Attacking the competition using links

ERHAPS it is a case of stating the obvious, but this will be of interest to those Webmasters whose habit is to create directories with index.html therein. This approach often produces more elegant and graceful URL‘s, yet it may entail a hidden cost.

I believe I have identified an issue that badly affects my site and, in particular, its WordPress blog component. This certain deficiency is associated with links that point to a given page whose structure is artifically built using Apache’s mod_rewrite. Several URL’s can point at the same page (even without appending a question mark to pass extra file request arguments). It turns out that http://example.com/Example is different from http://example.com/Example/ (note the extra slash), as perceived by large engines. “Example” is assumed to be an object residing the main directory in the former case. In the latter case, it is definitely a directory, so a structural ambiguity does exist.

Apache redirections handle the two URL’s separately as well. If two inbound links are received (e.g. by creation in whichever sites), there is a chance for ambiguity, which then leads to duplication of pages. This means that pages might be penalised for duplicates in search engines’ cache. I begin to wonder if a vandal could maliciously point to ‘alias addresses’, thereby having pages duplicated in SE indices. In this way, the vandal could lead to penalties which are imposed on other sites — those Web sites where dirty tricks are believed to be employed. Such penalties do not involve the Webmaster, they cannot truly be avoided, but they can help someone knock down the competition in the SERP‘s.

DDOS attacks are another, totally separate matter because they can slow the Web server at worse circumstances, thus slowing down crawling and ruining a site’s profile. That aside, DDOS attacks are illegal and they require a lot of brute-force and excellent connectivity. Link creation does not.

Related item: Aftermath of a Zombie Attack

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 4th, 2006 at 6:41 pm and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.