SEO Shadow

Sunday night and I’m tearing through a whole pile of work that’s been stacking up like no other, but i thought I’d get a little something out there for the Black and Gray Hatters as promised.

I hope some of you had a degree of success with the voucher poaching by the way. I’m well and truly stocked for the new year! So sorry in advance to anybody who plans on grabbing a copy of .Net magazine in Farringdon this month. I’d be surprised if there’s any freebies left that aren’t sitting in a nice pile on my work desk.

Anyway, I thought I’d cover a subject that’s been known to ruffle a few feathers in the past. Hell, it took me a little while to work out that I was being targeted by it, and then I sat back in mild admiration at the sheer efficiency of it all.

Phantom referral URLs!

Come on, we’ve all been there. You launch a new website and monitor it’s progress obsessively through your analytics tool of choice. The links are coming from where you expect. The odd Google long tail result mixed up with some Digg submissions and a forum sig. Then suddenly an unknown URL pops up in to your referred URLs inventory. What’s the first thing you do? You check it out! Who’s linking to me, man?!

Hey, you never know, somebody might be spreading positive words about the site. My ego’s never one to stay deflated so I nearly always click through to check what’s going on. Yet when you get to the referring URL, there’s no sign of your link on the page and it’s ultimately quite a flacidating experience. Am I getting too involved?

It’s not in the main content, it’s not in the footer. It’s nowhere to be seen and you’re probably scratching your head at how somebody managed to get from the mystery site to your own in one swift click.

The reality is that they probably didn’t.

This is all managed through a Firefox extension, and a very helpful extension for spammers at that. The execution is simple but brilliant. You define what gets sent to a website in your HTTP Referrer key and this will be logged whenever you visit a page. So if I’m visiting Joe Average’s website and I’ve set my HTTP Referrer to be logged as http://www.fiendish-link.com/awesome-sites.html, the next time Joe Average loads up his web stats, he’s going to have a rather unusual referring URL on display.

The natural reaction will be to click through and see why his site has received a mention. Of course, we didn’t mention Average Joe. We’ve bombed our referring URL on every single page that we’ve visited while using the Firefox extension.

The extension is called RefControl and is available to download freely from the Mozilla website. Once you’ve downloaded the add-on, you’ll notice that several options become available in your RefControl settings.

This is all you need to worry about:

Replace the link with the page that you want people visiting and sit back to watch on as an endless stream of mystified webmasters click through to see their site getting some non-existent rep.

Now, what - you might ask - is the bloody point in all of this? Why do we want webmasters to click through? Surely they’re only going to close the window and never return?

Maybe so, but it’s worth noting that many web stats are displayed publicly and so we can hop on the PR gravy train with a few completely effortless backlinks.

Another thing to consider:

Say, we don’t link to our own site. What if we link to an affiliate product? Or what if we game the system in to spamming our way up the social bookmarking sites?

It only takes a click.