Blackhat SEO - Esrun » Negative SEO

Negative SEO - Duplicate content

February 25, 2008 on 2:39 pm | In Negative SEO |

Duplicate content has been a problem for people for a long time. The basic idea is to create many copies of the content on someone elses website to confuse search engines about which one is the true author of the content and force them into supplemental results. Generally this method is unlikely to work on a large, long standing authoritative website but for reasonably newly launched websites, sites with low authority (low links, low quality pages etc) then it can be an effective method of keeping them out of the serps.

If you’re unsure why you’d want to do this then maybe you’re on the wrong website! Lets say you have a couple sites up high for the term “office printers” and you see a few new guys pop up, you’d simply get as many other sites indexed with the same content as these new guys to confuse the search engine about who is the real owner of the content and have them penalised. The more links you can point at the proxy urls to get them indexed and healthy the better.

Spreading the content out over different sites can be an expensive and time consuming process, especially if you want to replicate a lot of content. One way around this is to use a web proxy url maker just like the one I created. This works by using a list (right now, about 1000) of different web proxies and generating a list of web addresses based on the address of the content you want copied.

So for example if you were to enter the address http://www.esrun.co.uk as the address you wanted to be duplicated then the software would output a list like the following:

http://fatmonkey.ch/index.php?q=SFR0UDovL1dXdy5lc1JVbi5jby5VSw
http://hidewebsites.com/index.php?q=aFRUcDovL1d3dy5Fc3J1bi5DTy5Vaw
http://compensates.info/index.php?q=SFR0cDovL1d3Vy5lc3J1Ti5DTy51Sw
http://unblocking.cn/index.php?q=aHR0UDovL1d3dy5FU1J1bi5DTy5VSw

There are actually other benefits of using this software. For example if you were spamming a social network and was fed up of having your spam detected based on the same constant URL then you could simply generate a list of web proxy urls to use instead.

Check out the Proxy url creator now

Recommend: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

13 Comments »

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Hi Esrun, you may be interested to read this article on countermeasures to CGI hijacking:

http://hamletbatista.com/2007/10/11/like-flies-to-project-honeypot-revisiting-the-cgi-proxy-hijack-problem/

Comment by J — 25th February, 2008 #
Hmm pretty interesting, problem is it’s probably gonna be too late. Most people will only read up on the problem once it’s already happened.

I don’t think much of project honeypot to be honest. I looked into their stuff before and ripped the scripts apart to make them output data they shouldn’t and compiled a huge list of domains they were using which could have been used to clean your spamming targets. In the end I decided against releasing it since the project is primarily against email spammers which isn’t my area and therefore not my concern.

Comment by admin — 25th February, 2008 #
Outstanding! Thanks loads.

Comment by Dink — 27th February, 2008 #
Proxies are fucked off of matt cutts reverse dns on search engines and doublefucked when you bring in frame or ajax protection as awaiting green light on open source release. this is old skool stuff ersun already been dealt with you cunt.

Comment by keniki — 29th February, 2008 #
As most black hats are thick as shit there some nice javascript you can use to prevent lotts of these dumb fucks from copying your content and once they tripped over a few spam traps you can only allow access through ajax which of course needs them to enable javascript.

Comment by keniki — 29th February, 2008 #
It takes a moron like ersun to destroy something it takes a artist to create it and takes a nutcase like me to protect it.

Keniki

Comment by keniki — 29th February, 2008 #
lol you dumb fuck. Yes you can protect against it, yes you can protect against nearly everything.. if you have thought about it or discovered it in the first place. The majority of site owners don’t even know about this so don’t think to implement protection. By the time they do, it’s too late. Who says I want to destroy something? I gave two examples of usage and I don’t mind if people use it to get phishing sites knocked out of the serps

Big corps buy links to beat you in the search engines, the little guy tries things like this to beat you in the serps.. there’s a difference?

Comment by admin — 29th February, 2008 #
Here’s another way of outranking duplicate content…

http://www.TinyURL.com/syy8q

Comment by MORO — 6th March, 2008 #
Yep thats true Moro, although a bit limited with just one domain being used

Comment by admin — 6th March, 2008 #
[…] so new, but I’ve seen this technique being used more and more each day. Read more about it here and here. Basically you use proxy sites to generate duplicated content of a site… And Google […]

Pingback by Hot Trends for Black Hat SEO at busin3ss’s black hat seo blog — 11th March, 2008 #
Ok, so it looks like I’m a bit late to this party, but I’ll post a comment anyway…

Hey Esrun. Hugh, and here I am thinking that I was the only one who came up with the idea of exploiting web proxies (can you tell I’m new to this?). Although I’m experimenting with using them for the complete opposite reason. I do have a question about your proxy list though, if you don’t mind. I’m assuming you didn’t just sit there and manually find/screen these? (don’t ask, and yes, my programming kung fu is pretty weak at the moment) So did you use some regex to scrape the urls from a proxy listing site(s) then screen for the ones that would accept the ?q=base64_encode()? I’m just trying to get a sense of a roadmap here before I go driving off a cliff. Oh, and did you know that, currently, not all of the proxies in your file take the “index.php?q=”? For example, bebo-bypasser.li expects “browse.php?u=”?

-quack

Comment by thequack — 28th March, 2008 #
Hiya Quack

It was a collection of lists (scraped from other sites) and from searches/scrapes on google. I did run them through to make sure they accepted the right parameters but it’s easy enough to change what is required and a lot of webmasters seem to swap it around now and then but overall the list should be okay

Comment by admin — 28th March, 2008 #
Ya, I believe I’ve noticed that as well. Of course my first reaction is always, “OK idiot, what did you screw up this time?”. Stupid pinheads trying to make my life more difficult. Although, at some sadistic level, I do enjoy the challenge. Later foo.

-quack

Comment by thequack — 29th March, 2008 #