21–30 of 329 posts
Disturbing, fascinating, obvious in hindsight. Here’s another angle: a “bounce” back to google too quick is a negative ranking signal. By keeping them from going back to google by making them think they in fact did makes this also black hat seo.
But Google doesn't see the bounce back. The site bounces back to a copy of Google's result page.
Honestly, it doesn't shock me in the slightest that someone who markets themselves as an SEO expert would not only do something as unethical as this, but also brag about it, as though they think they've done something they should be proud of.
It's mildly unethical at worse, considering he could have happily done profitable leadgen at scale and it would have likely never been caught if he kept quiet.
Disturbing, fascinating, obvious in hindsight. Here’s another angle: a “bounce” back to google too quick is a negative ranking signal. By keeping them from going back to google by making them think they in fact did makes this also black hat seo.
Disturbing, fascinating, obvious in hindsight. Here’s another angle: a “bounce” back to google too quick is a negative ranking signal. By keeping them from going back to google by making them think they in fact did makes this also black hat seo.
But Google doesn't see the bounce back. The site bounces back to a copy of Google's result page.
This seems to have some fairly scary security implications if used maliciously, but I can't think of a good way to protect against this. Does anyone know of a browser extension to limit access to the history API?
Disturbing, fascinating, obvious in hindsight. Here’s another angle: a “bounce” back to google too quick is a negative ranking signal. By keeping them from going back to google by making them think they in fact did makes this also black hat seo.
But Google doesn't see the bounce back. The site bounces back to a copy of Google's result page.
Changing the back button might be clever but all the rest is just simple. But people don't do this because I think in a lot of countries this is illigal.
There is a way you can protect your site a little from this: add canonical tags to all your pages. When an attacker updates the back button to Google they will have a hard time getting the cloned pages up in the results.
This is an interesting yet disturbing case of blackhat SEO and phishing, where the site owner hijacks the back button and sends visitors to fake sites where he can observe their behaviour. FTA: Here’s what I did: 1. User lands on my page (referrer: google) 2. When they hit “back” button in Chrome, JS sends them to my copy of SERP 3. Click on any competitor takes them to my mirror of competitor’s site (noindex) 4. Now…
Yet another reason to browse with JS disabled by default.
Might as well say:
"Yet another reason to not browse anything on the web"
Honestly, it doesn't shock me in the slightest that someone who markets themselves as an SEO expert would not only do something as unethical as this, but also brag about it, as though they think they've done something they should be proud of.
I believe he did this to educate us.
Presenting yourself as someone else is called fraud in my book. Changing the back button might be clever but all the rest is just simple. But people don't do this because I think in a lot of countries this is illigal. There is a way you can protect your site a little from this: add canonical tags to all your pages. When an attacker updates the back button to Google they will have a hard time getting the cloned pages…