SEO Spamming Using robots.txt
This week Jaime Sirovich, QuadsZilla and I had an interesting thread where Jaime proposed the idea of putting CSS inside a robots.txt protected directory. The CSS, of course, would hide spam on a page from the eyes of anyone who just visited the page thus allowing you to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) spam the spiders visiting your site.
Any robots that respected this would then spider with the spam intact. I believe you would have a better chance with /includes than /images if you are just trying to social engineer people from not being curious. Also, by absolute linking, verses relative linking, it wouldn’t matter if one of the engines cached it or someone used a language translation services, as all of the ones I’ve tested preserve hard links and call them directly or pass them through a proxy unchanged (in the case of the anonymizer).
The major downfall is that I’ve never yet seen anyone do this (which you’d think would be good). If you ever get caught it would be fairly easy for Google to put up a rule, where if it saw CSS linked to from a page hidden by a robots file it was automatically suspicious. It would be easy for them to do because there would be no false positives that I’m aware of. That could easily be made automatic in their algoryithm. The question is how likely are they to do it - which would probably depend on how many people knew about this and were doing it.
I think this is a valid idea for at least the short term, but it will be interesting to see how Matt Cutts and the folks at Google evolves with this new problem. phaithful had a good point when I talked with him about it “If you’re a site that is worth it’s salt… you’ve got lots of people looking to take you down any which way they can. It doesn’t have to be scalable on the engine’s side. They have users policing the pages all the time.” Then the users can just go to Google’s spam report and submit it as an invalid website. Done and done.
Interesting idea, but only good for a short while, is my feeling.
