Blog Ranking Exploits

An easy way to increase your blog's visibility is to submit to various blog-ranking websites. Still it's not much use if your blog's ranked like 12,000^th of the 15,000. So clearly, you have to be on the top. But to achieve this, you have have visitors to vote for you, or at least visit your site to somewhat increase your ranking. That's sort of the catch on the whole ranking thing.

However, there are a few little tricks one can try to increase these rankings. For example, there are sites like BlogsOnTop, which rank blogs by their traffic, which is measured by a hardly noticeable little image somewhere on the bottom of the page. This can be pretty easily exploited: there are tons of popular forums and community sites that allow images in posts, or better yet, in signatures. You just write something catchy to start a conversation, and a few hundred unique IP's will request your ranking image for quite some time. Nexon's gaming forums, for instance, are used by hundreds of thousands of people, and they allow all kinds of external images.

Other sites, like PublicityWheel require the visitor to click on a particular banner, thus loading a page in the browser that generates some credit for the blog owner. So one can put it in a hidden iframe and visitor's don't have to worry about clicking anymore. For now, there's a small (but growing) community there, so don't try this, you'll get caught I don't think they filter out referrers in the HTTP request headers, but they can crawl your site and check for that hidden iframe. But they probably won't check your other websites, so this ranking system still remains quite unsafe.

A much safer approach is BlogToplist. The visitor is required to click on the vote link, and then click on the vote button again, on their website, so it can't be controlled by a script (or at least in XSS-safe browsers). Each IP can vote once a day. Seems pretty safe, huh? So what could the poor wanna-be-hacker blogger kid do?

Well, he could install Firefox & Greasemonkey, and write a script that would click on that button automatically (document.getElementById('btnid').click() works fine in FF). Then he could install TOR to get different IP's. He might already have Python installed, so he could use it to make TOR change the exit-node, say, once a minute. Now a clever Greasemonkey script can do the rest.

In fact, our blogger kid could replace the whole Firefox stuff with a simple Python script that uses urllib/urllib2 (or the socket module) and put the whole process in the background. Of course, getting a vote every minute will make him suspicious, the BlogToplist admins might suspend his account. But he might be clever, and generate votes in random intervals, faking different browsers and OS's. Eventually he might get caught, there will always be a way to fake visitors/votes.

To be extra-greedy, one could put all this stuff (including BlogUpp!) on a single page and host it somewhere like Google Page Creator, and flood it with meaningless traffic (1:1 traffic exchange works fine, try it with ABP).

Just to be clear here, I don't use any of these methods. As you can see, this blog's ranking in quite low. I don't advice anyone to use scripts to boost up their rankings, but I do want to warn admins to be cautious. And of course, vote for my blog — but only if you liked it :)