Rogue host changing customers' websites

[PhilC]

Does anyone remember the Name or URL of that rogue host who we exposed - I think in March? We lost some posts earlier in the year, and that thread was part of the loss.

[Nicky_uk]

You dont mean Traffic Power do you Phil?

[PhilC]

No. It was a host.

[Nicky_uk]

oh oops

[Janeth]

Is this a test?

I remeber the talk but not the host but I think you talked about it on another forum also?

[PhilC]

It's not a test. We lost the posts in a technical glitch some months ago. I talked about it at SEW in the hope that GG would do something about it, and he did. But I didn't post the URL or name there. All the details were here. Even GG had to come here to get them.

[Nicky_uk]

I've tried looking and tracing and all sorts, and pretty much everywhere you've mentioned it Phil, you didn't mention the hosts name. The only other one I have found in a similar light is APlus.net. That's probably not it tho.

[PhilC]

I think it's gone. It doesn't matter. I just wanted to check it out to see if they are up to their old tricks again.

[PhilC]

I've found it. It's "http://www.mdgcs.com/". AND THEY ARE STILL DOING IT!!!

If you search Google on 'outsidelinks4us.html', 1680 results are returned, most are Supplemental, but some are not. Look at the first 2 non-Supplemental results (#3 - caribinfo, and #6 - monticello) and notice the snippet. It's taken from the cache page. Click on the cache and see - it contains links to the hosts own sites. The date that they were spidered is 24th September 2005 - less than 2 weeks ago.

Then click on the listed link (Title) and you are redirected to the site's homepage.

The host's site is still banned by Google (grey TPR), so they aren't making any gains with Google, but I don't think that Yahoo! and MSN did anything about it, so there are still gains to be made.

For those who weren't here when this scam was uncovered, I'll explain it all in the next post.

[PhilC]

In March of this year we uncovered a scam that was being perpetrated by a host on all of their hosting clients. The host is www.mdgcs.com and they were dynamically adding directories and pages to all of their clients' sites, and also dynamically adding links on their clients' existing pages. The clients couldn't see anything of it because it was all done dynamically, and nothing could be seen by FTP.

When a major search engine spider came along and requested any normal page from a client's site, the host would intercept the request and return the page with some links added. Here are captures of a typical example:-

The bottom of the page that people see:-
http://www.bradford.org.uk/mdgcs/powellmuseum_actual.jpg

The bottom of the page that the spiders were given, complete with additional links to the host's sites:-
http://www.bradford.org.uk/mdgcs/powellmuseum_cache.jpg

And here is the listing that appeared in Google's serps for the page:-
http://www.bradford.org.uk/mdgcs/powellmuseum_listing.jpg

That page was a normal part of the Powell Museum site, but for the search engines, additional links to the host's sites were added at the bottom. This was done by the host, and without the site owner's knowledge, and it was done for all hosted sites.

One of the added links on each of the pages was to a non-existant sub-directory and a non-existant page in the sub-directory. All requests for anything in those non-existant sub-directories were intercepted, and people were redirected to the client site's homepage, while spiders were given a links page. The links page contained links to the host's sites, of course. The caches that are currently showing in Google's serps are typical of those links pages. All of those "outsidelinks4us.html" pages look like that.

A dynamically created sub-directory name is "outsidelinks4uswelike". If you search Google for it, there 3410 results returned. Again most are Supplemental, but odd ones are not. In fact, that sub-directory name is at the top of a pyramid of subdirectories, and all are fed to spiders but not to people, and all are done without the site owners' knowledge. The first 2 results from that search were spidered very recently (25th September 2005), so that part of the scam is still operational as well.

At the time that the scam was uncovered here, I contacted one of the clients and the host got wind of it very quickly. He came here and admitted he'd done wrong, and he even put a prominent notice on his site to that effect, which also stated that he wouldn't do it any more. I managed to get the attention of GoogleGuy at SEW, and he saw to it that the host was penalised without hurting the innocent clients.

So I'm very surprised to find that the host is still perpetrating the same scam on his clients, as the Google search in the previous post shows.

I think it's time for some more action.

[Mel]

Yes I agree Phil, one expects that your host is working for you not against you. Calling Googleguy.

[PhilC]

calling GG? You can call him on the phone? Or was that a low level hail

[Mel]

That was a low level hail though there is no reason one could not call Google and ask to speak to Matt Cutts say.

[PhilC]

I'd wondered what would happen if someone did that. I imagine that calls wouldn't be put through. But it's easy enough to tell him something. Just post a comment in his blog and ask him to delete instead of clearing it.

[simonmc]