Spam Sites Infesting Google Search Results

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?

Comments

Re:SEOs

[glindsey]

Which raises the question: Why not have GoogleBot do a check also as a normal user-agent (IE/Firefox/etc.) and see if the page is significantly different than when it identifies itself? At the very least GoogleBot could check if there are common blacklist words ("viagra" et al) on the website when identifying itself as IE or Firefox.

I Bet It's a Simpler Explanation

[eldavojohn]

Google is susceptible to an erosion of moral tenacity, just like any other corporation. This would be far more interesting but the sad fact is that it's probably the simplest explanation: spammers are merely more sophisticated. I mean, a while ago a few people teamed up to Google bomb Bush as a "miserable failure" and it worked. They exploited Google's page ranking system. It's pretty easy to exploit because they patented it so you merely need to read the patent. From there you get an idea of how to exploit it.

I imagine that spammers could band together or simply get botnets 'clicking' as independent IP addresses links that boost their page rank. That's how it worked with Bush, they simply linked his homepage as "miserable failure" and suddenly he was the number one result from that query in Google.

I find this more likely an explanation than someone changing the data or values in the database. There's going to be plenty of evidence left in the logs & it's not like nobody's going to notice. This is Google's bread & butter, no amount of money in the world could entice a worker to mess with it. They would have to be exceptionally stupid as the lawsuits that follow would be in the billions.

Re:I Bet It's a Simpler Explanation

[nahdude812]

Or Google Analytics.

Re:SEOs

[dschuetz]

I was pretty sure that Google already did some kind of checking for this sort of dodge. It could be that the sites in question have found some way to dodge the dodge -- maybe they figured out when a google revisit (with a different user agent) would occur, or maybe they recognize google IP addresses and always give the scammed page regardless of user agent, or some other similar trick.

That's what makes this scary -- as I said, I thought google was already on the lookout for such scams, and if they're being beat on such a large scale it might mean a major shift in google's strategy is in order...

Re:SEOs

[jmagar.com]

Google does this already, perhaps not with spiders, or in the way you described. But they do seek out and destroy sites that are caught faking keyword densities and other SEO tactics on crawl pages vs human pages.

specific phrases?

[rubberglove]

The story would be more interesting if it included an example hijacked search phrase.
I'd like to check it out myself.

Re:Not hosted anywhere?

[IBBoard]

Yeah, I think "not hosted anywhere" is somewhat of a simplification for "actually hosted somewhere but never show any content to a normal user because they redirect you to another domain instead". While it might fly for a complete non-techy, I wouldn't have thought /. would have too many people believing in responses from machines that don't exist.