Google "buy levitra" you will see the first and third listings are forum signatures. Obviously this is spam, but how does someone rank their forum signature #1 for such a competitive term?
I'm interested in knowing too. Those pages don't even have much content on them. Are these Black Hat tricks to get those sites in the top 5?
id say its definitely blackhat. I guess their using the authority the forum has to rank, but just doing this alone cant get you to rank like that. There has to be some strategy involved.
Yes they are building these profiles and then they are trackback spam linking to them. You can search yahoo for backlinks and can see hundreds of backlinks have been added to these profile pages with the keyword "Buy Levitra"
The phrase itself is hardly searched at all, very little search volume per month on a phrase makes black hat techniques work much easier. This method would most likely not work with a competitive phrase.
that link is showing 382 links from yahoo. I search yahoo for the sites it is linked to and I see no where in the sites does it say "buy levitra", or have a link to his page. How is he getting backlinks from these sites?
Well it works with Buy Viagra, there is a form profile about 8th for Buy Viagra so yes it probably does work.
I took this profile as a quick example: actionscript.org/forums/member.php3?u=63235 This site shows up as a site in Yahoo explorer for the URL above: http://www.spacerogue.net/wordpress/ View source shows: <a href="http://www.actionscript.org/forums/member.php3?u=63235" title="buy levitra pills"><strong>buy levitra pills</strong></a><br /> Next site shown: http://www.thedigitaledgeblog.com/ View Source: <a href="http://www.actionscript.org/forums/member.php3?u=63235" title="buy levitra"><strong>buy levitra</strong></a><br /> etc...etc...
Could that be because it doesn't have that much search volume either? Would be a valid reason don't you think so doctor?
Ok, well all these sites are hacked, that or the person who designed them all is embeding their links into these sites. But I have a feeling there is some sort of WP exploit going on here.. Check all the backlinks to actionscript.org/forums/member.php3?u=63235 They are all WP sites and no where on the site can you see a link to actionscript.org/forums/member.php3?u=63235 But when you view the source you can. I investigated further thinking that this might just be a big network of well designed spam blogs, then I noticed a senator's blog is effected by this. Finally, not only are they all running WP but they are all running 2.1 WP and I think most if not all are running K2 for WP. This could be a big problem here. EDIT: yep looks like there is an SQL injection exploit associated with this version of WP.
according to some tools, "buy levitra" is a competitive keywords so it is a bit strange to see three of the highest ranks there (forum profiles). However, I see that not many people targeting for keywords "buy levitra" and from some other tools, "buy levitra" is not a competitive keyword. So maybe you are right...