By Doing great link building is difficult, it is even harder when your competitor takes risks and violates Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and the sanctity of other people’s websites in order to gain quality links at any cost.
Last week the startup developer website Hacker News lit up with an SEO issue, an incredibly rare event for the more dev focused site where startup and open source tech seem to dominate. The post was titled “The top-ranking HTML editor on Google is an SEO scam”. If there is one thing web developers appear to despise and assume is frequently a scam, it is SEO. The sensational title plus the community’s ingrained distaste for the craft of search engine optimization sent it skyrocketing to the top of the rankings racking up over 1,700 ‘points’ and 392 comments.
The post linked to an article by a web developer who was frustrated that their project was not ranking #1 in the search results for what they claim to be the coveted keyword in their industry, instead only ranking #2 for the past year. The article dives into the details of a link injecting scheme used by a popular online HTML editing website that allows users to export HTML code from a visual WYSIWYG based editor.
“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.” – Caspar von Wrede, Casparwre.de
When I saw the post it reminded me of the whole J.C. Penney debacle from 2011 where they schemed to get keyword-rich anchor text links, sending their rankings soaring. The link scheme was concocted by Dallas-based SEO firm SearchDex. When the scheme was eventually reported on in the NY Times, Google blacklisted the company in SERPs for 90 days, something the retailer never recovered from.
Here is my comment to the Hacker News community on the issue with the J.C. Penney situation firmly in my mind:
SEO professional here, I can’t see the article due to the wide-spread outage but have reviewed the comments here, comments in closed FB groups, and injected links on sites from this tool, as well as the tool’s admission of such links on their site. This tool is most likely owned by a publisher attempting to steal SEO link value from user websites, it is also possible they are selling these links outright or via a PBN system. This type of link building was a common practice in the early 00’s used by CMS theme developers and tool makers alike to gain link value. Google took a stand against “widget links”, which is likely what these would be classified as, and as recent as 2016 even warned against their usage.
A year later Google’s John Mueller, a trends analyst who often also acts as a liasion between Google and the webmaster community, stated that Google might automatically apply a ‘nofollow’ attribute to these types of links, effectively killing their ability to siphon SEO link value to improve themselves.
We have noted in our agency research for clients several similar usages over the past few years that appear to be giving websites positive value instead of either being ignored or penalized, including a WordPress plugin that injects links on government and collegiate websites. The way Google assigns value based on links has changed quite a bit over the past 5 years and there is a chance they no longer penalize for widget links (unlikely) OR that their ability to detect them has degraded significantly (my guess is the later).
One thing is for certain, Google absolutely retains the ability to manually devalue links and penalize a website for violating their guidelines. They do not enjoy negative press or communinity discussions on search quality like this one and in the past have taken swift action when such issues arised in the media.
At our agency we advise clients against this type of link building as it has no long-term value for a brand and could cause long-term pain instead. SEO should be used to help new brands gain a competitive advantage against more established incumbents such as a startup taking on Amazon or a new SaaS tool providing valuable data to an industry.
How did Caspar, a non-SEO, come across this link scheme? According to the article he decided to purchase an Ahrefs account and used it to examine his competitor’s backlinks. Of note, his competitor was not the HTML editor website itself but appears to have been affiliated with it in some way.
What Caspar uncovered was that each time someone used the free version of the HTML-Online.com editor they would inject a link to a website or article affiliated with their website / core business. Often times this had nothing to do with the HTML-Online.com website or with HTML at all. In Caspar’s case the links were sometimes to his top competitor ScoreCounter.com. The links were scattered across websites likely to be of high quality including NBC Sports, Intuit Quickbooks, Rice University, and Macworld.
Note: The NBC Sports link Caspar found is just the word “score” and is found in the middle of a paragraph. This was clearly placed by the writer/editor and has no relation to a link injection scheme or an embedded scoreboard.
HTML-Online.com for their part fully admits to this in a disclaimer on their website telling free users that they will have links injected into their content unless they pay a monthly fee.
Their disclaimer message located in the footer states: “You can use this website absolutely free but by using this tool you accept to link to this website or our partner sites. If you don’t want this, please subscribe for a pro HTMLG license and you get even more HTML editing features.”
Caspar kept digging and found the same business owned a variety of websites that also injected links, one of those appeared in a Kaspersky article on COVID related phishing scams.
Frustrated with what he saw as an ethical abuse of other people’s websites and of Google’s algorithm to aid their SEO Caspar gathered all of the evidence he could and wrote a post on his personal blog about the experience. He then submitted the blog post to Hacker News on June 7th where it became the most upvoted and discussed topic of the day. Four days later on June 11th Caspar noticed that Google had manually penalized HTML-Online.com as the owners had placed a message stating as such on their website.
As of today, June 14th 2021 both HTML Online and ScoreCounter.com miraculously still ranked #1 in Google for their keywords “html editor” and “online scoreboard” respectively.
Caspar may have succeeded in getting his competition hit with a manual penalty, but he has a lot more work to do to win the #1 spot (unless things change soon).
SEO Takeaways
- Google still penalizes for “widget” / embed / injection links, especially those without nofollow attributes and designed to manipulate rankings and when they are not consentual.
- Google’s manual penalty did not impact rankings for the two keywords and websites being examined.
- Your competitors are actively trying to make sense of your SEO and will take action to harm yours and help their own.
- Link building at scale is difficult and challenging, tread carefully.