The discovery of this black hat site network was purely accidental. A client inquired about a keyword worth over 50,000 yuan, an English keyword that was extremely difficult to rank for. Naturally, we had to look at the backlinks of sites ranked from tenth to thirtieth place. According to the client's feedback, one of these sites went online in April 2009 and after just two updates, its PR rose to five, reaching as high as fifth place in rankings before stabilizing around tenth place. Suspecting foul play, what we commonly refer to as "black hat," we examined the site’s backlinks and found that they were all homepage links from domestic websites, numbering in the thousands. From the webpage itself, we did not detect any abnormalities. Even searching through the source code, we barely saw any outgoing links.
After discussion and analysis, we discovered that the external link site used a program to return two different pages: one for ordinary visitors and another for search engine spiders. When visited normally, no anomalies could be seen in the source code. We then disguised ourselves as Googlebot (a technique I will discuss in detail later) and revisited the external link site of this website. Finally, things became clear; please see the image below:
However, ordinary visitors would see normal web page displays, as shown in the image below:
We clicked through the first ten Yahoo external links, then the first hundred, until the first hundred pages, finally believing that we had encountered the legendary site network, the legendary link factory. In fact, this kind of black hat cheating method is not advanced, but its scale and the number of involved websites are indeed unprecedentedly powerful in our years of SEO experience. As SEOers, we still have our professional ethics and bottom lines. Occasionally, we might go a little gray, but this case is not only black but also black to the point of shining, leaving us speechless.
Here is the data for a typical targeted website:
After analyzing with the Yahoo external link checking tool from ZhuiCi.com, http://pai.sh.cn has 14,924 backlinks, with 889 top-level domain external links. Basically, all top-level domain external links are part of the site network controlled by black hats. The number of implicated and benefited websites certainly exceeds a thousand. Using ZhuiCi.com's intelligent ranking detection system to investigate the past rankings of this website, we can see that it indeed had good rankings for a period of time, and the keywords were quite challenging.
But now, when checking the basic situation of the pai website, it is evident that Baidu and Google have already taken action against it, rendering the site completely worthless. If you carefully check the keyword rankings pointed to by anchor texts, you'll find that the site has been stripped of its rankings by Baidu and delisted by Google, with either poor or non-existent rankings. This technology was identified and declared recognizable by Google years ago. It is regrettable that some black hat SEOs still use such methods to try and deceive search engines. To put it more directly, they only hope to achieve rankings in the short term, charging exorbitant SEO ranking fees, and by the time Google and Baidu punish them, they've already taken the client's money. Such deception is tantamount to crime!
In our internal discussions, we initially thought that this black hat might own a web construction company or department. However, after reviewing all the websites with added black links, the wide range of industries and regions made us suspect that these websites were either directly hacked or operated by unscrupulous IDCs. The main reason why this scheme remained hidden for so long without being discovered is due to the black hat technology introduced below, which hides their code. When you normally browse these black-linked site networks, you won't notice any abnormalities. The code is clean and leaves no trace.