Over 8,000 English-language websites are listed on Sape, covering everything from American political organizations to international children's charities. On Sape, black hat marketers and webmasters post search-ranking data for websites they control or have access to. But that doesn’t deter the global trade in links.Ī major source of injected links is, an online marketplace once partly owned by, a leading Russian technology company. Google’s quality guidelines forbid “link schemes” and cite “exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links” as one example of banned behavior. It's yet another example of how search engines like Google are being manipulated at scale by a global industry of shady digital marketers and hackers who take over expired domains, acquire once-credible websites and fill them with junk content, hijack dead links on major news sites, place undisclosed sponsored content, and launch extensive manipulation campaigns using fake online personas to make their content appear higher in search results. “I can see the allure of going after well-trafficked media sites - there are usually so many points of entry from contributors that all it takes is one good account to give wide access to the editorial content of a media outlet,” Matthew Blackett, the publisher of Spacing, told BuzzFeed News. And in the few days between the site discovering the compromised post and cleaning it up, someone added text and a link to an online gun store. In one example, an article about drug policy from 2009 had links and text injected for rehab centers and a cannabis vaporizer product. One post was even hacked during the course of the magazine’s email conversations with BuzzFeed News. After being contacted by BuzzFeed News, it identified several articles where unauthorized links had been added long after publication. The award-winning Canadian urban magazine Spacing is one site affected by injected links. That in turn helps the customer sites attract more traffic, and in some cases, increase sales.īuzzFeed News obtained lists of more than 20,000 websites where backlinks can allegedly be added for a fee, and confirmed multiple cases where links were added to these and other sites without the owner’s knowledge. Injected backlinks on these compromised sites quickly improve the search engine rankings of customers’ web properties by exploiting Google's preference for sites that receive a high quantity of links from authoritative sites. A BuzzFeed News investigation reveals how injected links are sold by global networks of online marketplaces and black hat SEO consultants who offer customers the ability to have links placed on compromised websites.Īmong those affected are journalists, celebrities, churches, charities, veterans organizations, and the managing director of Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm. Websites of all types and sizes, and especially those that use the open-source version of WordPress, are hacked to inject links to manipulate search engine results. What happened to Stillman was not an isolated incident. The culprit inserted content and links into 500 of the roughly 2,000 posts Stillman published over the past 12 years. It determined someone hacked her site, which runs on the open source version of WordPress, by finding a way in through the administrator login. Stillman hired a security company to clean up the posts and identify the source of the intrusion. All the more so given the subject matter. Her site is an important source of income, and someone hacking into her blog to add text and links left her reeling. Stillman, who lives in North Carolina, has been blogging about family, faith, and fashion since 2007. I mean, we're talking about horrible, horrible things. And there was even some links to Russian pornography sites. I mean, just truly, incredibly inappropriate things. “There were for, you know, anal bleaching, which is apparently a thing. She was horrified at what she discovered. This August, Molly Stillman logged on to her lifestyle blog to update a few popular old posts, freshening them up so they would continue to attract traffic from Pinterest and search engines.
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