Serious MSN Flaw

Easy to build bogus banklinks

[elklabone]

I've found a site ranking well in the new MSN, and when I was looking at their backlinks, I found something curious.

They have lots of domains pointing to their homepage, but they're all hosted on same IP!

Homepage domain.com IP *.*.153.187
Linking otherdomain1.com IP *.*.153.188
Linking otherdomain2.com IP *.*.153.188
Linking otherdomain3.com IP *.*.153.188
Linking otherdomain4.com IP *.*.153.188
Linking otherdomain5.com IP *.*.153.188
Linking otherdomain6.com IP *.*.153.188

And on and on and on. Google would ignore these as backlinks because they're on a similar IP, correct?

However, MSN loves 'em, and apparently the IP just has to be off by 1. Looks like an easy way to boost rankings in MSN. Think they'll fix this?

--Mark

[nzmatt]

How do you know MSN "loves 'em"?

[elklabone]

This site ranks #40 in Yahoo for same term...

Doesn't show anywhere in Google for same term... not on first 8 pages anyway!

New MSN put them at #3. I realize that MSN may work differently than Yahoo and Google, however it looks to me like MSN is counting backlinks that Yahoo and Google discount.

[siteseo]

Yahoo is also susceptible to run-of-site links and links from same IP block. I'm sure both MSN and Y! will eventually filter it out, just as Google does. MSN's algo is very simplistic in this early incarnation, but will evolve quickly.

[inbound]

A site with the same characteristics has appeared all over the UK results. Not the best day for it to happen, I suspect that most people won't notice anyway and the company in question will make a tidy sum from the amount of searches done today (unsurprisingly a PPC junk site).

28,000 inbounds from the same IP, hmm I could do that. Not that I would but it does make you mad when it effects your place in the serps.