The usage of web proxies isn’t something new, they have been around for years as a way for web surfers to get around firewall rules in places such as schools and workplaces. The way a web proxy works is quite simple – if you wanted to visit Facebook at work but found that it was blocked by the IT department then you could visit a web proxy and then visit Facebook through it. The company firewall would not detect the connection to Facebook and will let you use it.
Now using a web proxy is fraught with danger, some of them are perfectly fine but how do you know that your Facebook email address and password you just entered into the proxy version of Facebook hasn’t been recorded or stored? Anyway that’s a different story for another day… The problem we are looking at today is about SEO and how some people are now using web proxies hosted on Google’s appspot platform to sabotage legitimate websites in the Google ranking results.
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