Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Sounds like net censorship to me! What if I wanted to visit those malware sites?
The pdf contains a list of 2161 popular Google search terms. This is an SEO wet dream. Thanks!
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Personally, I'm comfortable with the fact that I'm only the second-best me out there. Let that other fella have his glory, because I'm never going back to the Rob Vincent Academy. I'm not going into it here, but those bastards Rob, Rob, and Rob know why.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
I'm probably too late on this discussion, but I thought something needed to be said. I work in online marketing (no, that doesn't mean I am a spammer) and I think this speaks volumes about what Google is hard-pressed to admit. The system can still be gamed. And it seems to me that no matter what Google does to improve their algorithm, the system will still be vulnerable to gaming.
In part, I think this has to do with the oddness that is their ranking strategy. They want to find the most relevant sites for any given query. So they study online behavior and adjust their algorithm to reflect that behavior. At the same time, they publish "guidelines" on how webmasters should design their sites and link out/in. It seems like they're trying to influence how websites behave online and then say that they're picking up on the organic trends. But in the end, they generate the trends. And then they tell everyone how to do it. Because of this, the system will always be vulnerable.
Until, that is, PigeonRank(TM) is launched.
Yes, you can dance to Radiohead.
So which was it? Months of Google poisoning or just day(s)? It wasn't "months". I think that confusion came from a subsequent blog post we made where we talked about having tracked _comment spam_ bots for months. This attack was only a matter of days. A number of the domains involved, for example, were registered on the 24th or 25th of November. Alex Eckelberry Sunbelt