Crazy Blackhat Example

[JoyHawkins]

Okay this is so nuts. Do a Google search for "auto insurance long island". This site is plastered everywhere in the organic results:

Usaa Auto Insurance Long Island Ny ~ San Lucas Mission

How does crap like this slip by? I am going to post it on the Webmaster forum but wanted to post here first.

Print shot (in case it disappears) - auto insurance long island - Google Search | Diigo

---------- Post Merged at 01:42 PM ---------- Previous Post was at 01:36 PM ----------

Found a page that hasn't been deleted yet...http://www.sanlucasmission.org/imgs.php?au=allstate-car-insurance-long-island

The thing I'm not really getting is what benefit this has....it's not backlinking to any other site?

 

[Linda Buquet]

Hmmm, when I actually click their link in the serps it tells me the link is broken???

Does it do that for you?

 

[JoyHawkins]

Wow...on page 2 for that search result I found another site that does the same thing...Progressive Auto Insurance Long Island Ny - Online Auto Insurance Quote.

---------- Post Merged at 01:44 PM ---------- Previous Post was at 01:43 PM ----------

Yep! Just added to my thread above that I found one that isn't dead yet - http://www.sanlucasmission.org/imgs.php?au=allstate-car-insurance-long-island

 

[Linda Buquet]

None of this makes sense. That site is really about a Mission in Guatemala. No reason to link to an ins agent in Long Island.

Think the site was hacked and the hacked links are malformed and don't work right or something. Whole thing is just weird.

BUT I think your point is why does Google even like this site enough to rank it higher than legit listings that SHOULD be on page 1?

 

[JoyHawkins]

Yeah exactly. There are like 10 of these that outrank one of my clients. Seriously...really annoying!!!

 

[Linda Buquet]

HAAA was just reading the CONTENT in Google cache. That is if you can call it content.

Silly spammers! (Read more at the link, I don't want to repost all the rubbish here.)

She put her Leon rubbed away enough Never saw Zane again. the KDM proceeded as planned to Houston fringe samples Lunzie had voice. Above that clouds were dont mind especially when the Ryxi and get. There along two thirds the DC area holding factor for most of. You could still get out of this alive. subdued the children gathered be construed as good. A first impression room and stopped dead. When she opened get to see anything inside the compounds.

Is it a auto long island ny insurance usaa good couple of and saw that the. My parents spoke. know that they havent sprayed Spectrum Cure into rubbing her fingers across. And what can they do to me Yeah.

Way to work in your keywords there spammer!
Then 3 links that don't work, then more jibberish.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Wow...on page 2 for that search result I found another site that does the same thing...Progressive Auto Insurance Long Island Ny - Online Auto Insurance Quote.

Weird. That one looks like a University site?

So it looks like these hackers are taking overseas high authority sites and hacking them. But again the URL structure makes no sense.

AND it really makes no sense Google would rank these foreign sites with broken links HIGH for local searches!

 

[Linda Buquet]

Hmmm, who's up for a bit of a black hat test?

I have not done a deep dive BUT it appears Google may REALLY like
having the = sign + KWs in the URL string.

One site has: =allstate-car-insurance-long-island

The other has: =progressive-auto-insurance-long-island-ny

But the URLs are malformed and don't work.

So I wonder what would happen if you took a valid inner page and tacked
=auto-insurance-long-island-ny on the end?

 

[JoyHawkins]

I'm going to see if I can try something to test if it works.

 

[David Deering]

Now that is pretty crazy. Joy, were you able to test out the "= + KW + location" string to see if it had any effect on a page's rankings? I checked out that page that you two were talking about and there are about a dozen or so links related to auto insurance interspersed among the other links in the menus. And that particular page has 9 backlinks from mmu.ac.uk, which is a very high PR site as well. It turns out that there are several similar pages on that same site. But I followed another link, which led to another foreign high-ranking site. Whoever did it is definitely doing some blackhat insurance SEO.

I'm thinking that they go in and hack good PR sites and create some sort of link chain, creating very powerful links which at some point link to the actual site. But how or why is that site ranking for that search term? I'm confused about it, too. Apparently Google is looking at that page's meta tags, the other links on the page, and of course all of its backlinks and ranking it high based on those things. But it's definitely crazy that a site like that ranks so high for such a competitive search term.