But right now, if you’ll have the curiosity to take a quick peek at the SERP for keywords like “buy viagra”, you’ll see that the first two positions are occupied by sites that use parasite hosting.  As you can see, a quick query on the highly competitive keywords mentioned above will provide you with the harsh reality – there are still black hat SEO practices going on, defying the Penguin updates.

What is Parasite Hosting?

We’ve covered parasite hosting before, and it’s not entirely a fresh appearance in the black hat SEO landscape. But people constantly tried to predict it’s demise and stick a fork in it. This black hat technique makes use of the fact that Google favors domains that have strong authority. Someone who uses parasite hosting to boost a site’s rank in SERP will try to place backlinks on high authority sites. Usually you’ll see on the respective parasited domain a new page that is specially created in order to rank for a set of optimized keywords. This technique is used without the webmaster’s permission and it is also illegal.

Interesting enough, you’ll see people using parasite hosting to boost their sites on keywords like “buy viagra” or “buy cialis” on .edu websites or high authority domains.

How Does Parasite Hosting Work?

While the reasons why parasite hosting might be appealing for someone, the deployment of this type of technique might be a little more intricate. You’ll always find it in a tandem with other type of black hat SEO techniques for maximum efficiency. On it’s own it may influence your ranking to some degree, but it really makes an impact in search results if it is paired with cloaking, for example.  Take the keyword “buy cialis”. What does happen when you click on sites that rank very high with this keyword ? Clicking on such links from the search results will redirect you to another page through the help of a cloaking script with smart HTTP_REFERER identification. The keyword will be screened and it will forward you to the designated site. The trick behind this cloaking technique is that the visitors will only access the hacked site through the search results. From any other source the website will act as if nothing has happened, making it difficult for the site owner to spot the problem.

When searching for “viagra”, the SERPs are filled with results that wouldn’t normally be there. But when you’re going to modify the keyword with a spammier version like “buy viagra” you’re going to find out a lot of examples of parasite hosting. You’ll see websites that have nothing to do with pharmaceutical products which are hosting doorway pages. Among those hacked sites you’ll see some of them have .edu, .gov or . org top-domains. It helps the hacker to better hide in plain sight if he uses the websites of organizations, as Google favors them in the SERPs.

You may also see black hatters cunningly using parasite hosting for negative SEO  purposes. While this technique can be harmful and eventually detected by Google’s crawlers, some of them are using this to put competitors site’s in jeopardy. You’ll see a lot of high authority sites that are leading in their niche that get manual penalties all of a sudden. It may be the workings of a hacker!

How Does Google Detect Parasited Sites?

It’s a fact that Google is trying it’s best to identify and handle parasited sites. But this short-term technique proves to be rewarding enough to be still implemented in 2014. And that is a sign that Google needs to be faster on detecting the sites. Maybe the new Payday Loan 2.0 Google Update will solve these problems. There is still a pretty long delay between the time the hacked site is displayed in the SERPs and the moment Google figures out the scheme. Those who take their time with these types of black hat SEO techniques are still ranking in the top 10 search results with success. Google can’t detect those who are masterfully done right off the bat. But in the end they will discover them through different crawling tests that they roll without identifying itself as Googlebot (in the case of cloaking). They also detect them through other methods that identify redirects and java scripts with their visual crawler.

How to Protect Your Site From Being Used as a Parasite Hosting Gateway?

Webmasters have a hard time trying to protect themselves from crap hat SEO techniques as hackers will try to manipulate the data in order to hide their trace really well. There are a few steps you should follow in order to keep those troublesome hackers away from your website:

1. Monitor Your Site

Use some integrity control tool for your site. You need to constantly analyze logs and keep an eye on any change you may see on your website. In case of a hacker attack on your site, you would know immediately that there were some alterations in the file system. Also, your styles.php file might suffer modifications. You can also detect if any backdoors are uploaded. By using such a tool you would be faster on cleaning your site of any black hat SEO changes.

2. Set Google Webmaster Tools Alerts to Notify You When Your Site is Hacked

You need to keep an eye on the “Security Issues” section for any alerts you might receive. While you’re here, you might also check the resources Google puts at your disposal regarding hacked sites. They have a step-by-step guide on the recovery process, after receiving a security issue in the Webmaster Tools.

3. Setup a Google Alert on the Phrase [site:domain.com]

This notifies you when new pages are indexed by Google. Even if hackers are very careful with their black hat SEO, you can still catch them in the act. You just have to make smart use of the proper tools for this type of problem. As a great deal of black hatters are focusing on the same money keywords like “payday loans” you can anticipate the hacking of your site and set the alert to search your site for them.

4. Patch and Update Your Software

If you run Public (Open-Source or Free) Software always Patch and Update your Software (such as WordPress,Joomla, PhpBB etc. ) to the latest stable versions. If a bug, that can be exploited, is found in such a program you may have a breach of security. This can be exploited at a high level by a skilled hacker.

An Example of a Latent Parasited Site

Here is a quick example that I found. It was ranking ok for several weeks, probably because it does not affect the end user directly. Even if it is not a clocked site, this has the risk to instantly become one as it was already hacked for the reason of adding backlinks to other abused sites, in order to give them more ranking juice and make them rank higher.

The site looks normal. Nothing shady about it.

The site was hacked and injected this link code:

As we can see parasite hosting can be used both for direct ranking or for in-direct ranking by helping other sites to rank higher, with injected hidden backlinks.

Conclusion

It’s clear that even with the latest efforts from Google, parasite hosting is still used with success by black hat SEO’s. Their inventivity and cunningness to develop clever techniques to deceive the Google is endless. In terms of ideas they will never end to astonish us and finally they will push the search engines further “making” them advance in technology faster. But as a viable technique for ranking in the search engines, you will be disappointed to know that parasite hosting, is discovered by Google eventually. They are keen on destroying these evil doers and their tactics.

What are your takes on this subject ?

The post 4 Techniques to Identify if Your Site is Abused by Parasite Hosting SEO Doorways appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

We do not endorse or recommend the usage of these techniques. This blog post’s intent is to show how black hat SEO works in 2014. Some of the techniques presented below are not only black hat but also “crap hat” which is illegal.

Even if Google tries to update it’s algorithms as best as it can, to cover all grounds, and provide users with pertinent and valuable information in search results, black hat SEOs seem to always adapt and find ways of ranking high. The strategies that I will present below, aren’t exactly new, as you’ve seen them work in the past, in some version or another, but apparently they are still kicking and punching in 2014. We’ve seen these black hat techniques used by small or big businesses, but one thing is for sure: sooner or later you’re going to be spotted by Google. It’s your choice if you plan to rank fast and stay up in the SERPs only for a short period of time( hours or days), or build a strong link profile that resists the test of time.

Let’s look at how the famous “buy viagra” SERPs look like nowadays and what techniques were used to get a top ranking there.

1. Parasite Hosting

This approach refers to performing SEO techniques that revolve around generating pages on high authority domains that rank very good in Google. These pages point to a certain site they wish to promote, boosting their position, based on the host’s ranking. Basically they steal some of the attention the parasite site gets to enjoy its already earned authority in Google. As you can see in the picture below, the hacker placed the “canadian viagra” page on a Hotel’s site. The two topics, “hotels” and “viagra”, aren’t related whatsoever, so it’s clearly not a naturally generated page. Another fact about parasite hosting is that the owner of the host has no idea about this, and the page was created without his knowledge. Let’s see a quick case study on what techniques are working in the pharma area.

There are those that work hard and create a strong authority and there are those who parasite!

Going for super competitive keywords means a lot of effort and a lot of resources invested. In the picture displayed below you can see the blatant competition that’s going on over pharmaceutical keywords – from 10 results displayed on “buy viagra”, 8 of them are ranking using parasite hosting. It’s interesting how, after all these years and all the algorithm updates, these type of parasite pages can still rank pretty high in search results.

It proves to be a very productive strategy for Black Hat SEOs in 2014.

Some people would call this technique as being part of a category named “crap hat seo”, due to its illegal nature. This is because these people hacked the sites and hosted their own content there.

2. Google Bombing

It needs to be stated from the beginning that it’s not as life threatening as it seems, and you won’t see any explosions on your screen. We’re going to move from one strategy that has been around for some years now, to another one. The first time this term was mentioned was in 2001, by Adam Mathes. But since it’s first appearances, it slightly went from being a form of prank to a form of boosting pages onto the first positions of Google. It seems black hat SEOs can still exploit this technique by using consistent anchor text when linking.

We have a clear example of Google Bombing so you may understand how this black hat strategy works and how it affects a site’s ranking. If you’ll take a look at the screenshot below, you’ll notice that  there is no historic data for this URL, meaning it’s a brand new page. The big link velocity spikes from the last days and there is an abnormal amount of links created just after a couple of days this page was created.

On the other hand, if we look at the whole domain on which the page was created, we can clearly see it’s not created with black hat SEO intent. The link velocity graphic for the whole domain shows a consistent link history that goes back to 2008, meaning that the site was steadily building links creating a solid authority. You can also see that for the last days, there are new link spikes that are very big and look suspicious. This black hat strategy may ruin a trustworthy domain.

Without that newly generated page, the domain is performing very well and looks very natural. If you’re wondering just how many links are created to sustain the pages on a victim’s site, you can look at the image below. A lot of parasite doorway pages are created in order to redirect visitors to the final landing page.

A lot of black hat SEO’s use automated software to generate lots of links on numerous sites, blogs, forums and web directories. Pretty much any place that accepts a text to be inputed on the page. These type of tools make spamming more effective, but only for a short period of time. These type of strategies won’t work on the long-term, since Google poured a lot of effort into creating an algorithm that identifies and dissolves such link schemes efficiently.

3. Cloaking & Redirects

By crawling your site, the GoogleBot scans your site and validates the data to be indexed and displayed in the search results. A website is considered to be using cloaking when it displays one page to the search engine spiders and another page to the users that click on the link from the SERPs. You can sometimes find yourself clicking on links only to find out that they have little to do with the description displayed in search results. Usually, those that are using cloaking and redirect strategies create multiple pages, all optimized for a certain topic using specific keywords.

Matt Cutts, the head of the Webspam department at Google explained cloaking in this video released a while back. This is important as it depicts how Google sees cloaking and how they classify it. It clearly states that:

There are no forms of white hat cloaking strategies that you can use for your site.

It’s made with the purpose of deceiving users or to present users and search engines with different types of content. When you’ll click on the link displayed it will take you to a page created to send traffic to the viagra selling site, or it will simply redirect to the site.

A lot of websites that have used cloaking and redirecting in the past couldn’t hold on to their site’s ranking for a long time. This tactic is still used in the present and you can clearly see an example in the picture below. If you’ll be curious enough to see how Google see’s the page, you can just click on the tiny triangle next to the link in the search results and then click on “Cached. That way, you’re going to be able to see the crawled page through GoogleBot’s “eyes”. To further understand how these techniques of link manipulation are still viable in 2014, you’ll have to learn how they work. In a nutshell, cloaking the site will have a script that scans search engine robots on one hand and human visitors on the other hand and classifies them after their IP address. If it’s decided that the visitor is human it will be displayed the content you wish to display. But if it’s GoogleBot, it will be set to be directed to an optimized page in order to pass as high ranked and valuable. Below you have a screenshot on the site it redirects after you click on the link in the search results.

Conclusion

Parasite hosting, and his close cousins Google Bombing, Cloaking and Redirects are among the select types of black hat strategies that are still being deployed successfully in 2014. Since they don’t serve any purpose other than manipulating a site’s ranking and they offer no real value to the user, they have a rather short life span. I need to mention the fact that, left isolated, any of these black hat techniques could not make a site rank too high. The real power is harnessed when they are used together.

I want this post to act as a notice for the ever-growing SEO landscape, that Google is still an algorithm that is still exploited by the Black Hat SEOs. Even if Google greatly improved its algorithms in order to better to detect unnatural links and find  shady patterns, I do believe that there is still work to be done when it comes to super competitive keywords such as the one presented here.

The post 3 Black Hat Strategies that Dominate the SERPs in 2014 appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.