101 Articles .Edu & .Gov Link Spam
.EDU AND .GOV LINK SPAM
Education sites and government sites are a primary target of search engine manipulators. Primary reason behind this is, in SEO point of view, .edu and .gov sites are predominantly ranked higher by popular search engines for their quality backlinks and proper distribution/density of keywords.
Spammer's activities on .edu and .gov sites and how they indulge in .edu and .gov link spam
Government (GOV) and Education (edu, .ac) etc run excellent websites. Because of their present formation they have high quality network and high quality backlinks in their network. Most of the education and government sites link among themselves and this gives them maximum benefit because there are some very high quality government sites in their network. For example any site getting backlinks from whitehouse.gov gets maximum benefit because this site has over 100,000 quality backlinks coming into it and most of the links are from valuable resources. Google measurement of PageRank gives this site a PageRank of 9 or even 10 sometimes.
Same with sites like Stanford.edu. This university has links from almost all the leading universities in US which gives them a strong internet presence. But they have lots of blogs which are unattended under their domain which spammers exploit to get backlinks. Instead of doing this in an ethical and natural way; spammers indulge in unethical activities to get backlinks from these reputable sites. They have their own ways to achieve this.
Here we have mentioned some of the ways in which the spammers exploit these reputable .edu and .gov websites for increasing backlinks and PageRank for their own websites.
1.Under the table negotiations or back door entry
By getting to know someone from the education sites it could be a current or past student or a faculty search engine spammers insert their link in footer or header. Many education sites provide a section for their students and faculties to publish their work. Search engine manipulators use this to exploit the value of .edu domains.
These techniques are otherwise known as under the table negotiations or back door entry. In this way the spammer builds backlinks for his/her poor and uninformative website and increases its search rankings. Also educational organizations and government sites run various clubs and organize events regularly.
All of them are not self-funded. Most of the time in the name of sponsors, they pay a certain amount to the club or the event and in return get a backlink from an authoritative site like .edu and .gov sites.
2.Discounts and Offers for employees and Students
To gain a valuable backlink from an educational or a government organization, companies offer discounts say 10%-50% for their products and services to the students or employees.
Refer the screenshot below:
http://www.uiowa.edu/~cqi/uiedp.html
3.Spam the forums, blogs and other feeds
The forums and blogs on education and government sites become a common target to people who somehow need to push their rankings higher. Most of the times the un-moderated comments section, un-attended forum section are hit by spammers to paste numerous links to their website in an attempt to drive traffic for his/her website.
Spamming in forums, blogs brings down their reputation as it annoys millions of web surfers and site members who tries to avoid these spam messages and provide or find useful information.
4. Fake Profiles will be created
The spammer also creates fake profiles in .edu and .gov forums and blogs to post comments and threads. He/she makes use of members who are involved in these sites, to create such a fake profile and in turn post comments containing links to their sites on these sites looking like a very legitimate and authorized person. And thus many members and site viewers are manipulated and they end up clicking on those links just to land on a poor and an uninformative website. He/she also makes use of automated programs, bots and spiders to create fake profiles in these forums and blogs owned by .edu or .gov sites.
Since these profiles are created by automated programs, they make use of dynamic addresses which keeps changing from time to time and it becomes almost impossible to track them down for a proper trial.Some site owners are ready to go any extent to boost their rankings and follow some of the above techniques to gain an authoritative backlink. By doing so, the website rankings will be increased due to the high quality backlinks, stuffed keywords, manipulation of search engine algorithms etc. As a result, spamming destroys the sole purpose of search engines by amalgamating search result sets and annoying millions of web surfers.
The above mentioned activities have made search engines to behave quite ruthless on simple mistakes employed by genuine website owners which in turn leading the website to be banned for a simple mistake. Even .edu and .gov websites are finding the activities to be very unfair and manipulative as their reputation is at stake and they are striving hard to keep their organization as well as websites clean from these spammers and hackers. Also the reputation and the reliability of these .edu and .gov websites are under the scanner as people are losing trust in these sites.
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Working Example |
The above image is a typical example of Edu and Gov Link Spam where the people are asked to click the link in the comment to get edu and gov site backlinks. After clicking the link, a site opens which pops out a scam scheme.
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References |
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Other sites that refer to the same manipulation tactic are as follows |