Irishwonder’s Black Hat SEO Blog

I’ve had a lot of fun recently reading this post by Michael Gray a.k.a. Graywolf – to be honest I always enjoy his rants, whatever they are about. Whatever it is he’s writing about, you know he really means it and some stuff he comes up with is totally hilarious.

Anyways back to Digg. If you’ve been living under a rock, I’ll have you know that it has killed off all external links recently and when you click the link from the submitted post to a site you get taken to a framed page that has the infamous Digg toolbar on top and the target site’s content below it. In the code of the page it looks like this:

<iframe id="diggiFrame" name="diggiFrame" noresize="noresize"
 src="http://www.your-target-site.com" frameborder="0"></iframe>

Well so, that’s your XSS done backwards – pretty much. Not you hacking into an authority site but the authority site hijacking your content. Michael goes on to suggest it can be still used as parasite hosting – but TBH, I’ve yet to see a single one of those Digg short url pages indexed or better yet ranking in Google. The submission pages at Digg do get indexed as well as ever before – but the short URLs are kinda hmm… I have checked the submission page code to see what causes it and found this:

<a href="http://www.your-target-site.com" class="offsite 
ct-lifestyle" rel="dc:source,[your short URL]" property="dc:title" 
target="_blank" onclick="gotoLink('12021587');">Your Submission 
Title</a>

The link to the actual submitted site page is cloaked – only hoomins get there but not the Googlebot. Of course this effectively prevents Google from indexing the short URL – without Digg being too explicit about it, like stating it in its (terribly formatted) robots file or inserting stupid nofollows nobody really cares about etc.

But Graywolf, being Graywolf, as skilled as he is in all the darker-than-white arts and exploits, couldn’t have failed to notice this bit. I see people accusing him of shite in that post’s comments – but I believe he has a reason to post what he has posted. I do honestly thing Michael has a plot to get Digg banned – and here’s the bit that proves it, his list of steps to follow to “abuse” it:

• Set yourself up with a nice spammy lander page and submit it to digg, like this (http://digg.com/d1kRNK)
• It doesn’t matter if it get voted, up, down, sideways, or even gets buried
• Go get yourself some links, beg, borrow, steal, do whatever it takes
• Buy links, lots of links, quality is irrelevant, you want massive quantities (you do know that paid crappy links work differently when pointed at trusted sites right?).
• Sit back and wait for rankings to come, and collect your affiliate checks

(The italicising is mine to draw your attention to these points.)

A site linking to spammy pages / bad neighborhood? A site with purchased links, especially such that look like they have a “stab me I’m a paid link” sign on their back? All of the above done en masse? If this does not look like a recipe to get Digg banned by Google then I don’t know what does. (Sorry Michael if you intended to keep this secret plot secret, it was just too hilarious for me not to post about it).

But we also know that Graywolf is known for critisizing Google, right? I don’t know any questionable innovation from Google that he has not posted about and exposed its evil nature. So, I also believe that he is feeding Google its own poison: you like authority sites? you don’t like paid links? Eat your own sh#t then!

Hilarious beyond measure.