| Knowledge Information Article, Tribal IM, March 2007
Imagine this: you’re a website-administrator that
has already done everything in the area of search engine optimisation.
Your page-titles include the right keywords, you do not use
scripts or Flash in your navigation, you have masses of incoming
links and a great Page Ranking. Despite all of this, your
site falls just outside of Google’s top-3 search results.
What do you do?
A few SEO-cowboys think they have figured it out. When there
is nothing else you can do to make your own website score
better, then just ensure that your competitors’ sites
will perform worse!
 The
situation
Last week, one of our websites (BabyNamesWorld.com),
a project from Tribal Internet Projects, was a victim of such
an attempt. On Monday, the first mails began to trickle in
from concerned webmasters who had linked their site to BabyNamesWorld.com.
They had apparently received the following e-mail, which initially
appears to have come from info@babynamesworl.com, but the
reply-to address was shown as babynames@cw.tj:
I urgently request you to REMOVE a link to http://babynamesworld.com/
from your page <the website> IMMEDIATELY, because I'm
getting a lot of spam traffic and a lot of scammers visiting
my site using a link from your site! Otherwise I will write
an ABUSE MESSAGE to your Internet Service Provider and your
hosting company and will complain that your site gives a harmful
traffic to my site!
Best regards
BabyNamesWorld Administration
Nonsense of course, but hey, considering that the average
internet-user still fearlessly opens virus-containing messages
from unknown senders and with vague attachments, the chance
is great that a scared webmaster will remove the link, just
to be sure.
Thus, a nice plan to rob a well-ranking website of a considerable
number of incoming links: find out who is linked to the site,
send them a threatening mail and just wait. Oh yeah, and if
the link is not removed quickly enough, send the following
mail a bit later:
Hi <name of webmaster>. I again request you to remove
my link from your page!!! I'll send you a bit later all information
about this traffic, including IPs and referral, when i receive
a full reporm from my network administrator.
After our short investigation, it appeared that the indicated
scammer had made an e-mail account in Tajikistan (where?).
Domain names from this location can be registered by anyone
and there is no WHOIS information provided. The domain name
cw.tj is registered to CompuWorld Tajikistan (one of the 6
registrants in Tajikistan). There is a forum on the site where
anyone (with basic knowledge of Russian) can open an account
for a small annual fee.
We could have this address removed, but the scammer can just
as easily create another address and continue his work, against
whichever website he chooses.
The
Solution
Meanwhile, we have sent an e-mail to all the webmasters to
ensure them that the previous e-mail should not be taken seriously
and a large number of links have fortunately been replaced.
Despite this, it remains an annoying situation.
Addressing
the problem
The question that arises, of course, is if something can be
done against these sorts of anti-link management actions.
There is not yet a lot of judicial precedence in the area
of internet rights and in terms of international businesses,
it is not entirely certain if you could successfully litigate
against them. Several lawsuits have been conducted to reduce
the number of undesirable links, but there is nothing against
third parties who damage links that ARE desired. Yet it would
seem obvious that it would also somehow be illegal to intentionally
portray yourself as someone else and thereby cause a loss
of income to that person. In the future perhaps Microsoft’s
Sender
ID technology can help prevent this.
In any case, let’s just hope that this sort of action
remains a solitary incident. If black-hat SEO companies implement
these techniques across the board, it will also become more
difficult for ‘clean’ organisations to be linked
on relevant pages. This goes against the entire democratic
grounds of the internet where the better websites also get
more and better links.
Source: Lenny de Rooy, Search Engine Optimisation Specialist
at Tribal
News article also available in: Dutch
or German.
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