Google Warns About Search-Spammer Site Hacking

Al writes "The head of Google's Web-spam-fighting team, Matt Cutts, warned last week that spammers are hacking more and more poorly secured websites in order to 'game' search-engine results. At a conference on information retrieval, held in Boston, Cutts also discussed how Google deals with the growing problem of search spam. 'I've talked to some spammers who have large databases of websites with security holes,' Cutts said. 'You definitely see more Web pages getting linked from hacked sites these days. The trend has been going on for at least a year or so, and I do believe we'll see more of this [...] As operating systems become more secure and users become savvier in protecting their home machines, I would expect the hacking to shift to poorly secured Web servers.' Garth Bruen, creator of the Knujon software that keeps track of reported search spam, added that some campaigns involve creating up to 10,000 unique domain names."

Comments

Confirmation

[Drakkenmensch]

Anyone who frequently uses google knows this already. Plug in any kind of search and you're bound to get a slew of crap results along the lines of:

Download [term] full version

Torrent [term] keygen

Torrent [term] latest version

Torrent [term] hacked no-cd

You'll get those even when searching for books.

Re:And what about search farms?

[Shakrai]

Does that actually "report" it or does it merely remove it from your search results?

Re:And what about search farms?

[sys.stdout.write]

Are you logged in to your Google account?