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Spam Sites Infesting Google Search Results

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the hate-when-that-happens dept.

The Google Watchdog blog is reporting that "Spam and virus sites infesting the Google SERPs in several categories" and speculates, ...Google's own index has been hacked. The circumvention of a guideline normally picked up by the Googlebot quickly is worrisome. The fact that none of the sites have real content and don't appear to even be hosted anywhere is even more scary. How did millions of sites get indexed if they don't exist?

3 of 207 comments (clear)

  1. SEOs by Chilled_Fuser · · Score: 5, Informative


      Using one page of information for Google's spider and then using a redirect for a non-spider user. It's an SEO tactic.

    1. Re:SEOs by Billosaur · · Score: 4, Informative

      It's more than likely related to IP address than user agent. I used to work in web site metrics, and the number of fouled up user agents and spoofs was always staggering, but IP was a pretty good indicator of who was doing something. No doubt the bad guys have tracked the Google bot's IP over a long period of time and perhaps made some correlations to give them a pretty good idea if the site is being revisited by Google under an assumed user agent. I'm not sure, but it would seem to me that Google would have thought of spoofing it's IPs long ago, to avoid people being able to track them, though I can't say how you'd go about that.

      --
      GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
  2. What hijacked phrases? Not seeing this. by Animats · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'm not seeing any of this. I'm trying commonly spammed phrases in Google, and seeing nothing unusual.

    • "digital camera" - OK
    • "ink cartridge" - OK
    • "flat screen TV" - PCworld at the top
    • "auto parts" - OK
    • "london hotels" - usual results
    • "britney spears" - usual results
    • "viagra" - Pfizer, Wikipedia, etc.
    • "rebelde" (the Mexican telenovela, one of the top ten searches) - normal
    Not one .cn site in the top 10 for any of these.