Microsoft Tracks Down Mass Fake Web Pages

An anonymous reader writes "According to an article on New York Times, Microsoft researchers have discovered tens of thousands of junk Web pages, created only to lure search-engine users to advertisements. While most of us have run across them from time to time, the company researchers have found the pages are deliberately generated in vast numbers by a small group of shadowy operators. By following the money trail, Microsoft researchers were able to track the flow from big-name advertisers to search engine spammers. Many use Google's blogspot.com to set up spam doorway pages. 'The practice has proved to be a vexing problem for the major search companies, which struggle to prevent both spammers and companies specializing in improving legitimate clients' Web traffic -- a field known as search-engine optimization -- from undermining their page-ranking systems. Surprisingly, the researchers noted that the vast bulk of the junk listings was created from just two Web hosting companies and that as many as 68 percent of the advertisements sampled were placed by just three advertising syndicators.' The report is available at Microsoft Strider Search Ranger project page."

Comments

Nice work

[MysteriousPreacher]

There's actually some pretty decent research here. The site cloning report is a good read.

http://research.microsoft.com/SearchRanger/Spam_At tack_by_Website_Clones.htm

The cloning of popular blogs as been a scourge for a while now, both for manipulating search engines and good old fashioned advertising - using someone else's content to draw visitors in

Re:Why?

[fruey]

The average return on investment on Search Engine Optimisation (generally: increasing your search position on specific keywords relevant to your business) can be about 10x more than the return on keyword purchasing, which can cost 0.30c - several dollars. Every click costs money.

Once you've optimised to your keywords in "natural search" e.g. *free* results, then your investment keeps paying (you need to maintain positions of course, but this is lower cost, especially if you're in a niche) whereas in paid advertising you have to keep giving money to Google and, in competitive industries, your cost per click will be subject to significant inflation...

Firefox is good.

[wetelectric]

Firefox has an extension called customizegoogle. It adds a 'filter' option to a google results page. Allows one to filter out the sneaky pages that hi-jack your search query.