Hidden Back Links - Let content thieves promote your site
 

Product: 1
Plugin: 2
Query: 0

What does it do

It inserts some hidden links (back to your forum) into the content of long posts. If someone steals your content, copy & paste a post to other places, there will be at least a link back to the original URL of your site. Good for SEO too.

Since you can't stop content thieves anyway, why not take some advantages?

Install

Step 1: import product-copyright.xml
Step 2: add this to the main css->additional css definition

Advanced
* for SEO purpose, there is an option to choose links back to a thread or a post.
* the back links will become visiable after copy&paste. if you like them to stay hidden, just open and modify template "copyright"

Find
Replace
i do not recommend to do this cause this may be bad for SEO.

Sounds stupid?

Yes, stupid enough. It is so easy to remove the back links. But from my experience, thieves are busy, blind, or more stupider. Most of them won't remove the links. You can't image how many back links i got this way.

You could modify the phrase "copyright_source" to some unique string. And google for it.


Will it hurt my SEO?

I can't promise that. but I think it does more good than evil. You could give your opinions here.




The most famous travel forum in chinese world - www.bbkz.com

hmm sounds good. what does everyone else think about it.

Thanks for sharing.

Think il be using this after i have seen what others have to say about it.

in top forum

sorry, wrong version uploaded. plz download again.

Sounds good, I'm gonna try it.

Thanks for sharing.

If the link is also embedded on your own forum as well then you have two links to that thread on your site and this could potentially hurt your SEO.

I'm not sure I'd take the risk from this, hiding links on your own site can dramatically hurt your search engine optimization.

http://www.google.com/support/webmas...n&answer=66353

Use with caution if you feel such a measure is neccassary

i've done a lot of suvery before implement this on my own site.

check your own source code, you will find that you already get a lot of hidden links with vbulletin by default. all the popup menu links are.

with this mod, you will get one more hidden link which pointing to the same url of that page. this is obviously without intention to deceive users and i think google is smart enough to tell that.

and if the links were copied to the other sites, they become non-hidden links. of course they do help your seo.

PS. if you were so afraid of hurting your SEO, you could make it visible even in the original post. just not add the css. the back links will be inserted too.

This has great potential but right now I think i will test this some before going live since i do not want to get penalized with google.

how will I understand that it is working properly

post a new message with length longer than the number you set in "Min Post Length" option. select and copy the content of the post. paste it into notepad or your editor or your blog. you will see a backlink there.

Well I copied an old thread and pasted in a test thread. But the links are not hidden.
There are those links visible, like: "source: name of the forum and link"
edit: Opps, that's how it works, right?

so it works. it meant to be visible anywhere except in the original post.

I see,
last question: where can I change the "source" word to my language? I searched in templates, phrases and xml file. But couldnt find

search for phrase variable named "copyright_source"

Ok, thanks...

Good point.

Here is an in-dept article that exculpates the addon from any black-hat or even grey-hat SEO techniques.

Enjoy! :)

I know this is not meant for vb 3.7.4 but I tried it anyway and got this error:

I've read the articles before i created this mod. I think what Matt said support my idea. You can use hidden text, just not too much. that's why there are options for you to decide in which posts should the links inserted and how many of them.

As i mentioned, this mod act the same way your vbulletin popup menus do. if you think this will do hurt to SEO, maybe you should disable your popup menus either? and i forgot to tell, the back links will not be inserted if the pages are requested by bots. Yes, this is some kind of cloacking, but the vbulletin system itself cloacking the popup menus too by default.

I have implement a lot of so called grey-hat SEO techniques on my own site, and they never hurt my ranking. My attitude toward these techniques is simple: do what is good to users.

proably you have downloaded the previous uploaded file. plz try to download it again. it works for the version 3.6.8 afterward.

or open the plugin "Insert Copyright - Insert Text"

Replace All
With

Not 100% sure abt this mod but going to give it a try anyways as i have hidden links in my sites footer to specific threads on my site and it hasent hurt our SEO yet :)

Some thoughts:
Add options to turn this on/off on a Catogary/ Room basis ?
Add options to turn this on/off on a user group basis ?

I have installed the new version and will let you know if this solves it.

Will it add links to posts already in the database or only to new posts after installing the mod?

you could decide that in the options.

it add the links on the fly for new and old posts, and will not modify anything into database.

Is there a way to add just one link to the end of the post instead of after x amount of characters?

For example:
So that the link looks genuine when it's copied and pasted somewhere else, instad of being stuck somewhere in the middle of the post and not looking right?

Or the anchor text could automatically become the title of the thread?

Maybe a possible option for future releases?

Thanks for the mod, useful but I think needs improved.

it reason why i don't put it at the end of posts is that the link is hidden in the original post, so there is a big probability it won't be selected for copying if it is the last few byte. and when it becomes visiable after pasted, the link is more likely be recognized and removed.

as for the second suggestion, the anchor text should be the link itself because most of the time the content will be copied as plain text intstead of html source code. if the anchor is the thread title, there will not be a back link after pasted.

but of course this is easy if you insist. open template "copyright" and find these two line
replace each with
try to simulate the action of copy&paste. you will see the tricks here.

uhm, interesting, but will wait to see what happens with this mod

any screenshots ?

i will wait for some time from other users experience..............

老黄，干得不错哦

Demo?

When someone steals content, they usually read what they are stealing. So even if they don't see the link when they copy it, they will proof read it and see it when they paste it.

EDIT: all better

[high]* TFEX actually reads the first post....[/high]

I dont get how this works

Hey thanks for the GREAT MOD!!!
So for its working great on vb374 and vb381/380 vbseo installed as well!!!
indexing going normal no harm so far
backlinks WOW so far 3 by alexa 2 by google 7 by yahoo so let those theft as they like hehe
thanks again

WOOOOOW , super hack , super easy installation , easy to modify for vbseo and zoint seo and ... , MOTM , my choice

the link is not hidden in my own site
i inserted the code in the css but its still visible
i use vb 3.8.2

any help there ?

Is it possible to just remove the links all together and have it do Copyright © Local Race Chat instead?

Thanks

This hack will hurt your SEO because Google don't like hidden text/links. You have been warned ;)