Legal
We can’t give legal advice. It’s safe to say everything about knowingly buying links on hacked sites is probably illegal. If you’re in a tough market and building your own link network isn’t good enough you should probably spend time finding an easier market. But, some people like to rank for insane keywords because they have an incredible business model behind it. In those cases, it’s common to find hidden links on hacked sites.
Networks
Hidden links almost always come from hacked sites. Before it was popular, Russian link network SAPE was awesome for buying links on hacked sites. As with any Russian link network, there are a number of hoops you have to jump through to be approved including handing over a passport and other uncomfortable things with your personal data. Something about handing over your personal data to Russian hackers to buy links sounds like a bad idea. Don’t do it.
“Brokers” are the way to go, if you absolutely must buy hidden links for some purpose. You can find them on black hat forums, and they deal directly with multiple link networks and buy for you. Of course they take a hefty fee out of it, but at least they don’t have so much of your personal info.
The bad part is, they still have the keys to your rankings. If you wake them up to a great market, expect them to shut off your links or just use your funds to pay for their links and beat you at your own game. Not fun.
Hacking
There are plenty of website vulnerability/exploit scanners. Pick one. Find the exploit. Check out how the exploit is done. Use three layers of proxies, hack, and hope you don’t get caught.
On the “hope you don’t get caught” section, remember you’re doing this to point links at the end of the day and those sites you point to are probably tied to you. Most people aren’t used to covering their footprint which is easily detectable by NetComber. Sometimes hackers use cloaking to only display the hacked links to Google. It’s risky.
Hidden
The very interesting part to me is how hidden links pass juice. The hidden links are in DIVs that are simply not defined properly. For example, this is live as of the time of writing:
<div style=\64\69\73\70\6c\61\79:\6e\6f\6e\65>Attractive prices <a href="http://www.healthcaremediations.com/usa/purchaseviagra/" title="Buy viagra online">Buy viagra</a> without prescription. Learn about <a href="http://www.diecasting.org/viagradosage/" title="viagra minimum dosage">Viagra dosage</a> recommended and how it is supplied. Also <a href="http://www.paperroll.com/sources/" title="Purchase viagra">Buy viagra</a> express shipping discreet packaging.</div>
So notice, it isn’t display:none
. It isn’t even coded properly. It should say <div style="somethingnotstrangeandwherearequotationmarks">
. It’s just a broken piece of code that Google still accepts as a link. Pretty nifty way to hide links on a page.
How effective is it?
That site is #2 for buy viagra right now. Of course they are riding on the authority of healthcaremediations.com, but the link building is no accident.
How hidden is it?
You can’t even see the links ApexHandTools.com. Of course this will probably be cleaned up after this article is posted, but it’s so hidden that even in Google cache, plaintext mode, you can’t search and find the text “viagra” on the page. Yet Google knows it’s there. It’s true for dsireusa.org too, and every other hacked site. Just a miscoded DIV layer. It works better than display:none which doesn’t pass much juice. Another trick (though not as prominent lately) is:
<div style="height: 0px;">
Keep these ideas in mind if you want to create a realistic looking blog network that just “appears” to be hacked.
BaconRank?
Relevance is an issue and keeps these sites held down. Because a space like “buy viagra” is monitored so closely and manually reviewed to kill the latest blatant hacks, it’s actually a low competition area with high stakes.
Low competition? Not really. But right after a PageRank update you might see Viagra domains ranking with a PR1 or PR0. Most sites in the risky niches today run off someone else’s authority whether it’s a press release or subdomain of a powerful site. Similar to ranking YouTube videos, a couple junk links will push it to the top.
It’s important to remember that Google has to pull results from somewhere. There aren’t authority results outside of the legitimate Viagra site. You can’t really even handpick the results for “buy viagra” or “buy viagra online” because there shouldn’t be any quality results. It’s just the nature of the niche.
Do You Need It?
Just because this is a “sexy” link-building strategy because of how risky it is, we will almost always advise that you don’t need it. There are easier ways to make money without risking identity theft or jail time.
Take what you can learn from how it works and apply it elsewhere without blatantly jumping into buying hidden links or hacking them yourself.