High-Star SEO Skill Caught Sneaking Self-Promo Backlinks
jasoncola1 · reddit · 2026-07-17
While using Claude Code to build SEO/GEO tools, a developer discovered hidden self-promotion in claude-seo, a GitHub repository boasting 11.5k stars.\n\nThe project's skill file (SKILL.md, line 119) contains an undisclosed instruction: it commands the AI agent to automatically append the author's Skool community promotional link to the end of the output after executing any of 15 different SEO audit commands.\n\nThis means that using this tool for client projects would unknowingly generate backlinks for the original author with every delivery. The poster warns the community that GitHub stars and fork ratios are no substitute for thorough source code security reviews, urging users to perform comprehensive scans before installing any third-party skills.
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