Don’t ask me why but I was bored on the weekend and decided to see who was ranking in top ten for the keyword “web hosting”. At first, it was making all sense except for webspacehosting.com. I have never heard of them, so I decided to visit their site and look at their incoming links. I used Yahoo Site Explorer to get the list of sites that are linking to that web hosting company. As I was going through the source code, the links didn’t look natural and they were using “margin-left” attribute with a negative value. Basically the negative “margin-left” value places the link off screen, thus making it invisible to the website visitor but the link is visible to search engine spiders. Also, when I tried to look up whois information for the domain, I wasn’t surprised to see whois information protected. Most of the sites that are linking to webspacehosting.com are using DotNetNuke CMS and I am guessing some kind of exploit is being used to inject links in the source code. It’s possible these website are selling text links and they are hiding those text links. If that’s true, I just wasted all my time researching 
What surprises me is Google is not able to detect this and it’s allowing sites to rank high for competitive word like “web hosting“.
Below I have listed five example sites with their source code. If you look at the source, you will notice that they all have negative “margin-left” value. I am not advising anyone to go out and do this for their website because I am sure search engines will eventually figure it out (Hopefully!!) and penalize those sites.
Update (March 17, 2010) – Added IP address and hosting provider name.
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IP – 66.235.111.172
IP Whois – Sage Dot Corporation
<p><div style=”margin-left: -467px;”>Powered by Texas <a href=”http://webspacehosting.com“>web hosting</a></div></p></span></span>
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IP – 216.185.5.75
IP Whois – Allied Telecom Group, LLC
<p><div style=”margin-left: -467px;”>Website is powered by <a href=”http://webspacehosting.com“>web hosting</a> ultimate services</div></p></span></div></div>
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IP – 216.157.205.70
IP Whois – Artemis Solutions
<div style=”margin-left: -367px;”>Fast free <a href=”http://webspacehosting.com“>web hosting</a></div></p><p><div style=”margin-left: -438px;”>And ways to <a href=”http://www.youronlinetipsource.com/”>make money online</a></div></p>
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http://www.fountainhillschamber.com/
IP – 66.29.198.159
IP Whois – MaximumASP, LLC
<p><div style=”margin-left: -434px;”>Powered by <a href=”http://webspacehosting.com“>web hosting</a> services</div></p>
<p><div style=”margin-left: -438px;”>Trying to figure out how to make <a href=”http://www.youronlinetipsource.com/”>make money online</a> click here</div></p></span></span>
<a name=”1927″></a><span id=”dnn_ctr1927_ContentPane”><!– Start_Module_1927 –><span><a href=”http://www.moviepro.net/download-watchmen-movie.html”><em>watchmen movie download</em></a>
<a href=”http://www.movietrimmer.com/free-comedy-movies.html”><strong>free comedy movies</strong></a>
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IP – 89.213.252.200
IP Whois – NetServices Plc
</div><span><div><a href=”http://www.moviepro.net/”>online movie downloads</a>, <a href=”http://www.solarmovie.com/”>watch movies</a></div><p><div style=”margin-left: -438px;”>Looking for ways <a href=”http://www.youronlinetipsource.com/”>make money online</a> click here</div></p><p><div style=”margin-left: -467px;”>Haart is powered by <a href=”http://webspacehosting.com“>web hosting</a> servers of New York</div></p></span></div>
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I just want to make it clear that I am not saying webspacehosting.com is trying to cheat the system. It’s possible some other competition is trying to give them bad name.
10 Comments
Wow now i am really curious what kind of exploit they used to achieve such high quality backlinks.
That’s crazy….
I dare to do thins
That’s great finding man … and it’s really bothering. So you think that this web host is injecting those links in their customer’s sites? if yes we should report it to Google.
Really , Wow , i will try at least once time, because in seo we should always use all method.
Wow, So we must report it so people won’t use their web hosting. They pay and get cheat like that
Thanks for your post on this topic. Our site was affected by this, and you pointed us in the right direction.
great finding man!
We have a web site that has also been affected. We do not host with with webspacehosting.com. It appears our DNN site was hacked with links to webspacehosting.com styled with negative left margins. Does anyone have additional information on this hack?
I believe I have the answer. I have been tracking the movie industry some, and the top person for “download movie” is alfamovie.com. He or She I believe is dropping these links. If you look at “his or hers” yahoo back-links they all have – margin value. I been tracking him for about a year and half and didn’t start seeing the web hosting one along with his till the beg of this year, this leading me to believe that alfamovie is somehow dropping these links.
I don’t know if the web hosting company is in the wrong, but I for sure know that http://www.alfamovie.com is the person dropping these and should be removed from google yahoo and msn. I’m filling a report will google soon, once I have my report complete. I luckily happen to have a good friend that works at google that he said would help assist me in this matter.
Kind Regards
John
I have a site with them and checked my code right away and didn’t find it could this be added in adds?