Pixelrage.net

On March 18th, one of my stagnant, never-upgraded SMF forums was hacked. I would have never known this if the hacker hadn’t sent me an email saying that he now has full control of my forum. Thankfully, I didn’t care, because I only had installed SMF on a stagnant domain name that I was intending on working on someday – we all know that routine. What happened afterward, however, was a great learning experience about backlinks!

The instant I saw that email from the hacker, I immediately went into my FTP and simply selected all files within the account and deleted them, then pointed the domain name to my Parked domain parking account. What I saw afterward was pretty amazing.

The traffic was skyrocketing – the domain went from 1 hit per month to over 1,800 hits per day. How can this be? I jumped on a free backlink checker to find out. The result: my stagnant domain name, which had zero backlinks, now has 296 backlinks with anchor text ranging from “cash advance” to “Honda Accord parts” terms.

What the hacker originally did was to create spam threads on the forum, then create a virtual “linkwheel” by pointing links to those spam posts from other forums that he spammed. Obviously, the webmasters of those 200+ forums hadn’t noticed the spam threads he had created.

A good deal of these spam backlinks came from .es and .de forums that he hit. In turn, a vast majority of my traffic was coming from Spain and Germany as as a result. That sheds light on the value of backlinks from geo-targeted domain names and their rankings in those countries.

What I was really interested in was seeing a dip in traffic (I never thought I’d say that…). From its peak, the parked page was getting around 1,800 hits per day. Now, a little over a month later, it’s getting around 480-500 hits per day – all of which are from Spain.

Those worthless backlinks are still pulling in decent traffic; but unfortunately, it’s garbage traffic for topics that have nothing to do with the domain name. Still, it’s pulling in about a dollar a day in clicks – I suppose that’s the only bonus to this whole fiasco. The bad news, of course, is the fact that this is going to be a difficult mess to clean up when I want to actually make something of this domain name someday, and get it to rank for relevant keywords.

Beyond the obvious moral of the story, which is “don’t neglect forum upgrades unless you’re not serious about the forum,” the other one shows the desperate measures that hackers are taking to manipulate SEO. Hacking sites to get linkwheels pointed to backlinks from spammy forum posts? If they’re not automating these attacks, then they’re really wasting a lot of their own time.

On the flipside, a lot of forum admins out there aren’t doing their job!