STOP giving away one way links from your website

There is a new black-hat technique doing the rounds on the Internet today. Its called CSS Stealing. By using this method a site owner can know exactly which sites you have been browsing. Canny black-hatters are using this method to steal one way links, pretending to give out reciprocals. I show you how this works.

A gentleman called jeremiah grossman published a method of stealing a users browsing history via CSS and Javascript. His article is here.

Did you ever get an email that looked something like this:

Hi,

I really like your site (sitename.com). In fact, I have put a link to your site from my site (as you can see here). Don’t feel obligated, but I would really appreciate a link back when you get the chance.

Thanks much!

-Fakename

Well you are not alone. This is a perfectly legitimate way to ask for a link back which I daresay you have tried yourself. However nowadays when you check for your link on their site you need to follow some extra steps.

The way this scam works is that the blackhat site keeps a list of the sites whose webmasters they have emailed. If the stolen browsing history of the webmaster contains their own site then a link back is displayed, if not (as in the case of a search engine) no link is displayed.

It is pointless examining the page source because this looks completely kosher. How? The index page is usually set up so that on your first visit your ip is looked at and if you have not already visited and you are not a search engine then you are served a page which contains some javascript code to scan your browsing history. this page immediately redirects back to the index page PHP program which now knows your ip is to be associated with your site and adds a hardlink to the page it serves you.

The only way to detect this is to completely clear your browsing history and cookies before visiting. This is very inconvenient, so what I do is take a list of the six or seven url's I get per month in these emails down to the internet cafe and use their browser instead, without visiting my own sites first of course!

Guess what, around 1/3 of the sites that display a link-back when I look in my browser at home do not display a link back if I look from elsewhere!

So stop these Bozos from stealing an advantage using one way links from your sites and check more carefully!