I gave a friend of a friend a bit of SEO advice and noticed google’s cache of the site’s pages – but not the pages themselves – had a link at the bottom that said “website development” with a link to a web development company (we’ll call them company X).
The friend’s friend didn’t really understand what I was on about but it became clear company X had done a small bit of work on the existing design. And it appears they took the opportunity to go into the CMS templates and add this:
<?phpinclude”ipchecker.php”;if(isGoogleBot()){echo ‘<div><a href=”company X’s website”>Website development</a> …
Yes, a bit of code that shows a link to Google but not to anyone else. A quick check in Yahoo Site Explorer showed up some more examples.
Now I don’t know they did all this without their clients’ permission, so I’m not outing them. But I figured someone there should know that we’re on to them …
So I’m running searches every time I get to a new computer for the following terms:
- adding secret links clients site company X
- cloaking company X
- going to out you company X
- links footer company X
all of which return one of their pages – and then I’m clicking through, hoping their analytics data will soon start to show these terms appearing …
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