BusinessOnLine SEO Blog - Search Engine Marketing techniques for 3rd generation SEO» Hacked http://www.businessol.com/seo-blog BusinessOnLine SEO Blog - Search Engine Marketing techniques for 3rd generation SEO Wed, 16 Feb 2011 21:12:24 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9 en hourly 1 Cli.gs URLs Hacked Forwarding to lansner.freedomblogging.com http://www.businessol.com/seo-blog/2009/06/cligs-urls-hacked-forwarding-to/ http://www.businessol.com/seo-blog/2009/06/cligs-urls-hacked-forwarding-to/#comments Wed, 17 Jun 2009 19:16:00 +0000 Benj Arriola http://businessol.com.php5-5.dfw1-1.websitetestlink.com/seo-blog/?p=110 Cli.gs, (Cligs) a URL shortening/forwarding service has been hacked where several users have been reporting their older created forwarders were all going to 1 single location. Below is a screenshot within the Cligs user interface displaying some older saved forwarded URLs in my own Cligs account.

All of which were now going to:

http://lansner.freedomblogging.com/2009/06/14/twitter-hashtag-conversations/25613/

And all had the title:

Hashtag? How to join those Twitter

In the early days of URL forwarding, probably the most widely used service was TinyURL which has served well for people that were sending links via email or instant messenger because sometimes long URLs with tons of parameters get cut off in the sending process by human error, or technical error.

When microblogging came out, and Twitter gained a lot of popularity, more URL shorterners started popping out because of the limited characters allowed in a microblog post which is usually 140 characters. One of the popular URL shorterners is Cligs and the value added service Cligs had over the others, was the free web analytics bundled together with the URL shorterner. One more benefit that many others also had was the custom folder name, and the changeable URLs.

I am not sure if the changeable URL was a good idea, but URLs can always change, link in changing a domain, changing a CMS platform, and you would not want to have dead-404-shortened-URLs. But once someone gets to exploit a security hole on Cligs, this can be a vulnerability of losing all your created forwarders and will be forwarder to some place else.

From an SEO point of view… if any of your forwarding URLs get’s posted by one way or another on some other site that has good search engine friendly links, Cligs forwarders are actually 301 redirects, thus giving link value. So who ever hacked into Cligs, must have had this in mind to steal some links in the attempt to rank higher.

Now the question is who has done this? That we really don’t know. Although we do now that http://lansner.freedomblogging.com is owned by real estate bloggers Jonathan Lasner and Jeff Collins. Could they be responsible for this? What are your thoughts?

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