Top 20 Stealth Links - Getting your url in front of Search Engines by nontraditional means

Getting into the "URLs Live Every Where" mindset.

[Brett_Tabke]

In another thread on Virtual Page Rank [webmasterworld.com], we talked about ways that you can link to a site other than a direct http href link or links that may not show up on the link command radar.

Lets start a list of the ways sites can link, refer, or point urls to your pages other than direct hrefs. Mainly, we are after ways that SE's such as Google may run into and use urls they find:

1. another site links to your graphics ( img src=http://www.searchengineworld.com/gfx/logo.png )
   
2. a site links to your javascript files
   
3. a site links to your css files?
   
4. rss feeds and other xml feeds that people can link to without notice or referrals necc being generated.
   
5. links in email that some se's can read (yahoo mail, hotmail, Gmail [webmasterworld.com])
   
6. links marked with noindex
   
7. links marked with nofollow
   
8. raw urls within javascript or js comments
   
9. raw urls within css or in css comments
   
10. urls within meta data of graphics and video files
    
11. urls within html comments
    
12. urls within the head section, meta data of a html page, or alternate html entities (alt, name, id, etc)
    
13. links or pages that maybe surfed while visitor has page rank engaged on the toolbar
    
14. the target of a constructed, obfuscated, or encrypted js url (hidden until executed)
    
15. links behind pay walls that Google can spider via webmaster tools
    
16. Domains that have been 301'd with links.
    
17. Links in Flash movies (games, quizzes, etc).
    
18. non href'ed url's. (raw url on page http://www.webmasterworld.com)
    
19. Links in any documents other than web pages e.g. .doc, .pdf, .txt, etc.
    
20. blocking a page in robots.txt should make it blocked from bots, but they still spider it.
    
21. Domain registrations/Whois and DNS data
    
22. Links in form data.
    
23. Links in other Google produced software (gadgets, widgets)
    
24. NonTraditional pages (irc, twitter, UseNet, Yahoo, or Google Groups.
    
25. Advertising links (AdWords/Yahoo), and other services like Maps.
    

What else? Wow - blew through 20....
I will update as we go. Thanks to everyone who pitches in...

[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 3:57 pm (utc) on April 19, 2009]

[Marcia]

In Gmail: It's been noticed going way back that when the Adsense bot hits a page, Googlebot is hot on its trail; in fact, there's an overlap between them. In Gmail, contextual ads are served, so the content has to be "analyzed" in order to serve up relevant ads.

Speaking of which, their contextual ads are also served in Googlegroups, which could also be a source of discovery.

Further along lines of behavioral advertising, they've got plenty of data from DoubleClick and Google Affiliate Network. Every new page/URL put up that an affiliate link is put on phones home.

[edited by: Marcia at 4:58 am (utc) on April 21, 2009]

[robzilla]

If links in Gmail were to pass juice, Google would have to make sure their spam filters are infallible or they'd be rewarding spammers (borderline e-mail marketers included), but of course there's a difference between passing juice and URL discovery.

[robzilla]

Audio information retrieval is getting more advanced. Can we expect Google to start word spotting (url spotting?) in audio files in the future? Sounds a bit farfetched, perhaps, but who knows.

[GF_Diablos]

I don't think it's far fetched considering the thing they did is the election with finding themes in the videos, www must be easier to recognise as an audio string than "election"

[Vimes]

to add to 2clean's thoughts

Google account Web History must a great source of brand spanking new URL's

Vimes

[tedster]

I haven't even seen evidence that links in gmail are used for url discovery, to say nothing of send any juice.

[trillianjedi]

Why would a Search Engine restrict itself to URL format?

I think if I were building an SE, and my main focus was therefore on finding and indexing information, I would be casting the net slightly wider and looking for words in pages which don't exist as far as my dictionary is concerned. That might indicate a company name, for example.

If my company name was "Jepstons" and that word was used on an English language page (and therefore I know it is not a word, but it could be a brand) then my natural inclination would be to ascertain if jepstons.top_level_domain exists and if it does I'd be tempted to go index it.