Searching for HTML editor on Google, the top ones are actually the results of SEO cheating? !

Search engines have bidding rankings, but even the editors commonly used by developers have been affected? Recently, the developer Caspar stated that he had accidentally discovered an SEO (search engine optimization) cheating.

Caspar discovered that some high ranking online tools for editing or "cleaning up" HTML seem to increase their search engine results rankings by injecting some links into their output secretly.

Caspar suspects the same person behind the cheating of the following tools:

• html-cleaner.com
• html-online.com/editor/
• html5-editor.net
• htmlg.com
• ……

Affected websites include BoingBoing, the official website of the German Football Association and Kaspersky Lab. Ironically, the subject of the affected Kaspersky article is "Keep away from hackers."

Ins and outs

Caspar discovered this phenomenon while building its own online scoreboard product. ta has adopted an effective SEO strategy for this product, but it still fails to top the list of search engine results. In the past year, a competitor called "Scorecounter" has been ahead of ta's products.

When people use Caspar's products, they share links and embed them in their websites, which means that over time, the product will accumulate a large number of inbound links. Over time, the SEO ranking of this product should be invincible, but in search engine rankings, it can't always win against competitors that don't have this proliferation.

So Caspar launched an investigation. After checking the "backlink profile" of Scorecounter, he found that: Scorecounter has 3,600 inbound links, which are accumulated in a short period of time.

This prompted Caspar to view the page containing the link, which increased ta's suspicion.

For example, a blog of the German Football Association contains a link to Scorecounter with the word "score", which is not related to the context of the article. Caspar also found more links on random domains, such as Macworld Shop, Intuit Quickbooks, etc.

After inquiries, Caspar received the following response from an online news portal:

Thank you for reaching out, we have never sold links.

However, things did not stop there. Caspar also found an exception in the HTML cleaning tool (html-online.com/editor/) that he used for a year. A few weeks ago, he discovered that the tool suddenly started to secretly inject links into HTML content.

And this is the secret: the creator of Scorecounter also made an online HTML editor that injects links for certain keywords. The beauty of this scam is that it creates a wonderful positive feedback loop by injecting links into its HTML editor: the higher its search ranking, the more people use it, and the secret links that can be injected. The more.

In addition to the HTML editor and Scorecounter, Caspar also discovered a third product-Ruwix.com. Use Ahrefs.com to easily find a lot of backlinks to Ruwix.com on random websites. Judging from the position of the link in the article, the author of the article is not aware of this.

An entire tool chain

In backlinks, Caspar also discovered a complete network of tools, all of which are part of the same operation and have similar backlink profiles. These tools include:

• htmltidy.net
• html-css-js.com
• divtable.com
• html-cleaner.com
• html5-editor.net
• htmlg.com

Type "HTML Editor" on Google, and you will find that these tools occupy the top three positions in the search results. This proves how successful the scam is.

In addition, Caspar found that at least one tool’s terms contained the following:

We display ads and may randomly place a link to the end of the cleaned document.

Can this disclaimer prevent Google from penalizing it?

Reference link: https://casparwre.de/blog/seo-scam/