Events, Happenings & Cool Stuff » Boston College http://www.lakeland-printing.com/blog Brought To You By PAWS Printing In Lakeland Florida Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:37:34 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 Boston College Endorses Black Hat SEO Tactics http://www.lakeland-printing.com/blog/boston-college-endorses-black-hat-seo-tactics.html http://www.lakeland-printing.com/blog/boston-college-endorses-black-hat-seo-tactics.html#comments Mon, 02 Mar 2009 16:54:34 +0000 admin http://www.lakeland-printing.com/blog/?p=852 On January 15th, 2009 I wrote a blog post about a sneaky used car dealer who had their link placed in the middle of a painfully long article.

If you look in the middle of this page you will see the term “used cars” was snuck in there with a link pointing to a used card dealer in Florida. For those who don’t know, a link like that will boost the dealer’s ranking in search engine search results (particularly Google) because it is coming from a reputable source. Furthermore, a .edu domain provides huge “link juice”. This is reffered to as “Black Hat SEO“.

Boston College did contact me about my post and said the link would be removed “sometime this week”. Well, as you can see the link is still there.

Is Boston College making money installing these links and supporting the Black Hat SEO Market? It appears so. Do they have an employee on the inside selling these links? It appears so doesn’t it?

]]> http://www.lakeland-printing.com/blog/boston-college-endorses-black-hat-seo-tactics.html/feed 1 Sneaky Used Car Dealer Manages To Get Hidden Link from Boston College EDU Article http://www.lakeland-printing.com/blog/sneaky-used-car-dealer-manages-to-get-hidden-link-from-edu-article.html http://www.lakeland-printing.com/blog/sneaky-used-car-dealer-manages-to-get-hidden-link-from-edu-article.html#comments Fri, 16 Jan 2009 02:31:26 +0000 Mike http://www.lakeland-printing.com/blog/?p=793 Note: I actually received an email from Boston College this morning (Saturday January 17th, 2009). They explained that this article is actually webspace that is provided to students, and it’s not an “official” part of the BC website. Apparently this happened before and they are working towards having it removed.

I was doing a bit of research tonight and happened upon a used car website in Florida. I was surprised to see it had a pagerank of “5″ and was curious how it managed such a high pagerank.

After looking this website up at my SEO Quake Firefox Extension, I noticed it only had 11 back-links. I knew one of them had to be a good one since obtaining a Pagerank of “5″ isn’t as easy as it was last year.

I won’t even mention the car dealer’s site because I don’t want to give them free publicity, but you can see the article here: Boston College Article With Hidden Link.

Anyway, I checked their back-links through Yahoo Site Explorer and the first one was the article from the main Boston College Website. I clicked on it and couldn’t find it anywhere (visibly), so I right clicked and viewed the source. Here it is:

Click To Enlarge

Click To Enlarge

So, you think there is a college student at BC selling links? I wonder how many other hidden links are on the official website of Boston College?

For those who don’t know what I am talking about, it’s quite simple. The more powerful the links are that you have pointing to your website, the more powerful your website will be. Sneaking “in-links” like that is referred to as “Black Hat SEO (Search Engine Optimization)”. Doing it ethically and by the book is called “White Hat SEO”. I’m not sure who started this terminology, but it goes back to the old cowboy movies. The good guy always had a white hat and the bad guy had a black hat.

I’m sure it’s possible this site may of been hacked and the link uploaded, but I don’t think there are many hackers in the used car business.

]]> http://www.lakeland-printing.com/blog/sneaky-used-car-dealer-manages-to-get-hidden-link-from-edu-article.html/feed 0