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Last night Alex Graves from Bronco posted an article discussing the Payday Loans niche and how he thinks that the Google algorithm has been gamed, even after the Penguin and EMD update.
I tweeted to him, the payday loans case study that I did back in June (this was the first case study of its kind, that ignited a series of articles talking about how the payday loans niche is abused in Google). He is saying that this new site ranking on the “payday loans” keyword in the UK was not a hacked site like I described in my June article. He said that it is a “normal” site that somehow managed to abuse the new low quality links & unnatural link detection mechanisms of Google.(post Penguin and EMD)
I took the site ranking no.1 for an analysis spin in cognitiveSEO and … my oh my … what I did find out?
All the red flags are here for Google to see:
Extremely Over Optimized Anchor Text Profile
- payday loans(57%)
- payday loan(43%)
- payday loans online – payday sam(0.04%)
Super High Link Velocity
- 633 Referring Domains
- 8256 Links
- all of these links appeared in the last 4 days
100% Dofollow Links
100% Deeplink Ratio
94% Not In Content Links
87% Short Paragraph of Text Links
But the BIG Surprise was this
So How did the Google Visual Crawler get fooled here?
Well I have 2 hypotheses:
– high crawl delay compared to the normal bot.(can this also be slowed by Hurricane Sandy? I personally do not think so)
– identifies the visual link position incorrectly due to a CSS trick used. The visual crawler might be tricked in thinking this is a Header Link because of how a the browser rendering engine works. This might be due to DOM inheritance parameters that might be incorectly passed as positions relative to the 0,0 axis position of the screen.
Practically what it does, is it puts a CSS Style with an absolute position and a top of -9999px and it hides it from the screen. This is not a new method, but combined with the rest of the pieces in the “magic formula” and Googles’ inability to crawl visually as fast as it does with the normal Google Bot, it might led to this sites’ ranking no.1 for a few days.
The same hidden css trick is used for other sites that are now ranking top 10 in the SERPS … so this is clearly a demonstrated black hat technique that works.
All of these seemed to be masked by natural looking metric profiles such as MajesticSEO Trust Flow, Google PR, Ahrefs rating, SEOmoz Ranks … all of them looking natural.
And to finalize … all of the links are posted on hacked sites.
You can download the in-depth analysis data here:
What do you think?
Have you seen this strategy used anywhere else or do you know any other black hat technique that is worth mentioning here?
The domain was registered 3 days ago? How did you get over 600 linking root domains? Have you 301 redirected them from a previous payday loan domain?
well. first of all this is not my domain and second of all maybe there are some 301s but the majority are hacked site that were added a picece of code to display that link hidden in the site
Having recently been defrauded by a payday loan company, it comes as no surprise that they would resort to hacking sites to gain maximum exposure in the serp’s. This was an interesting read Razvan, thank you for doing the report.
great work, people don’t realise that they are giving their personal details to hackers when they are sent to these sites by Google. OK the site isn’t hacked bu they are still giving their details to hackers.
How long before hackers then sell on applicants details to ID fraudsters, who says it isn’t already?
I guy called Jordon posted on the Jordon Graves website not Alex. I don’t think Jordon’s first language is English though. #pedant
interesting. will double check on that. tks
Interesting that my authorship is being questioned but I’ll confirm that I did write the article.
Why is it on Jordan’s site, it’s my brother but feel free to check the ‘team’ page on the site or contact either of us for confirmation.
Plus, check Google.co.uk for PayDay Loans just now! With no spamming and nhbs dot com are on the first page! Google’s gone mad!
The Truth Is Out There,
So the site has no spamming or negative SEO holding it there?
Try to explain the 2,478 links pointing into the site with the term Payday Loans….
Clearly not done by the owners of the site, but proof that you are not looking at the complete picture here…
Great article! What plugin did you use to analyze the code?
no plugin. just Chrome – View Source and Inspect Element 🙂
Great investigation with the software you used and a great conclusion.
Its a merry-go-round. The seem to have a massive production line of sites which go to page one for a few days then drop back. Theres only one actual payday lender on page one constantly in the uk – apart from all the adwords of course! Google seem complacent on this one.
Google unceasingly baffles me with their insensible claims about upholding relevant and useful websites eminently void of spam while the reality fiercely contends with that ridiculous claim. We love Google, but when they fail to live up to their claims and apparent goals, there’s nothing we can do.
I don’t know if anyone acquiesces to my comment above, but I’m sure most people would unreservedly agree that Google’s search engine needs some fixing. In the meantime, I gotta look up some search results for spam exploration. Starting with payday loans…