Hidden Quantcast links on Digg.com

Posts : 1016 Points : 26435 Join date : 2012-03-27

I was playing around with the Google cached version of Digg.com’s homepage when I found this:

Of course, that link doesn’t show in the full site design, so I decided to Digg (excuse the pun) a little deeper and take a look at the code:

Looks like the “href=” lurking in the tag is up to no good. It’s the 1 pixel tracking gif’s alt tag showing as a link in the Google cached version of the page. Hmm.. Does Google think this is a juice passing link? I did a quick query and got this page:

I was suprised to see a internal page from Digg and not the homepage, but then Google’s Link: operator works in mysterious ways tells us absolutely nothing of any use, er, whatsoever. It is useful though to know that Google’s index displays at least one link.

Interested and wanting to find out more I took a look at this from the Yahoo site explorer perspective. Amazing linkbuilding practice there, Quantcast:

399,560,780 Back links. The image above is the is the top 5 sites linking to Quantcast. Here are the next 15:TITLE URL
ImageShack http://www.imageshack.us/
Bravenet http://www.bravenet.com/
digg http://www.digg.com/
Technorati http://www.technorati.com/
Bible Gateway http://www.biblegateway.com/
The Economist http://www.economist.com/
Dictionary.com http://dictionary.reference.com/
Last.FM http://www.last.fm/
Pandora Internet Radio http://www.pandora.com/
Drudge Report http://www.drudgereport.com/
DivX http://www.divx.com/
LinkedIn: Relationships Matter http://www.linkedin.com/
Second Life http://secondlife.com/
CBS http://www.cbs.com/

And here are the next 1000.

Unless I’m greatly mistaken, the tracking gif implementation for non java enabled browsers doesn’t have to carry the “href=” link back to Quantcast. As long as the tracking gif has a unique filename, right?

You should remove the “href” at least, and I’d be quite tempted to remove the tag altogether. After all, who visits Imageshack, Digg and Last.fm without java enabled?