Im just curious how would you feel if your web hosting provider was injecting hidden links in to HTML output of all your pages without your knowledge to boost their own PageRank?
We have come across a hosting provider that has done just that, injected a hidden CSS link to every customer page that they host. The link is stuffed just below the <body> tag, they use CSS to hide it from being visually rendered by the browser but is in the HTML source-code. This is obvious black-hat SEO on behalf of the provider, but to use their customers as pawns in dirty SEO games is completely new degree of scum.
The prove what Im talking about is true, follow these steps:
1) Go to www.google.com and search for dnn hosting, or click this link http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&r...&q=dnn+hosting
2) The #1 natural search result should return www.powerdnn.com.
3) Use googles link-back search query: link:www.powerdnn.com to list all sites that are linking back to www.powerdnn.com. Or follow this link http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&r...w.powerdnn.com
4) Visit as many of the sites as you want 99% of these sites are hosted by the same hosting provider. Try visually locating a link or use browser text search function to locate powednn.com string. The dominant majority of sites will not have any visible links, however google is reporting that there is a link. Hmm.
5) Open the source any one of these website in source view, then search html source for powerdnn.com, you should locate the following HTML tag just below the <body> tag <p style="display: none;"><a href="http://www.PowerDNN.com">DotNetNuke DNN Hosting</a></p>
The reason Im bringing this up is because we are also a hosting provider and do compete for similar keywords in google and other search engines using good content, blogs, articles, and good old fashion help on public forums. The question is, how would you as a customer feel if you were to discover the same thing occurring to your sites? Yes, we are aware of Google spam report http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html, but what about those webmasters that are unwittingly are part of cloaked link farm and as result will suffer when google updates their filtering algorithms? I think this is a new low we have seen in the web hosting industry in many years, what do you guys/gals think about this?
We have come across a hosting provider that has done just that, injected a hidden CSS link to every customer page that they host. The link is stuffed just below the <body> tag, they use CSS to hide it from being visually rendered by the browser but is in the HTML source-code. This is obvious black-hat SEO on behalf of the provider, but to use their customers as pawns in dirty SEO games is completely new degree of scum.
The prove what Im talking about is true, follow these steps:
1) Go to www.google.com and search for dnn hosting, or click this link http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&r...&q=dnn+hosting
2) The #1 natural search result should return www.powerdnn.com.
3) Use googles link-back search query: link:www.powerdnn.com to list all sites that are linking back to www.powerdnn.com. Or follow this link http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&r...w.powerdnn.com
4) Visit as many of the sites as you want 99% of these sites are hosted by the same hosting provider. Try visually locating a link or use browser text search function to locate powednn.com string. The dominant majority of sites will not have any visible links, however google is reporting that there is a link. Hmm.
5) Open the source any one of these website in source view, then search html source for powerdnn.com, you should locate the following HTML tag just below the <body> tag <p style="display: none;"><a href="http://www.PowerDNN.com">DotNetNuke DNN Hosting</a></p>
The reason Im bringing this up is because we are also a hosting provider and do compete for similar keywords in google and other search engines using good content, blogs, articles, and good old fashion help on public forums. The question is, how would you as a customer feel if you were to discover the same thing occurring to your sites? Yes, we are aware of Google spam report http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html, but what about those webmasters that are unwittingly are part of cloaked link farm and as result will suffer when google updates their filtering algorithms? I think this is a new low we have seen in the web hosting industry in many years, what do you guys/gals think about this?
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