From Hitcountermaster.com
Q: How can your hit counters and stats be 100% FREE? What’s the catch?
A: Our counters are 100% free because we have family friendly sponsors who sponsor your counter. We get paid by the sponsor to include a small text link about their service which is never seen by your visitor.Q: Can I remove my sponsor link?
A: No, Please respect your sponsors link because they are the ones who enable us to provide you with a free counter. We have worked an agreement with all sponsors so that their link will be hidden from your visitors.
I took it upon myself however to email some of the sites listed above which responded that they had no idea the hit counters were serving links to commercial sites:
I had no idea – I looked for a free counter and placed it on the site – how did you find out that it linked to jerks?… I have removed the counter from my site including (I hope) all the html they provided to paste on my site for the counter, thank you for pointing this out.
Thank you for the heads up. We had no idea. We immediately removed it from our web site.
I asked the site owners where they had found the free hit counters and they responded with “Google advertising” or “I searched on Google for hit counters.” So, I made some searches on Google for hit counters and found that HitcounterMaster.com is a Google AdWords advertiser.
Although ethically questionable, the strategy used by this company is pretty smart. The hit counter linking is working perfectly and they’re probably paying much less per link than they would be actually purchasing these links from individual sites :
- Buy Google AdWords for ‘hit counter’ and other terms.
- Get lots of different styles of sites to run the hit counters.
- Place links on some of the hit counter images to their payday loan site.
- Rank #1 on Google for ‘payday loans’, a multi-million dollar placement.
- Rinse and repeat.
So, in conclusion here is what is wrong with this linking and ranking picture:
- Google is giving top ranking to IdealPaydayLoans.com, a site which is using hit counter links and transparent link spam to build its backlinks.
- Google should not be doing this and their quality engineering team should be able to pick up on such an unethical linking method for such a high dollar and competitive term. I hope that Matt Cutts and Adam Lasnik can offer their thoughts on the matter and how Google treats such linking techniques.
- Although the HitcounterMaster.com people are being somewhat transparent that their hit counters link to advertisers in their site’s FAQ area, they are still taking full advantage of the unknowing sites using their counters via not being transparent enough.
- Hitcountermaster.com is putting these sites at risk by embedding transparent link spam code & script into these sites.
- Google and other search engines should take action to prevent hit counter providers from using these techniques to manipulate rankings in their system.
ohh thx! good info 4 me
There are so many hit counters like this. A while back ago, I wanted a free hit counter that I didn’t have to sign up for and it took mea long time to find one without links in it like this one. Great article.
I met a guy at PubCon who said that his site was banned from Google because he tried using this web counter linking tactic. He was looking for advice on how to save his domain. I suggested he try to take all of the links down and resubmit to Google, but I think he wasn’t willing to do all of that admin work. Does anyone have any suggestions? I couldn’t think of anything else. If it were me, I might let the domain die rather than try to save it.
Uh oh, someone cracked google. Well it’s only a matter of time before our search results are flooded with copycats.
strange that here no admin which cleaned post, in principle
It is just meter of time when spammers will find some new way of spamming instead of hit counters
Didn’t realize before that it’s possible. I just don’t like these tech stuff.
This is really amazing on how much effort you have put in. I appreciated this article and your effort.
I checked the site on GOogle using your keyword but the site is not on the first page of Goggle. Maybe it was already banned or penalized by Google.
Wow! That is totally amazing. I was just reading about blackhat techniques yesterday because there was an affiliate program that has an ebook out about it and I was wondering what the heck that meant (blackhat). Perhaps this is an example? Anyhow, I also did research on all the links just now and none of them are in the rank you have shown anymore. Guess they got caught but they’re still in business.
I had purchased a domain name last year from .ws domains and I like to check my stats regularly. I ran across a site that had posted my domain name somewhere on their site or keywords because after googling it they were like the second link after mine. It was a porn site and I asked .ws if they could block this person from linking to me somehow and they said no.
Is that common too? I have since closed my account with .ws domains.
i am shocked to see
does it still works
if so i would like to try it
its a 6 month old post so has google has solved it or it is still there?
because this site is not listing for the keyword that it used to do earlier
your web hosting site should be able to block IP address. if they dont, it may be obne of their affiliate sites
Great info. I use hit counters all the time and didn’t know they were doing this!
Jeesus, this is realy amaising. I checked it out and saw that the site is no longer on the first page. However I wonder how many millions have they made until this article was published.
So, this tells us one clear thing: all the bla bla google says about building websites is all crap.
You can not do business online, waiting for your website to “naturaly” grow up, because the competition will never wait, and they will eat you up.
I think you are right but this is not good solution for me
I’m almost tempted to implement this for my site – it seems far easier than basic SEO but does play against my ethical nature towards organic ranking, but who am I to call it?
if so i would like to try it – nice
nice!!!
Very interesting
Great insight. Whats a good counter to have then?
Hit Counters
You know what guys. I think this is very good idea, but I am affraid not for me :|
Nice You can not do business online,
Makes me feel rather naive – I never in a million years would have thought up a scheme like that. And I actually work hard on my SEO improvements – who knew it could be this easy to rank in my niche! :P
Thank You
thanks,cool. I didn’t know it
Thank you very much!
Counters, I always use google analytics, no problems there.
What google loves most is ADWORDS! Hit Counter? No way!
Very smart method, however I agree that it’s unethical and must be dealt with a serious penalty from the search engine.
Smart Guys. Looks like those guys are penalized now. They are not coming on the top of the search engines now.
I found a site that does the same thing, it uses hit counters for links.
It is Great Site .
I think in certain situations, even in highly competitive areas, just having lots of backlinks from a wide distribution of domains really does work.
No point getting up tight about it – online is a business for many companies and they will do what the feel they need to do to succeed. We may not agree but it is not breaking the law. We have to live with it.
i think statcounter.com is also doing this i havenot kept code of in my wordpress blog but it is appearing.
moreover statcounter code is seen in my html website nepaliunicode.tk which do not use statcounter & while checking page one by one i found nothing.
Makes me feel rather naive – I never in a million years would have thought up a scheme like that. And I actually work hard on my SEO improvements – who knew it could be this easy to rank in my niche! :P
Thank You
I don't know what's more impressive, the fact that you spent the time to dig all of this up or the fact that Google was allowing this to happen. Seriously, great article!!
I don't know what's more impressive, the fact that you spent the time to dig all of this up or the fact that Google was allowing this to happen. Seriously, great article!!