We’ve released this plugin to allow blog owners to reward regular posters with a backlink. You can see it in action by looking to the right, we’re displaying it under “contributors”.

You can choose in the options what it takes for a writer to appear, by selecting x posts in y days. Maybe you want 1 post in the last week, 3 in the last month, 12 in the last year – its completely up to you.

Everything is automated. When a writer qualifies, their link will appear without any input from you. If they ever no longer qualify, their link will simply vanish until they qualify again.

In the settings you can select any writers that you want to block from the list. You can also choose whether it displays sitewide or homepage only.

To install it, simply copy the php file to your “plugins” folder. Activate it as a plugin, then go to Widgets (under Appearance) and drag it to where it needs to go. You can change any settings under “WP Contributors” in Settings.

The “powered by” credit link is completely optional.  It is Off as standard, but if you’d like to help support us then feel free to tick the box to display the link

You can download the plugin here. I’ll leave comments on for this one, feel free to ask any questions or leave any feedback.

UKbanners.com, a popular banner exchange system, has found itself at the centre of a massive information leak after accidently posting its customers email addresses, websites and passwords online.

(click to enlarge)

All that anyone has to do to view all this personal information is visit this url – http://ukbanners.com/cgibin/shortfall.cgi

Looks like a massive own goal to leave all this information out in the public.  The same security issue also affects their other websites – ukbuttons.com and cheekybanners.com.

Hovering over the username on that page showed their login name and password. Its unbelievable that they would show all this information on a publicly accessible page, but to then store passwords unencrypted is simply bizarre.

With those login details anyone can login and request payments, edit banners etc.  Lets see if they fix it before this post goes live (I’m emailing them and warning them this has been published to appear tomorrow, 4th June)

No, before you get ready to report me, I am not actually selling pagerank 9 links

This post is going to be lengthy, so I apologise in advance for that – no way around it as there is a lot going on in this scam, but I hope it will help you falling into any traps when you are out building links. We’ll be going from the sleazy link sales forums, to hacked Egyptian government sites and beyond, so I hope you find it interesting.

It all started when a client emailed me the contents of a private message from someone trying to sell them a pagerank 9 link:

PAGERANK 9 Link Sales

We are selling links from very strong PR9 site.

Site language : English – US IP
Duration : monthly / 3 months / 6 months / Yearly

all links visible. no blogpost,hidden or hack.

Pm me if you are serious buyer.Prices not cheap

You can read the original sale offer thread here. I would have done this post without actual url’s, but when you attempt to use criminal activity to rip off one of my clients, then you lose the right to having your url’s kept hidden.

The pagerank 9 in question is http://universitevetoplum.com/, which appears to be a Hungarian campus of a USA college.

The pagerank appears to be valid:

So lets take a look at its backlinks:

Pagerank 9 – www.mohp.gov.eg – Egypts Ministry of Health
Pagerank 8 – www.ukzn.ac.za – South African University homepage
Pagerank 8 – www.presidency.gov.eg/index.html – Egyptian Presidents homepage
Pagerank 7 – www.caricomlaw.org – Official Caribbean Law site
Pagerank 7 – www.asil.org – The American Society of International Law Home Page

At this point, the original link for sale would certainly pass a quick examination – its pagerank is technically legit, and it has a handful of extremely strong  backlinks pointing at it.

Lets examine each of those backlinks in detail:

www.mohp.gov.eg – Look at what can be seen in the source code: (warning: some of the links in it are nsfw, I would advise not typing them in your browser…)

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So within the Egypt Ministry of Health pagerank 9 website, we have 6 links to mainly nsfw Turkish websites, and the pagerank 9 in question.  The links are completely hidden from view, you cannot see them on the page itself.

www.ukzn.ac.za – This site is down right now, but you can view its Google cache.  Then in the source code we have (click to enlarge):

So here we have a large international university, again linking to the pr9 in question, and yet more Turkish porn sites.

www.presidency.gov.eg/index.html – In the source of this one we have two separate lots of hidden links:

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This time they’ve opted to hide a bunch of them by using a 15 x 15 white image (on a white background) to disguise the fact there is a link present. Again the links point to the PR9 site along with yet more Turkish porn.

www.caricomlaw.org – In the source of this one we have:

Click to enlarge

Yet more links to Turkish porn and our original site in question.

www.asil.org - So onto the source of the final one:

Click to enlarge

I’m sure it won’t be a surprise at this point – a link to the pr9, and some more NSFW turkish stuff. This time they have opted to use a 0 pixel size link to hide the facts the links are there. Again you cannot see them on the page.

It is amazing all of this is still working in 2010 – Its hardly rocket science to detect links hidden with css, or white squares on a white background as the linking image, or images set to size “width=0″.  And it is undoubtedly working, since we can see the pagerank all flowing into http://universitevetoplum.com/, where the links are being sold for $650 per month.

Illegal? Sure. Profitable? Undeniably.

I hope anyone reading has learned a little from this on how to check links and make sure everything is as it seems – remember this doesn’t only need to apply to extremely high pagerank links. I would bet if these criminals applied the same tactics to get lower pagerank sites, it could go on forever unnoticed.