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SNEAKY BACKLINKS. I just discovered unauthorised external links on some of my websites.
Posted by on December 3, 2020 at 10:02 amBasically I have been using a free Google Maps embed tool that doesn’t require an API key to generate maps on some of the websites I manage.
I did a link analysis on one of the websites last night and discovered that the homepage has 1 external link that goes to some mattress review website lol. It uses anchor text that doesn’t even exist on the page, so I used to inspect tool which pointed out the map as the source.
Checked the other website where I’ve embedded a map from the same source and they all have those sneaky backlinks going through it.
Has anything similar ever happened to you?
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7 Replies
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You used a tool to embed maps when you can just literally paste the iframe code from the share section of a listing?
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There are link services out there that sell “niche edits” that are all just hacked links.
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I stay away from all 3rd party plugins, embeds, themes, etc. Unless they are reputable.
Last month some code was injected into one of my WordPress sites. Other pages were duplicated, but with file names a little off.
No idea how it got there but I noticed it when I had some strange 301 redirects & I was ranking for essay writing site. Click on some one of my ranking pages & it was redirected to theirs. They were smart and didn’t mess up the site much. They just wanted backlinks.
Ngl, I was impressed. I take security seriously.
Had to do some manual cleaning to fix it. I understand basic code and file structure of WordPress, so it was easy to fix. It was mostly in the headers & filenames. A security plugin helped too. Just a bit tedious & annoying.
Just take it as part of the learning process. I’ve been learning for 10 years now.
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The link is not baked into your source code. Don’t worry too much about what’s inside the embed.
Your SEO tool might return it, but it won’t affect your SEO for Google in any way, shape or form.
To go higher level, it has no impact on algorithms like Pagerank and Reasonable Surfer -
If you are in a competitive niche check out any fast rising competitors on Ahrefs or a similar tool. More than likely they will have tens of thousands of links from unrelated websites and Google is ranking them very high, so they keep hacking.
So, the mattress site is getting ranked by hacking your site and thousands of others and crushing established players in the mattress niche. It is insane but it will go on until Google severely punishes the offenders.
Today a random wall of unrelated links will rank you in most niches. I am talking 10X the number of links established players have.
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Yeah, when Polldaddy started charging awhile back, I had to find a new polling software that would allow me to embed polls into WordPress posts, as their rates were ridiculous.
After lots of trial and error, I found a tool that I really liked, but they would include a random link at the bottom of the poll, and had done it in such a way that if you removed it, the poll would no longer work.
For now, I’m dealing with it until I find a better option. 🙁
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I have abandoned wordpress completely in part because of crap like this. It was time to move to full amp anyway.
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