The Imperial College of London was only one of dozens of universities which had their sites hacked.
An online casino affiliate is accused of hacking university websites in order to boost their Google search results. The web marketing firm, eTraffic, found that a ‘black hat’ operator had hacked dozens of education sites to insert links to their own site.
Employees at eTraffic did a research of one of their client’s competitor’s backlinks and noticed the black hat affiliate marketer placed links to their website on 74 different education websites.
Some of those .edu and .gov sites have 1 link, while others had up to 11 links from 11 different pages to the sites.
Search Terms in the .Edu and .Gov Links
Phrases used in the links include search terms like “real money slots”, “onlinepokies”, “play for real”, and “mobileslotcash”.
The websites hacked included some illustrious names in the U.S. postsecondary education system: Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon University, NYU, Duke, Dartmouth, Boston University, BYU, Vanderbilt, George Mason, and Caltech.
In the arcane world of search engine optimization, links from those university websites are considered high-value. Thus, the hacker in this case used cheap tactics to receive an advantage worth tens of thousands of dollars, or possibly more.
The Sites Which Were Hacked
The university sites hacked were not all from the United States, either. Imperial College London, Pembrokeshire College, Universiteit Gent, Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Universidade de Lisboa, Polytechnic University of Catalonia, the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, and the University of the West Indies were just a few of the non-American universities with links to the site.
Some websites had multiple hacks, such as Brookdale Community College, Nassau Community College, Illinois Institute of Technology, and El Consejo de Educacion Secundaria.
Why Education Sites Are Important
Education and government websites are considered some of the best links to have in the search engine optimization field. The .edu and .gov addresses are considered authority sites by Google. They are also seen as largely disinterested, because they are immune to link-buying schemes which dominate SEO implementation and reciprocal link exchanges which dominated the industry at one time.
Hacking such sites thus gave the unscrupulous affiliate the ability to receive dozens of high-value links, which are seen as votes on behalf of that site in the Google algorithm. Each vote is not weighted the same in the Google system, so the site vaulted up the SEO rankings for many lucratic search terms.
The site which reported the hacks noted that such terms are often worth $80 a click in the online gambling industry these days. In the online gambling industry, setting a high volume of visitors thus translates into massive amounts of cash for the affiliate.
Lessons Learned from the Case
It does without saying that the strategy worked, though a quick check of the hacked pages showed that most links have been removed. The hackers also appear to have ignored some of the lessons SEO experts learned from the Penguin update. Experts say that, despite their rudimentary anchor text (by 2016 standards), Google still assigned high value to those links.
For one, Google’s algorithm does not penalize for relevancy when the link comes from a high authority domain. Also, exact match anchors are not anathema, if they come from a high authority domain.
While such analysis might sound like Chinese to some readers, it is highly instructive to those who study SEO. People have tried countless different ways to dissect the importance of various factors in Google’s algorithm, but no one outside the world’s most important search engine really knows the exact importance of those factors. Through trial and error and a lot of study, SEO experts seek to divine the truth. Thus, evidence that bad anchor text does not hurt one’s rankings if the links are good enough is a bit of a revelation to some.
Presumably, eTraffic’s discovery meant that the hacker’s advantage was noticed by the 72 different universities and the hacks were fixed. If so, then the bad search engine optimization likely means that the hacker’s site no longer ranks very well for high-dollar terms. The hacker will have to find a new underhanded scheme to make money.
