Google Purges Thousands of Malware Sites

Stony Stevenson sends in word on the most massive "SEO poisoning" seen to date. The attack was directed at Google in particular and resulted in tens of thousands of Web pages hosting exploits showing up on the first page of Google searches for thousands of common terms (PDF). Sunbelt Software blogged about the attack on Monday after investigating it for months. By Wednesday Google had removed tens of thousands of malware-hosting pages from its index.

Comments

They've also changed their PageRank for many sites

[garcia]

Recently (end of October) Google reordered some of their sites and dropped the PageRank on many (mine included) there was a blog post about it here. My PageRank suffered immensely dropping from an overall high of 6/10 to the now 3/10. The most noticeable difference for me was that for the next two weeks (and the first time ever) I was no longer the #1 hit for: Bill Roehl, "Bill Roehl", or any variation thereof. Not only that but the first result from Google wasn't even for my root page, it was for some post I had underneath. I found that to be very odd.

Now, while I was digging through the Google results to find out why this could have possibly happened (prior to reading the blog post linked above) I found tons of SEO spam sites that my site had been linked from. I had never seen that many junk results returned before and was surprised they were getting through. I was seriously concerned that they had something to do w/my ranking drop.

At least Google is getting back on track dumping those bastards. While most people probably don't change their default settings to see anything more than the first 10 results, I am constantly looking through the first 100 on various searches and have seen more and more of that. I was wondering if some of the claims of Google's drop from #1 would imminent if something didn't change.

Re:all your base

[sm62704]

When will their crawlers automatically disqualify ALL sites that contain malware though? That would be nifty.

I don't think it would be possible. I linked to a turing test program I wrote called "art.exe" from my Artificial Insanity page that I hosted on another site I owned (which I since have let lapse). The only way a crawler would know that this program was benign was because it isn't listed in any of the antivirus lists of viral signatures.

What would be nice is if Google would have its crawlers automatically check pages as they crawled. If there were any known malwars the page would be blacklsted. But there's no way I can think of to flag malware that hasn't been identified as such by humans.

-mcgrew

PS:)downside would be that you couldn't find microsoft.com (Foghorn Leghorn says...)
PPS: I've been mulling over rewriting the Artificial Insanity program in javascript. But I'm having a hard time finding the time.

A hidden gem

[dotancohen]

The pdf contains a list of 2161 popular Google search terms. This is an SEO wet dream. Thanks!