Gorilla Team here.

Cloudways … a very well known name in the hosting space.

72 of DA and….. 15.4 Millions of backlinks!!

I recently discovered that they use a very unprofessional, unethical and lame tactic that got them some of those backlinks…. actually, one of the worst I ever seen by any hosting company!!

But I must admit that it’s clever… that’s why I wanted to share it here.

In Cloudways, you can provision applications in just 1 click.

To put it differently, with a push of a button a whole standard WP installation will be installed into your server (ok cool… but keep on reading):

By creating a WP installation inside their platform, their script AUTOMATICALLY create everything you need (WP, database, admin access, some plugins, cache, etc).

The fact is that… together with all of that, without alert and without you to know it (I hardly figured this out) they will also install a BLOG POST on your wordpress!!

It contains some guides, info, links, their name and some partner names!!

First of all:
– without the client to know that, this is just LAME!
– surely there are better ways to guide your customers or to give information (email? platform notification? blog? KB?…)

But the post in WP was published as LIVE… so I wondered: why is that?
I mean, if you want to inform website owners in this (crappy) way, you could just have it inserted as draft or private, right?

Then I had my “aha” moment…

And you will get it too, by seeing the following printscreen on how the post looks like:

Got it?

16 backlinks in one page that bring any user to 16 different blog posts of their cloudways blog!!!!!

Straight from ALL of your clients… which have different domains, IP, reputation, etc…

That is a MASSIVE amount of backlinks…. actually a very nice steady flow and a viral loop too because the more clients you get, the more WP APP they provision inside your platform and the more backlinks you get to your website (16een each time)!

Here is a small query on google to show you my point:

14’800 results with the page title “welcome-to-cloudways”, which is the blog post that gets created “automagically” by the script on all of their clients.

So they used (and I guess they are still currently using) their same clients’ websites, without them to know, to gain thousands of backlinks directed to their cloudways website!!

Brillanti right?

But… why is this lame? 

Well… if you think about their clients for a moment, and you know a few things about SEO, you understand by yourself why this is BAD!!
a) you got content that is published and it’s not relevant to your niche
b) it’s duplicated content so your ranking are jeopardized
e) it’s full of DOFOLLOW links to the same website: cloudways.com so this makes you a bit of a spammer in the eyes of Google…
f) it’s a simple list of backlinks… no content around it… just backlinks… and not context, no LSI, etc.. means bad 😉

Would you do that if you had such a large portfolio of clients “ready to be used” ?

Personally, I wouldn’t.

I put ethical stuff before anything else.

But maybe that’s why Gorilla Communication has only 148 backlinks 😉