SEO Spam or Fear the Penguin

One of the most irritating con jobs on the Net is selling links to people desperate to get traffic to their websites. This is part of what is known as “black hat SEO” with SEO standing for Search Engine Optimization. So it was rather interesting to get two false referrals from seoairport . com / site / product / in my Blogger stats today. UPDATED: December 2014 has seen a massive amount of hits from seoairport . com / site / recommended with no end in sight. New screen captures added at the end of the post.

Firing up the trusty virtual machine, I checked it out. Remember folks, don’t click on strange links and leave that to daredevils or those of us with more than one operating system on a machine. The name told me what to expect out of the site and I wasn’t disappointed.

The home page above is of basic design, which will be important later on.

The direct link left behind in my stats goes straight to the money page where they lay out what they do and how much is charged for it. Note the spelling errors which indicate an amateur site or that the author is not a native English speaker. The inability to spell “domain” correctly doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the skills of creator to deliver.

Also notice the blogs shown and how basic their designs are. Not a whole lot going on there, which isn’t what you would expect of highly trafficked sites generating follows to your site. This isn’t a professional level operation, that’s for sure.

I very highly recommend avoiding this site and any like it selling backlinks. Not only is it shady, it will set you up for a very hard fall down the road. Why?

Google has been targeting link sellers lately and have been working constantly at refining their search engine algorithms to week out suspect sites such as these. In fact, they shut down a link farming group last month by delisting them from their index. They also like to turn loose cute animals that penalize websites for having unnatural links.

Look up “panda” or “penguin” in relation to Google’s search engine and you’ll find a lot of interesting if technically arcane information about the damage these special sweeps can do to even legitimate websites. We are talking about being lowered in rank or even being deranked in Google.

So it is best not to get involved in this kind of SEO linking in the first place and most of these operations will give you a brief boost in traffic then demand more money when it invariably crashes.

Google’s new software engine under the hood (so to speak), Hummingbird, is thought to have enhancements to detect artificially generated traffic as well. Please think twice, even thrice, before paying for backlinks.

UPDATE:

One thing I like about StatCounter is that it filters out all the fake referrals. Until now, that is:

Note how the visits supposedly come from around the world. Either a wide variety of traffic headers are being forged or we are looking at a botnet being used to spam.

Using this last one as an example, notice how the browser and operating system aren’t listed. However there are operating systems listed in some of the other hits along with varying screen resolutions. The only constant is the unknown browser with Javascript enabled which makes me suspect a botnet using infected PC’s is being used.

Out of curiosity, I checked out seoairport again using Tor this time around to see if the site had changed at all or had anything something connecting to my blog. Nope! Not a thing. I also checked the blogs you could buy backlinks from and they are just as amateurish as the main site.

It appears this isn’t just a shady enterprise, but possibly a criminal one as well.

December 2014 Update

Well, guess who is back? Seoairport returned with fake referrals at the beginning of the month to annoy Blogger users. They have renovated their web site complete with testimonials and a frame that shows up expecting you to pay them through Paypal. The front page is tweaked to look a little more professional while the spelling still needs work.

As before, what appears to be a botnet is pumping out the fake hits from multiple IP addresses. Please do not visit their web pages!