The top-ranking HTML editor on Google is an SEO scam
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This is the story of how I accidentally discovered what appears to be a sizable SEO scam.
Summary
Some highly-ranked online tools for editing or “cleaning” HTML seem to be secretly injecting links into their output to push themselves and affiliated sites up the search engine rankings. This scam is highly successful and appears to have gone undetected so far.Tools which I suspect of doing this are all made by the same people:
html-cleaner,com
html-online,com/editor/
html5-editor,net
htmlg,com
… and others
Sites that have fallen victim to this include BoingBoing, the official German Football Association and Kaspersky. The delicious irony here is that the affected Kaspersky article is about “staying safe from hackers”.
.....Full artcle https://casparwre.de/blog/seo-scam/
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@catweazle So are you Caspar or is your whole post a quote from the article
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@tbgbe , it's copy from the page, sorry, I'll edit is as cuoted
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@gwen-dragon , maybe, but my name is something shorter than Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Buhl-Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg (sadic parents)
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@gwen-dragon Not to defend G, but I don’t see how Bing and DuckDuckGo (which uses Bing) wouldn’t fall victim to this.
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@code3 , Bing maybe, but DDG I don't think so and Startpage and Woogle either. The problem is not the engine as it is, but the use that Google makes of them.
Anyway, they are not pages that interest me especially. -
@catweazle I don’t get what you mean
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@code3, do the results of your searches on Startpage and Whoogle appear in the same order as searching for it directly with Google? I think not, despite using the same engine, guess why
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I have given all the listed domains an appropriate review in Web Of Trust.
Shame I seem to be the only one so far to leave any negative reviews. -
@dr-flay , WOT is a good idea, but only this. I also had WOT as an extension in the past, but I quickly noticed that it is not reliable for a simple reason, it bases its ratings on those of users. This invariably leads to anyone with a personal dislike for a website or a competing webmaster casting negative votes on a subjective basis. There are many haters on the net.
It is the same effect that these websites have that value user experiences of travel, hotels and restaurants, which are not based on independent and objective evaluations.
Therefore, be careful with the WOT evaluations, it can bring bad surprises.
User reviews are important, but they can only be an additional information to an independent objective assessment, for this reason I prefer VirusTotal and Blacklight to test links that I do not know. -
@catweazle Great job and a very interesting read on these SEO scumbags!
But a small tip: If you want to combat SEO scum, make sure to not actually link to their sites, as you do here when pasting the article quote. That's how they build their scam, by injecting links into respectable web sites like this forum.
Go through and change it to code spans.
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@pathduck , edited
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@gwen-dragon said in The top-ranking HTML editor on Google is an SEO scam:
OMG! Some guys never learn that Goofle is not a search engine but a google-ads-ismore--important-suggest-to-buy-engine.
I do never check any rankings on Goofle.
Google is not only trying to push ads on everyone, but is also a snoop, trying to track everyone.
Why should people care about rankings? If I use a search engine, it is to find something specific. Anything that can give me a good answer is fine with me. -
@streptococcus said in The top-ranking HTML editor on Google is an SEO scam:
Why should people care about rankings? If I use a search engine, it is to find something specific. Anything that can give me a good answer is fine with me.
What percentage of the time do you go to more results or look past the first ten results??
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@streptococcus ,it's a big difference when what's relevant to you comes out first or what's relevant to Google and yours on page 5 of the search results.
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@catweazle Yes all user contributed systems have the same issue, however people abusing WOT never actually leave a review or a proper review, thus making them stand out as being suspect ratings.
The majority of the reviews contain more than just "I like this site" and when genuine issues arise are easily found and read by all.
Or you can rely on google safebrowsing and similar with no evidence of what is right or wrong with a site and no way to verify the integrity of the rating.Virustotal cannot tell you if a site is a phishing site or scam.
Users can put reviews of sites in VT, but they don't.WOT isn't perfect but it is the best way to inform the wider public.
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@dr-flay , both uBO and Trace block access to fraudulent pages more securely than WOT-
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