7 replies to this topic

[Dr.Marie]

I was looking at some of my backlinks and noticed an unusual site that was totally unrelated to mine. When I went there I couldn't see a link to my site so I checked the source and saw this line (I've changed the name of my website to mywebsite.com):

<div style="position:absolute;left:-34567px;top:-34567px;"><ul><li><a href="http://www.mywebsite.com/forums/images/reputation/users/drmarie/database/">1</a></li></ul></div>

Huh?

It looks like a link to my forum, positioned off of the page. For what reason? The site looks like a quickly made blog to advertise clickbank stuff. It's not porn or anything illegal as far as I can see.

Not sure if it is related, but I recently shut down my forum. On the day that I went to shut it down I started getting notices from Google that there was malware if you went to my forum.

I'm also seeing that on other pages of this site there are similar hidden links to other peoples' forums as well.

Any thoughts?

[EGOL]

What would a visitor see if he went to the URL on your site that is included in this link?

If that page does not exist I would not worry about it. Lots of spammers are dumb and lots of their programs have errors that produce random links.

[DonnaFontenot]

Some sort of trackback spam maybe?

[jonbey]

My thoughts are that these people hack abandoned forums and then create links to help get parts indexed so searchers fall into the trap.

But if that link does not lead anywhere (or did not) then not sure! Seems very odd indeed.

[A.N.Onym]

I've had the same thought as jonbey. It's highly suspicious, I'd investigate for hijacking.

[Dr.Marie]

Thanks guys. I can't tell where the link goes to because I took my forum down, so it's really not important to me now. I was just trying to figure out why on earth someone could do this.

I can see why some hackers could hack into an a forum to place links back to their site, but I can't figure out why it would benefit them to have a hidden link to some random page on my forum.

[A.N.Onym]

Usually, it's done to increase the speed of indexing and to increase its SERP strength, perhaps, until it's filtered out. It largely depends on the amount of links, really, so they can squeeze as much as possible until it's not shown any more.

[jonbey]

Of course, maybe never a page on the forum at all.

Some time agao (Oct 2010 I think) I blocked Googlebot because it followed a suspicious link that was a sort of hacking url thing (firewall picked it up). I did not check the IP, I just blocked (along with a bunch I had checked that were Polish, Russian. Chinese, Brazilian etc.).

I wondered why Googlebot appeared to "attack" my site and the suggestion was that it just followed a link.

Maybe some site / forum just links to possible places that may be vulnerable. Maybe the link in the blog was automated, maybe it rotates through sites holding the same CMS? All seems odd as hell to me, and I am probably way off the mark as usual!