University Sites Hacked by Over-Zealous Affiliate

An online casino affiliate platform has been accused of hacking university websites to improve rankings

A online casino has apparently been rising up in the ranks through search engines, but they haven’t done so using fair methods. They are being accused of using a hacker in order to gain access to highly esteemed educational sites in order to bolster their own rankings through Google and other services.

Etraffic released a report last week that indicated that an online casino affiliate has been surging up through Google’s rankings by using ‘black hat’ search engine optimization techniques. The report didn’t release any information pertaining to who might be the culprit behind this, as they are keeping it anonymous until further information is available and a case may be presented against the platform in question if the allegations are found to be true.

Sometime between January and September of this year the affiliate had gone from ranking down on the fourth or fifth page of Google’s search engine results to now being placed onto the front page as a result of black hat techniques. Many of the keyword phrases that they targeted surrounded things that people looking for online casinos might search for, such as “online slots real money”, “real money slots”, and “real online slots”.

The reasoning that educational websites were targeted was due to the fact that Google’s algorithm holds websites with “.gov” or “.edu” extensions at a higher standard than most websites, and thus backlinking from these types of sites is going to be more effective on search engine rankings. The affiliate had 76 backlinks that were coming from education sources in the United States, United Kingdom, and many other countries. Major names that were included was Stanford University and Duke University.

It’s unknown exactly how long these backlinks have been around, but it’s expected that they are relatively fresh for the most part due to the sudden climb in search engine rankings by the website in question. The hacker had inserted gambling keywords into articles that had absolutely nothing to do with gambling, and then using those keywords to link over to the affiliate website. These words were put in awkward positions sometimes in the middle of sentences, randomly popping up. Beyond that, the hacker took it a step further by coding the links to not appear as underlined or discolored so that they wouldn’t actually look like links and pull in unwanted attention.

Although eTraffic isn’t releasing the site that is being investigated, a little bit of digging will reveal that the culprit is most likely mobileslotcash.com. This hack has shown just how much emphasis Google is placing on website backlinks that come from credible sources. Having a fraction of the backlinks of some of their top competitors, these key targets have put them at the forefront of search results.

There hasn’t been any information released yet regarding whether or not the website owner is going to face criminal charges, and it doesn’t appear as if being exposed has effected their ranking at this time.