Generated by webalizer version 2.01
Found out about an interesting Blackhat link building technique. You can use search engines to find web logs that are publicly accessible, then you can refer your site to the site with the accessible weblogs, and viola, you have a link in the eyes of the search engine. For example, this site has the list of referrers, and there are plenty of sketchy ones on there, no doubt a result of referrer spam. If you use Yahoo Site Explorer to look at the inbound links to one of the sites, you’ll see a lot of links from Webalizer logs.
As with most blackhat techniques, it wont be too difficult for the search engines to determine when a site is abusing this. Link spammers typically use automated programs to generate links, and go for quantity. So if a site magically appears on public weblogs for 1,000’s of sites, that would raise some flags. Now the search engines can’t penalize a site for this, as you could easily add a competitor’s url to the weblogs, but they are most certainly disregarding the links coming from these. Do I know this for sure? No. But if I can figure this out in a couple of minutes, I imagine 50 Phd’s can figure it out also… Interestingly, it looks like Google isn’t returning results for logs with links, further evidence they are onto the technique. If I have heard about it, it is old news…