News Source: http://centuryhouse.net
Story Found By: charlotteseo 1148 Days ago
Category: Sphinn Zone
I just can’t believe that MIT of all websites would get hacked!
Don’t they have the smartest people for technological stuff at MIT?
13 Comments
Comments
Interesting find. I’m sure Matt Cutts will be interested as well...
I put it on twitter, and hopefully he’ll look into itthere’s at least 2 dozen EDU’s, and even ny.gov got hackedi’m just REALLY surprised that MIT got hacked
Could it be people that work at those schools, rather than a hack?
That’s what I thought Jill, it’s no secret that guys in college with that kind of access can make a pretty penny selling links, landing pages and redirects.
if you check out the page that was cached by google, you will see that the page was full of spammy linky content even before. So what most likely happened is that a student brought a page to some good locations for the relevant keywords by using the domain authority and links, posted an ad on the page offering it to the highest bidder and voila....
i dont think it was done by students since it was done on like 20 different schools, and also gov links. they all go to the same placehence the owner of the website getting over 45k visitors on each domain he owns.
Not going to sphinn a piece equating illegal crackz of sites with "black hat SEO". Next, we’re at the old "black hat SEOs = felons" idiocy which even Matt Cutts himself has recently disowned...
this post wasn’t about Blackhat being cool....it was about MIT and Yale getting HACKEDthere’s a lot of blackhat that IS illegal..here’s the ’reason’ why this is ’blackhat seo’SEO - optimizing a page/website to rank higher on a search engineBlackhat - using other means that are against TOS to rank or draw traffic from a search engine.this a website that got ’hacked’ to rank high on google, and added a 301 redirect to another page. hack would be if someone’s page just got hacked for the person of defacing it.this is blackhat because someone not only hacked it...they ranked it on google to obtain trafficwhether someone paid another person to buy links from an edu would just make it blackhat seoseo - rank high on googleblackhat - put a script or doorwage page that leads to another page (against TOS)
<font color="#005a96">Feydakin</font> - student selling links has nothing to do whether it’s blackhat or whether it’s a hack.it’s obviously a hack or are you telling me that these schools allow these scripts to do redirects to another page?
Not going to sphinn a piece equating illegal crackz of sites with "black hat SEO". Next, we’re at the old "black hat SEOs = felons" idiocy which even Matt Cutts himself has recently disowned...
They aren’t hacked with black hat seo.. They are students selling links..
@Feydakin and all others!
The students are not selling links!
The links on those pages are authority links. Its an automated script that is creating content pages targeting mostly (high cost keywords - o/b linking to authorities - I know this because on of my business finance sites - which is a top ranking authority site has been linked to in all these pages - and I can assure you Im not paying for those links!). The point of those links are to help the page rank high in the serps. The page itself redirects to the spammers "money page" which is the mortgage page. However many spammers also do this for drug store redirects and other high price targets. Its not just edu sites - its .gov sites aswell. They are targeted becauase the spammers piggy back their authority and strength. the pages are injected into the site through scripts and other exploits where the sites have left doors open.
Its easy to for the ed/gov sites to prevent and stop this - but they need to secure their scripts and probably get one central "watchdog agenecy".
The idea that people are buying those links - on spam pages that are being redirected and can only be viewed in the cache is a little obsurd - I can tell you right now that I would pay to have them STOP linking to my site. Ive also seen the same thing happen for big brands - "injected pages" on edu and authority sites targeting Big brand names - with redirects to the regular - drug stores, payday loans, etc. Do you think those big brands are paying students and disgruntled government employees for those - spam links?
Actually this has been happening for quite some time now... You mentioned 'stop linking to my site' - which is interesting. We've seen cases (with clients) where those spammy links were pointing to their site... so there are a few approaches being used with these outside of pure link building.