This is something I noticed a while back that I thought was interesting (though definately a bit on the gray hat site) – a free followed backlink from tesco.net! I first noticed it showing in our backlinks on Yahoo! Site Explorer a few months ago so investigated further.
Tesco.net have a Google search box that lets you search the web, but serves the results internally on the tesco.net domain.
https://www.tesco.net/default.asp?cr=&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.seoconsult.com&near=&x=0&y=0
Direct a couple of external links towards this page and Google will happily index it, as they have here:
The fact the link is followed (i.e. doesn’t contain the rel=”nofollow” attribute in the HTML) means the link is counted as a vote to your site – and from a pretty powerful domain to boot.
I only blog about this because it’s interesting to look at the implications when you add a feature like this to your site. I’m not suggesting everyone should rush over to Tesco.net and get spammin’.
If Tesco (or any site in the same boat) are listening then the solution would simply be to either nofollow the individual links on the results page, or better yet block all results pages in the robots.txt since these pages have little value themselves and are a waste of crawl budget too.
This blog was written over 6 months ago and Internet Marketing and SEO is an always changing industry which means the information within this blog may be out of date. Use caution when using any methods or suggestions within it.
