Spam Archives

A Google Reader Help thread reports an increase in the number of RSS feeds being hacked into and used to redirect subscribers to spammer sites.

Googler, Roger, from the Google Reader team said:

Thanks for reporting this problem. Unfortunately, we've seen similar problems with WordPress feeds being compromised in the past. We'll look into it further, but in the meantime, I encourage you all to alert WordPress to this issue via their support forums.

Roger seems to believe there is a loophole somewhere in WordPress allowing this.

Clearly, this is not only upsetting to the publishers and their subscribers, but also to search spam. Many RSS feeds are scraped and used to inject content into Google. Spammed feeds that are scraped are can be even more of an issue for search quality.

Forum discussion at Google Reader Help.

Back before March 2005 Google page hijacking was a serious issue. It took Google some time to tackle the issue and it was less of an issue towards the end of April. But then it sprung up again in June 2007. Since then, I have not heard much about 302 or proxy hijacking in Google.

A new Google Webmaster Help thread has a new example of one webmaster being 302 hijacked. What makes this thread interesting is the conversation around helping both the webmaster and Google isolate the issue.

Googler, JohnMu, confirmed the issue, saying:

Thanks for posting about this issue. The team is busy on a solution to this issue, but it might be a few days before it is visible in all data-centers. Hang tight -- it'll hopefully be changed soon!

After about 24 hours or so, the issue was fixed by Google. I guess if this ever happens to you, you should probably head to the Google forums.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

I often see threads at the Google Webmasters Help discussion forum of people who have sites that were penalized for having issues with their site in the Google Webmaster guidelines. But it is not often where you see a thread that one issue then opens up an other issue, then an other issue and so on.

A recent Google Webmasters Help thread has just that. It starts off by looking like the site has a copied privacy policy, which isn't nice, but normally doesn't warrant a penalty. It then looks like there are way too many link pages, so that should be removed. We then notice that some of this person's sites have duplicate content amongst themselves. So fix that.

Then I see this from the webmaster:

My partner's brother had muscular dystrophy. He made several md sites based on personal knowledge as well as medical facts. These are examples of our sites which are useful and deserve to be indexed.

www.typesofmusculardystrophy.com
http://duchennemusculardystrophycure.com/

We have hundreds of sites like this.

Okay, to have hundreds of sites in different topics make sense. But to have hundreds of sites on exactly the same topic? Well, that just seems redundant to me.

In any event, the thread is an interesting read in that this webmaster is getting advice from both SEOs and Googlers on several layers of issues.

Forum discussion at Google Webmasters Help.

A WebmasterWorld thread spotted an interesting paragraph in an Reuters article on AOL possibly using automated tools to create an infinite number of niche sites, targeted at driving users to the site via search and having them click on the ads on the site. The article says:

AOL, for example, is embarking on a strategy of creating a plethora of niche websites through automated methods on which to place ads, partly through its own ad platform. It has called this "leaning into the fragmentation of the Web.

The debate in the thread is two fold:

(1) Is this simply bad journalism and AOL is not trying to go this route? If not:
(2) What will search engines do to combat such a large site creating such spam?

It is no doubt that there are many "authority" sites that create these types of pages and get by for doing so because of their "authority" status. In fact, many SEOs have called out these type of sites before.

AOL can make a lot of money if they did go this route, but are they really going to go the automated route when they do a pretty good job at creating unique content already?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Throughout my many years (makes me sound old) in the search industry, I have heard about many filters and penalties, including a filter or penalty to prevent a site from ranking well for a specific keyword phrase. For example, if I want to rank well for big blue pineapple chair and I create a page about a big blue pineapple chair but Google never ranks me for that term, I may consider my site to be penalized from ranking well from that specific term.

A HighRankings Forum thread has a couple webmasters asking about such a filter. They say they rank well for everything they want, but not for a single keyword phrase that they once ranked well for. The question they asked does a search engine, such as Google, penalize a site for a specific keyword phrase?

Here is a poll, let me know what you think about this topic:

As you can see from the poll, I have two Yes answers and one No. You can select all or none. Yes algorithmically means that Google has a filter that is automated. Yes Manually means Google does filter for keyword phrases, but a human does it. No, means, no, Google does not penalized in this way.

I'll vote but I won't tell you what my thoughts are until after I post the results.

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

There are different levels of search spam. Some search spam involves creating spam on sites you control. Some spam involves injecting links into third party sites, hacking sites, infecting computers, phishing attempts and so on. Where does search spam cross that line and become "evil." That is somewhat of a debate, but Danny Sullivan is coining the term "craphat" in order to differentiate between "blackhat" and "whitehat" SEO. Because, many believe that "blackhat" SEO is not necessarily "evil" and that some people who consider themselves "blackhat" go to extremes that make some "blackhats" not want to be considered blackhat anymore. Which is why I think the industry hats and colors are melting a bit.

Danny created a Sphinn thread to discuss this topic, the topic of "craphat" SEO. How does Danny define this work?

Real crap? Automated link drops. Anyone who runs a blog, look at the shit that your comment filter catches automatically. It’s a crap harvest. Manual off-topic link drops, like we delete routinely here. Gibberish pages that say nothing and serve no purpose either than to get a rank and shove some Google AdSense ads at the top of them. Or one of my favorite examples, or not so favorite because it’s so sad, how a memorial site that Mike Grehan did for a friend got covered in link spam, adding to the further stress his widow was already under.

Danny thinks the industry should "try to stamp out." But being a realist, Danny knows "it won’t get stamped out," but adds, that it "doesn’t mean we shouldn't try."

Spam is getting worse and worse by the day and people are going to extremes they may have never thought they would go to. Matt Cutts discussed this in detail with his Virtual Blight video.

How can we make a difference and help prevent this type of stuff? Can we?

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

I figured I take a different look at Matt's Give Google feedback on "noresults" pages. In short, Matt Cutts of Google wants you to submit feedback to Google on search results that lead to reviews, but those reviews don't actually have a review. For example, Matt McGee points out one example of this at Search Engine Land. A search for sd880is reviews returns a result that shows this:

That is what Matt said most people want Google to tackle in 2009 in terms of search spam. Personally, I dislike going to a page that should have reviews on a product and not find any reviews. So I do hope Google does clean up those results.

This is also perfect if you have a competitor in the retail business and they have a reviews section that contains products with no reviews. This might be able to help you. Or maybe not...

This whole topic touches on the very controversial topic of wether or not SEOs should report other SEOs or competitors to Google or other search engines. When we polled our audience in May 2008, we learned that Most SEOs Don't Report Competitors To Google. About 70% said they do not report competitors to Google. Why? Many reasons including pride, morals, community, low blow, the "us vs them" attitude, feeling your not good enough to beat your competitor, and so on.

Is this the same thing as reporting spam on your competitors? I am not sure. If you don't do SEO and your an active searcher who hates empty reviews, then help Google, help you. If not, then you need to make a decision.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Matt Cutts has his annual post on tell him what Google's search quality team should tackle in 2009, to prevent web spam.

So far, Matt's post has 90 suggestions. So if you really hate web spam, go there, comment and let Matt know what you think. Matt said:

Based on your experiences, close your eyes and think about what area(s) you wish Google would work on. You probably want to think about it for a while without viewing other people’s comments, and I’m not going to mention any specific area that would bias you; I want people to independently consider what they think Google should work on to decrease webspam in the next six months to a year.

Once you’ve come up with the idea(s) that you think are most pressing, please add a constructive comment. I don’t want individual sites called out or much discussion; just chime in once with what you’d like to see Google work on in webspam.

Okay, so again, if you hate spam, go to Matt's post and comment.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Is Cuil, the new search engine that seems to have lost momentum, trying to bring brand awareness back to the forefront by adding spam comments to blogs? That's what I'd say -- after all, they spammed my blog:

And that's also what forum members have caught. A Sphinn submission points to a blog post where it's obvious that I'm not the only one who was a victim of the Cuil spam. Even WebmasterWorld forum members are a bit shocked.

On my flickr screenshot (click the image above for the link), Brad from Cuil writes the following:

Hey Tamar, it actually isn't us (Cuil) posting the spam. We are as against spamming as you. We'll be doing a blog post later today to clear things up.

And just as promised, the Cuil team has written a blog post to publicly inform the community that it's not them either.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and Sphinn.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks a very good question. Which penalties require a reinclusion request in Google?

Yes, this is a tough question to answer. But it would be great to come up with a list of items that might require and no require a reinclusion request.

WebmasterWorld administration, tedster, really sums up the issue with this question.

(1) Not all "penalties" are really penalties. In fact, a nice percentage of posts that say, "I have been penalized," are really not penalized.

(2) Some penalties are manual, while some are automated. Manual penalties probably require a reinclusion request, while automated ones do not necessarily require one but likely can be expedited by one.

Now, outside of that, coming up with a list of how to spam search engines and then describe which penalties are automatically applied and which are manual, can be daunting. In addition, making assumptions on which webmaster guidelines violations are worse than others, may also be a hard thing to do.

In any event, the discussion around this topic, I thought, would have been larger.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread has early discussion on the topic of what to do about a penalized site. Should the webmaster destroy the domain and start on a new one or should he/she clean up the site and wait for Google to reinclude the site in the index? There are pros and cons to both avenues.

It totally depends on how bad your penalty is and what you did to warrant it. It depends on how new or old the site that got penalized is. It depends on how many quality links and trust you earned on the old site. Is it a throw away domain?

In most cases, I would say that it is best to clean up the penalized site, as opposed to starting new. But what do you think? Take our poll:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Google Groups thread has discussion on the topic of dynamically creating pages to target localized searches. For example, this particular webmaster wants to be able to target 28 different zip codes for his client's A/C business. He summarizes what he wants to do:

Johns A/C does work in 28 different zip codes. He creates 28 webspages, page names reflect the township AC_service_City_zip.htm, meta tags reflect city, zip such as Johns AC serivce serving the "City" and "zip code" area. Then the body is a template and the city and zip are filled in for each city/zip area.

This way when someone does a search for AC service "zipcode" or "city" there is a good chance his page will be included.

This was a popular SEO tactic years and years ago. These days, it is much harder to rank well for terms using the automated city database methodology. We actually covered some of the databases you can purchase to accomplish this back in 2005. But is this legit?

According to Google, no it is not. In fact, Googler, Reid, said that the manner in which this webmaster wants to go, seems to be a "doorway page." Reid said:

I agree with webado in this scenario. If the body of these pages is a template and the only thing that changes is the city and zip code, this sounds a lot like doorway pages:

google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66355

Why push the limit on how much duplicate content a page can have? Pages with unique content often perform the best in Google's search results, are better for users, which in turn, is probably better for your business.

Your best bet in this situation is to create useful and unique content for each page. How? Well, take a look at some of the major local portals and see how much effort they put into their localized pages.

But would you consider these to be doorway pages? Google defines a doorway page as:

Doorway pages are typically large sets of poor-quality pages where each page is optimized for a specific keyword or phrase. In many cases, doorway pages are written to rank for a particular phrase and then funnel users to a single destination.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Recently I have been reading and hearing a lot of webmasters complain about a huge drop in their Google traffic. There are just too many threads to reference, so I thought I reference one valuable post by JohnMu of Google.

John said in response to why a site lost virtually all of their traffic, in a Google Groups thread:

Looking at your site, it might be that one issue could be that links pointing to parts of your site are not valued in the same way that they used to be.

This is a guy who has exhausted looking at coding issues, all on-page SEO issues, crawling issues, indexing issues and so on. Google then came in to tell him, you know all those links you have - well, they may be the cause for your site not being ranked well in the Google search engine.

The question you get from such a response from Google is two fold:

(1) Is this a link penalty? If the webmaster can somehow drop those links, will you see an immediate recovery in rank?

(2) Are the links just devalued? If so, then if the links don't count, should the webmaster just focus on getting better quality links and not worry about those "bad" links?

We know Google has said time and time again that links can't hurt you but most SEO's don't believe it.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Matt Cutts, of Google, posted a blog post at the official Google Blog named Using data to fight webspam. In that post, he describes how the web spam team uses log data, IP addresses, and cookie information to help prevent search spam. The question in the forums is why? Why is Google handing over this information?

Let me quote a snippet from Matt's post:

The IP and cookie information is important for helping us apply this method only to searches that are from legitimate users as opposed to those that were generated by bots and other false searches. For example, if a bot sends the same queries to Google over and over again, those queries should really be discarded before we measure how much spam our users see. All of this--log data, IP addresses, and cookie information--makes your search results cleaner and more relevant.

David Naylor takes issue with that, in that you can also seem to spoof this information. Dave asks why would Google come out with this information?

In addition, a WebmasterWorld thread asks the same thing. WebmasterWorld administrator, tedster asked, "I do wonder why it was published at this particular moment (I'm always looking for that hidden motive these days) but I do appreciate the look behind the scenes that he gives."

We do know that Google promised to be more open about the inner workings of how the search algorithm works, on some level. You have to admit that Google would not give over information that would harm the quality of the search results. I believe, for the most part, all Google is saying here is that they use log data that is available to them to simply see if they are improving in search quality or not. They can analyze various queries, and see if user behavior on those queries have changes for the better or worse over the course of releasing new spam prevention methods. Matt clearly shows how they can use log data to see when a spam injection in Google has started, which helps Google fight back as well.

All in all, I really don't think that Google is telling us something we did not suspect. Google continuously says they are a data driven company. To use log data, IP addresses, and cookie information in an effort to fight spam really doesn't surprise most SEOs. I know there are many questions still, so I leave it open. Why did Google post this information? Why now?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Sphinn.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks if there is a way to prevent Google Bowling. Google Bowling is known as a method of using links to hurt your competitors. While Google still denies it, most SEOs believe this is possible can this be prevented?

In the thread, Tedster said:

There is one thing that protects a website against Google Bowling - a solid backlink profile of its own. The more your "real" quality backlinks grow, the less anyone else's malicious actions can affect it.

Can you Google Bowl the NY Times or Wall Street Journal out of the index? Can you Google Bowl top notch quality sites out of the index? Of course, "quality sites" are a very subjective thing and that is where things get messy.

But I agree with Tedster, the best way to prevent a Google Bowling attempt is to have a very solid back link profile.

Senior Member, CainIV, added:

A diverse, quality source of backlinks helps protect against this. The more quality backlinks you have over time, the less percentage of new links there will be pointed at you in comparison to existing links. The more trusted the website is, the more 'iffy' inbound links it can absorb.

I think this is why Googlers keep suggesting that SEOs and Webmasters focus on their own site and not worry about competitors.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

So we see that most SEOs believe a competitor can hurt your search rankings, we also wrote an article on How To Penalize Your Competitor's Site in Google but now we have a new WebmasterWorld thread on image search.

The WebmasterWorld thread discusses a major flaw in Google Image search's SafeSearch solution. As we discussed in the past, many people found themselves being filtered out of Google image search, when their images are not adult in nature. So I offered up some tips on getting your images out of the safesearch filter hell. But does it always work? Not even close.

The WebmasterWorld thread discusses how if you have adult-related sites linking to your images or including your images on their sites, then Google may apply the safesearch filter to your images, even if the image is not adult in nature.

As Tedster explains, "Google Image Search does seem to have a problem dealling with hotlinking, and that means your site suffers." This is an ongoing issue with Google Image search, which doesn't necessarily impact Google searchers directly, but does impact them indirectly. Not only that, SEOs and Webmasters do take notice, when they see their Google Image Search traffic drop and never recover due to a bad hotlink.

Clearly, if hotlinking can hurt your Google Image search rankings, what is to stop your competitors from having adult sites hotlink your images on their sites?

Can Google outline measures Webmasters can take to avoid such a serious issue?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Beu posted a Search Engine Watch Forums thread after noticing that Google has changed the definition they used for what a doorway page is.

On the Google Page, it now reads:

Doorway pages are typically large sets of poor-quality pages where each page is optimized for a specific keyword or phrase. In many cases, doorway pages are written to rank for a particular phrase and then funnel users to a single destination.

Whether deployed across many domains or established within one domain, doorway pages tend to frustrate users, and are in violation of our webmaster guidelines.

The cached version still has the old version:

Doorway pages are pages specifically made for search engines. Doorway pages contain many links - often several hundred - that are of little to no use to the visitor, and do not contain valuable content. HTML sitemaps are a valuable resource for your visitors, but ensure that these pages of links are easy for your visitors to navigate. If you have a number of links to include, consider organizing them into categories or into multiple pages. But in doing so, ensure that they are intended for visitors to navigate the sections of your site, and not simply for search engines.

Key sentences, words and adjectives have been removed and replaced by more generic terms. Google seems to have re-written it to discuss less of the technical nature of the page and more of the desired outcome of such a page.

In any event, all SEOs should know about the change.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums and Sphinn.

A couple weeks ago I asked if Do You Report Your Competitors as Spam in Google? Well, the results are in and most SEOs said they do not report their competitors to Google as spamming. Of the 159 responses, 111 respondents or 70% said no, they do not report competitors to Google. 45 respondents or 28% said they do report competitors to Google. While three of those votes were for "other" but was actually left blank.

Here is the break down:
:: No said 111 respondents or 70%
:: Yes said 45 respondents or 28%
:: Other said 3 respondents or 2%

I am actually a bit surprised by the results, I would have thought more SEOs would anonymously say that they do report competitors to Google. These results, to me, shows a fairly strong unity amongst the SEO industry.

Forum discussion continued at Sphinn.

• Reporting Spam: Is It Ethical
• How Can I Report Spam to Google?
• Google Spam Reporting Working
• Does Google Investigate Spam Reports?
• Quick Spam Reporting Tool

In any event, the related Sphinn thread has discussion on if you report your competitors as spamming in Google. So I decided to run a poll here to find out if you have ever reported a competitor as spamming in Google. Simple Yes or No - hoping people don't use the "other" option, but I added it just in case.

Here is the poll:

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Warning, clicking on the following Google search result may return an image of extreme pornographic nature. The image is of a woman's vagina and is found on a pornographic site, but the image appears to be hosted on Google's Blogger network.

The search phrase is a common search in Google Web search for hot celebrities (warning, there may be an image that you don't want to see or don't want your kids to see). The image comes up at the top of the page, above the organic results, in the top universal search spot. I will not share a complete screen shot, but I will share a very censored version (just so it is documented), if you really want a full screen shot, go to this blog.

I have notified several of my contacts at Google before writing this post but told them I would blog it.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums & DigitalPoint Forums.

Ann Smarty poses an interesting question on Search Engine Journal. As blogs are communities, it's useful to comment and leave your thoughts. But what if you add your link to the comment? Is it spam?

There are numerous tools that can check to see whether the comment is spammy and it depends on your blog installation (MovableType versus WordPress versus any other platform). But Annie notices that search engines are smart enough to factor in whether the comments are spam and also check for relevancy, comment content length, similar content on other blogs, blacklist terms, and other elements to determine whether it's spam or not. She concludes that if you add relevancy and ensure that you don't violate these rules, you're not spamming at all and you're adding value instead.

In the Sphinn forum discussion, bloggers acknowledge that it's important to put all comments through moderation (if you care about your blog). Apparently, some people actually do rank well after spamming blogs with their comments. If your blog is your baby, don't let those comments through.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

A Google Groups thread has several smart webmasters aiding a webmaster who found links on his site via the Google cache. In short, the links are not visible when viewing the page in the browser, but they are visible when viewing the page via the Google Cache. He asks how can this be.

One of the cool parts of this thread is that the webmaster won't give up the URL of his site. So we have smart webmasters and even Googler's offering ideas on how a link can end up on a site without knowing about it or seeing it.

JLH tells the webmaster to try changing their useragent to see if it is a cloaking thing. The main thing is to first find the problem, then find the source, and then get rid of it. Googler comes in and adds:

JLH beat me to the punch. Thanks for the quick, thorough response, John! I'm sorry to hear about your site--but I agree with his diagnosis. I still wish we had a URL to look at to confirm our suspicions, though.

To fix the problem, I'd look for any scripts (asp, aspx, etc.) that you didn't write, delete them, and update any CMS you are running, since CMS's are the most frequent targets of hacks. Usually security holes are used to upload scripts that create and hide the text.

In this case, what was the issue? One of the pages had some bad "code in some user controls (.ascx)." The webmaster added:

One of the files had this script in the page. I deleted/cleaned the page and pasted in to the production environment. We have Front Page Server Extensions and Web DAV.

This is not uncommon at all.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Our beloved Google Groups was hit with some forum spam the other day. A Google Groups thread in the Webmaster Help section reported it back on January 30th. Duncan at TechCrunch reported it a day earlier with his Go To Google Groups. Get Tricked Into Downloading Malware. Do Not Pass Go.

You can still see some of the spam posts indexed in Google, with a search on site:vivalb55.googlegroups.com. Here is a screen shot, because Google has begun to clean up some of these accounts:

As you can see, users set up multiple accounts and then did tons of posts. Then some how they did a redirection from their post to their site. It still works if you use the cache link. For example, this cache link will redirect you to this site, which is on debt consolidation. The domain is registered at GoDaddy under a private registration, but the DNS information points to ULTRADNS.NET.

The form of redirection is via JavaScript that is currently live at http://www.parkonrails.com/lead.asp?id=55.

Googler, JohnMu, thanked everyone for reporting it and said it will be taken care of. It seems like a lot of those accounts have already been removed, and that Google is still removing the spam from their index. John said:

Thanks for bringing this issue up. I've passed it on to the team. In general, if the group had normal postings, you could use the "Report this message" link (under "More Options") to report things like this. In cases like this where there are no postings to report (but where the group clearly abuses our terms of service), you can send an email to abuse @ googlegroups.com providing the information that you have.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Remember back in September we reported about Chinese-like .CN TLDs spamming the heck out of Google's search results? Well, it appears that a study was done by Sunbelt Software that showed "27 different domains, each with up to 1,499 [malicious] pages" found in Google for hundreds of legitimate search queries. It appears that the .CN (which were really not .CN TLDs but masked as such) are directly related to this report.

Subverted search sites lead to massive malware attack in progress is the article that most people are pointing to. I covered it yesterday at Search Engine Land placing blame on Google's Malware Filter not working properly. But it has history, as I showed above.

Here is our picture from September:

Here is a picture from News.com from yesterday with those malware results:

Look similar? Yea.

Was Google aware of this issue back in September. Yes, they were. Google is working to clean up the mess faster since this news hit the front page of Techmeme.

Do I know for sure the two are related. No, but they seem to be. Only Google can confirm the two are directly related.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

What SEO doesn't like talking about spam? Now add a newly granted Google patent that talks about spam and an SEO is in heaven!

Bill at created a Cre8asite Forums thread about a new granted patent named Methods and systems for identifying manipulated articles. Here is the abstract:

Systems and methods that identify manipulated articles are described. In one embodiment, a search engine implements a method comprising determining at least one cluster comprising a plurality of articles, analyzing signals to determine an overall signal for the cluster, and determining if the articles are manipulated articles based at least in part on the overall signal.

Bill goes into more detail at the Cre8asite Forums thread and in his blog post at SEO By The Sea. I will not recap what he wrote, since he did an excellent job explaining the patent.

In short, Google has come up with an formula for analyzing articles, placing them in a cluster and determining based on the linkage pattern between those articles if they are manipulating the web with spamming tactics.

Here is how Bill explains it:

A patent granted to Google today explores Web spam and the manipulation of documents and links on the Web. It describes how the rankings of pages may be influenced if they are identified as “manipulative.”

The identification of manipulative documents, how they might be grouped together, and how they could be treated by the search engine is described in some detail. That treatment might include removal of pages from the search index, reductions in rankings for pages, and possibly a change in how quality scores (PageRank) are calculated for links from manipulative pages.

The patent application was filed about 4 years ago. So Google may or may not be using all or some of these concepts within their current day algorithm. The fun part is the discussion and application of the patent to current day SEO trends.

Bill ends his thread with a teaser, "Anyone want to talk about spam? Paid links?"

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums & WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports that many of the proxy highjack pages for your domains have been removed from Google. Proxy highjack pages are basically pages that try to outrank yours for the same keyword phrases, and thus replace your pages in the search results at Google.com.

One member said:

This morning while looking to see if there were any extra proxy highjack pages in Google’s index for my site I got a very pleasant shock.

Zero
Nadda
Ziltch

WebmasterWorld forum administrator, Tedster, confirms this analysis, saying:

That is indeed very sweet news. I am not seeing any proxy sites either right now - but there have been many sites affected, so I hope we hear from more people. If Google has indeed fixed this issue, it can only be a good thing for them and for webmasters.

For past coverage of the Google Proxy Highjacking issues see Reports of More Google Hijacks via Proxy Sites and Detailed Explanation of the Page Hijack.

Good job Google!

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There is a DigitalPoint Forums thread that is taking note that Yahoo Answers questions and answers have a tendency to rank well in Google and other search engines.

Yahoo Answers has been ranking well in the search results for a while now. So the concept of using this network as a platform to try to help your traffic, is nothing new (although the title implies that).

But let's step back and look at this thread.

(1) Hey, it looks like Yahoo Answers ranks well, said one member.
(2) "Interesting. Do people still use Yahoo Answers to drive traffic to their relevant website(s)?" Said another member.
(3) "So go in and start answering some Yahoo Questions. you wouldnt believe the traffic i get with it!" said another member.

You see how it begins or ends for that matter. The spam controls at Yahoo Answers are nice, so let's see how bad it gets at Yahoo Answers in terms of spam.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread has discussion about a service one member was offered.

In short, the service is composed of two offerings:

(1) Damage your competitor's search engine rankings
(2) Protect your own search engine rankings

They use threats in their email marketing message, such as "Pay up or have your forum spammed!" and "Your forum will be spammed in the next few days" and then "Pay up to this url or have your forum heavily spam."

What should you do if you get such an email? Forward it to Google or let me know.

But seriously, all you need to do is "just hit the delete button," as forum administrator, Robert Kerry said.

The big question is, can a competitor hurt your rankings? We discussed this most recently in August 2006 and October 2006. I mentioned that Google has a FAQ that addresses just that.

What can I do if I'm afraid my competitor is harming my ranking in Google?
There's almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you're concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information published on the web; we don't control the content of these pages.

"Almost nothing" are the words used here, so technically, it is possible.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A Google Groups thread asks if it is acceptable in accordance with Google's new webmaster guidelines on Hidden text and links to use CSS as an image replacement technique for graphic links.

Image a site that has images for their navigational links. Now, if you turn CSS off, you will see a new version of the navigation, using standard text version of the links.

Susan Moskwa, one of Google's new Webmaster Central Google Groups support people, said it is acceptable, based on intent.

If your intent is purely to improve the visual user experience (e.g. by replacing some text with a fancier image of that same text), you don't need to worry.

However, if your intent is "to deceive the search engines, we frown on that," said Susan Moskwa. She explained that she spoke with Matt Cutts on this, I guess all new Googlers run some of these questions by Matt, and added, "Matt did say that hiding text moves you a step further towards the gray area."

So if you are hiding text even for non-evil purposes, it does move you closer to the "gray area."

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Land site has been caught hiding text and performing "poor man cloaking" techniques. A WebProWorld thread called attention to the fact that Search Engine Land was hiding text in a CSS file:

text-indent: -9000px;

But Danny Sullivan didn't know about it. In fact, someone had to call this thread to his attention, and then he wrote in.

Still scratching my head, I then wondered, "Wait a minute. Is this about my site?" Surely not. But yep, there in our style sheet was the damning code. It's true. We were totally hiding text and technically might be considered spamming the search engines. Curses -- just when I hoped not to be counted among those other search spammers like Google and Yahoo that have been outed for using hidden text.

So what happened? Apparently, there was an H1 tag that was visible only to users who have images and stylesheets disabled. That's why regular users typically don't see it. Danny continues by saying that he doesn't approve of this technique and will fix it after SMX next week.

We'll look at a way to make the logo be a hyperlink that doesn't involve using a hidden style, though our permanent solution might have to wait until next week as we're sort of busy with the upcoming conference we have this week.

Sorry for anyone that somehow thought we were endorsing some spamming technique. We're not, of course.

Yeah right.

Image of Danny Sullivan (on left with beer in hand) endorsing Mr. Spam man

Forum discussion continues at WebProWorld.

Cloaking is when a search bot is given one page of content, while a normal user is given another set of content.

If you go to http://autos.yahoo.com/used-cars/forsale.html and compare it with the Google Cache version, to me they look identical. So possibly, Yahoo! changed it. But in the screen captures, only the Google version had the "used cars" anchor text by every state break down. You can see the before and after at Agerhart.com.

It seems like Yahoo Autos is currently not cloaking at this moment.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: Tim Mayer of Yahoo! has confirmed on May 22nd edition of The Daily Search Cast that Yahoo Autos has changed the page since this has been reported. So, Yahoo Autos was cloaking. FYI, this wasn't the first time Yahoo! was caught cloaking, there also were spotted using unethical search practices in July 2005.

There is a unique thread at Search Engine Watch Forums where a person describes a case of an in-house SEO that has gone bad.

He said that before he came on to work for a company, they had an in-house SEO. The in-house SEO left to start his or her own SEO practice through his or her blog. So now this SEO is marketing himself through his SEO blog, which is cool.

However, the new SEO said that he "found two separate instances of this person attempting to put hidden links to their own sites in this client's site's code."

He asks how should he handle this. He lists a few different ways to handle this:

(1) Confront the SEO
(2) Tell the client about this
(3) Publicly tell people about this via a blog or forum

In my opinion, you have no choice but to tell the client about this. Maybe, but highly doubtful, they knew about those links. Then I would bring this evidence to the SEO and ask him why he or she did this. Maybe he or she has a valid reason or maybe it was an honest mistake, yes there can be reasons for this - but I cannot think of any at the moment.

There is no reason to go public with this information at this point. However, if you see the SEO repeatedly using these practices, placing hidden links on client sites, and if the top two methods do not work, then you may have to notify the public. May have to but I would do everything to avoid that.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

An excellent WebmasterWorld thread asks if the new Sitemaps Auto-Discovery supported by all four major search engines is not just an easy way for search engines to find and index your content. The thread asks if this enables scrapers to easily find and scrap your most important content?

There is no doubt in my mind that having an XML feed helps scrapers do their work. That is part of the debate over should I offer a full feed versus a short feed. Full text feeds enable scrapers to take your content and all of it, much quicker.

The Sitemaps.xml files are not full text feeds, they are just directional data for search engines to easily find your most important content. A crawler then does the rest of the work. But it does help scrapers do the same thing.

The WebmasterWorld has some pretty good feedback.

Tedster said:

After all, the sitemap.xml file hands over a list of urls directly to any scraper that wants to make use of it. And excessively scraped sites can struggle in the SERPs.
Sounds like a very good reason for cloaking to me.

incrediBILL explains:

Sitemaps.xml is a serious scraping vulnerability which is one reason I don't use it as the sitemap.xml file is a clear path to crawl without hitting any spider traps so it should be cloaked, no doubt about it. Any time you give scrapers a clear path to avoid honey pots and spider traps they'll use it. With that said, the scrapers can simply scrape a search engine first using "site:mydomain.com" to get the equivalent of a sitemap and avoid your spider traps anyway.

That's why even robots.txt should be cloaked because you give the scrapers a list of user agents that you allow to crawl. Assuming you don't also restrict user agents by IP range or reverse DNS, the scrapers just adopt the allowed UA's and slide right through your .htaccess files or other user agent blocking fire walls.

The thread continues but not having a sitemaps file does not prevent scraping of your content.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A DigitalPoint Forums post refers to a PC World article about recent malware being disguised by a Google Sponsored Link.

Roger Thompson of Exploit Security Labs posted today about finding poisoned Google sponsored links that surreptitiously direct searchers through malicious sites that attempt to surreptitiously install malware on your PC.

According to the article, on the morning of April 10th, if you searched for Better Business Bureau on Google and clicked on the Sponsored Listing, you'd find yourself on the BBB website as expected. However, before you actually reached the final destination, you'd pass through a site that attempts to exploit an Internet Explorer browser vulnerability and installs malware intended to steal very sensitive banking data.

Barry wrote about this a on Search Engine Land. He references yet another article from the Washington Post that reports the same story about how sponsored listings are being tainted to install malware that reportedly steals passwords and other sensitive information.

On DigitalPoint, a member asks if this will have an impact on the future of paid listings. I hope it does. In the PC World article, the writer says:

I'd love to hear from Google whether they screen purchasers of sponsored links or the redirection URLs they use.

I think that this is very important. Otherwise, the search engine will be under fire as others take advantage of the exploit.

On a similar note, AdWords accounts are being hacked. When Barry reported the story, there was no apparent association to GregOne's account being compromised to the malware within the sponsored listings. It may, however, be the case now. The WebmasterWorld is updated, and GregOne (whose account was hacked) writes to say that by clicking on one of the ads, there was a "redirect pointing to trackback.org that somehow installed an activex component without approval."

This is pretty worrisome. GregOne says, "I got hit on the 23rd of April, you'd think Google would have put a freeze on any links pointing to fasttrack.org." That would be a good idea.

Discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

• porn
• offensive language
• hate posting
• malware

The article scanned 614 blogs that were chosen randomly and states:

According to Scansafe's Monthly Global Threat Report for March 2007, a surprisingly high percentage of the Internet's blog sites-- up to 80 percent-- contain "offensive" content, with six percent hosting active malware.

Then again, the study only looked for a single post -- which could also be a comment -- to deem these sites offensive.

To be added to the list of those deemed potentially offensive within a business context, a site merely had to contain a single post containing profanity, or worse.

But the word "China" is as prevalent as some of the most offensive words in the English language:

"There were as many blogs with the 'F-word' as the word 'China'", said ScanSafe's Dan Nadir.

Oops. What does that really say about us bloggers? :)

At the end of the day, Brett mentions that the important lesson to take from this is to be aware of this in corporate environments. I'd definitely agree.

For more information, please see the ScanSafe press release and report (PDF).

Discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

On a recurring theme of Internet spam, a study discussed in WebmasterWorld indicates that three out of four blogs -- or 75% -- are spam.

According to the study (PDF link):

...14 of the top-15 doorway domains have a spam percentage higher than 74%; that is, 3 out of 4 unique URLs on these domains (that appeared in our search results) were detected as spam. To demonstrate the need for scrutinizing these sites, we scanned the top-1000 results from two queries – “site:blogspot.com phentermine” and “site:hometown.aol.com ringtone” – and identified more than half of the URLs as spam easily.

Here is a chart from the study showing the "top doorway domains and their spam percentages (among the search results in our data)":

The reason for this is the suspicion that the popular blogging service is free. One WebmasterWorld member states:

The trouble is, there's no algorithm that can automatically factor in the price of a service. It's free to set up a blog on Blogger, so it can be abused more easily. If these spammers actually had to pay for a new domain name every time they set up a splog, they wouldn't bother.

Other findings of this research showed the spam percentages for Top-Level Domains (TLDs):

• 68% of .info TLDs are spam
• 53% of .biz TLDs are spam
• 12% of .net TLDs are spam
• 11% of .org TLDs are spam
• 4.1% of .com TLDs are spam

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread links to a December 2006 paper at Yahoo! Research named A Reference Collection for Web Spam. The paper can be downloaded as a PDF file, it is not brand new, but relatively new. Here is the abstract:

We describe the WEBSPAM-UK2006 collection, a large set of Web pages that have been manually annotated with labels indicating if the hosts are include Web spam aspects or not. This is the first publicly available Web spam collection that includes page contents and links, and that has been labeled by a large and diverse set of judges.

Gary Price of ResourceShelf linked to an updated paper from Microsoft on Web spam. The 10 page PDF file is named "Spam Double-Funnel: Connecting Web Spammers with Advertisers." Here is the abstract:

Spammers use questionable search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to promote their spam links into top search results. In this paper, we focus on one prevalent type of spam – redirection spam – where one can identify spam pages by the third-party domains that these pages redirect traffic to. We propose a five-layer, double-funnel model for describing end-to-end redirection spam, present a methodology for analyzing the layers, and identify prominent domains on each layer using two sets of commercial keywords – one targeting spammers and the other targeting advertisers. The methodology and findings are useful for search engines to strengthen their ranking algorithms against spam, for legitimate website owners to locate and remove spam doorway pages, and for legitimate advertisers to identify unscrupulous syndicators who serve ads on spam pages.

So here is your weekend reading.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld sparked this post from me. At SES Chicago '06, during a session named CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & Search Engines the search engine representatives were asked about how they handle CSS.

It is currently easy to hide text using CSS, everyone knows it. But do people do it?

Back to the SES session, on this panel were search engine reps. Many of the search reps were new to conferences and were not necessarily prepared to get certain questions. It all started when a Yahoo representative told the crowd to open up your CSS so Yahoo can peak into it. Then Google said they will also be indexing JavaScript and AJAX and CSS, so don't use it to hack.

Now, if you know Yahoo! and specifically Google, they typically will never say that they will be doing anything in the future. They typically first do and then tell, but not tell and then do.

All the search engines, except for one, I believe (but I forgot if it was Ask.com or MSN) said that you should not block your CSS and JavaScript files from the search engines using your robots.txt, just in case they want to take a peak.

I am honestly still confused by that statement. Well, if we block it, will it raise a red flag? If it raises a red flag, will you manually peak? Are you going to algorithmically crawl those files and look for problems if we keep them accessible to you? If we format something a certain way, but it may appear like spam, but in reality it is not, will an automated ban come on the site?

Personally, I am not worried. But these types of responses, by the search engines, can fuel a lot of questions and unnecessary worries.

As pageoneresults says in the WebmasterWorld thread:

Google has a hard enough time now dealing with html/xhtml. Parsing CSS files and determining whether something is hidden or not is not a solution. Now the bot would need to determine why that CSS exists. There are many valid uses of display:none or display:hidden.

For those who may be hiding things through CSS or negatively positioning content off screen to manipulate page content, I surely wouldn't do that with any long term projects. ;)

The penalty for getting busted using this technique I would imagine is a permanent ban. No if's, and's, or but's, you're history. You'll need a pardon from the Governor to be reconsidered for inclusion. ;)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Matt Cutts of Google is known as a spam fighter, he is part of Google's Search Quality team and has a inner moral spirit to prevent web spam from creeping up in the Google search results. Watching Matt Cutts in action is something to see, when spotting out spam or just reviewing typical sites in terms of search quality. At PubCon's Thursday Interactive Site Reviews and SERP Quality Control Forum, Matt sat at the end of the table, with his laptop turned to him only, and his search quality (spam fighting) tools fired up while connected to the Google VPN.

If you want to know what goes through Matt's mind during a site review panel, then read his own review of the panel, it is pretty enlightening to read it from the horses mouth.

But if you want to see the reaction of the crowd as Matt chews on these sites, you have to go to the conference. I heard many wows, laughs and OMG! at the conference during this panel. But how did he (Matt) know that? Where did he learn about this? etc.

WebmasterWorld has a great thread with reaction to Matt and his secret search spam fighting tools. I tried my best to get a screen capture of Matts screen, but it is almost impossible. He doesn't accept bribes (why would he need to?) and he is very protective over his laptop (who isnt?).

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

We all know about PPC fraud and that some of the fraud is caused by bots (robots) that click on the ads and drive up your bill and unwanted traffic. But it gets more serious than that. Bot are also used to steal your content, spam your site with comment spam, guestbook spam, dhtml spam and some very bad hacks.

Often, when someone writes a script to have a bot do any of the evil things they may do, they let the bot run wild. Sometimes that may take down your server.

Discovery at Search Engine Watch Forums links to a Wired article named Attack of the Bots.

The latest threat to the Net: autonomous software programs that combine forces to perpetrate mayhem, fraud, and espionage on a global scale. How one company fought the new Internet mafia – and lost.

Bots have gotten to us, they have. They got to WebmasterWorld, DigitialPoint Forums, Search Engine Watch Forums and many many other sites.

Discovery asks, not only in terms of PPC fraud and click fraud;

Have your concerns with bots grown over this past year?

I answer, Yes.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports how someone with an Invision Power Board, a popular discussion forum software, found Google AdSense code embedded on his site, without him doing it himself.

So if you have forum software, double check that it is your AdSense publisher ID and code in the site and not someone elses.

If you see something sketchy, you should report it to Google at AdSense Abuse. More details on reporting violations at Google AdSense Help.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Jennifer Convertibles web site [http://www.jenniferfurniture.com/] has been delisted by Google because some hacker got in and generated an infinite number of dynamic affiliate spam pages.

Let me start off by explaining that my company, RustyBrick, developed this site years ago, like 5 years ago. We are now in the process of redesigning it. We currently do not maintain the hosting or server environment for the site. The client called me and told me they no longer rank anywhere for their brand name [Jennifer Convertibles] in Google.com.

So the first thing I did was to see if any of the pages on jenniferfurniture.com were indexed, they were not.

So then I asked some people I know to look into it and they discovered that the cause of the Google ban was because someone dynamically added an infinite number dhtml pages to the Jennifer Convertibles web site and domain name. Such as a URL like jenniferfurniture.com/this-site-has-been-hacked.dhtml, here is a screen shot.

So I sent this information over to the server people and my development team to look at first thing tomorrow.

Luckily, I have some contacts at Google that can hopefully expedite the reindexing of the Jennifer Convertibles web site. But if it was a normal web master and a normal site, a hack like this can have serious issues in the long term, i.e. may take a while to get back into the Google index.

I was given permission by the client to share this information with the search community. I hope this at least helps others.

Update: 9:30pm (EST), we have blocked those pages from coming up. I'll share the technical reasons tomorrow when I have a solid answer. I believe it has to do with the htaccess file hack.

Update: 7:00am 10/25, based on popular demand, I have submitted the site for reinclusion via the Webmaster Central Sitemaps tool, at this time. I will not make a special request from Google to reinclude the site. Let's see how long it takes through the tool. If I was using this tool for this client, I would have spotted the issue much earlier. More to come on what exactly the hack was later.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Update on this at Jennifer Convertibles Web Site Back in Google.

An interesting thread has been started on the SEW Forums regarding a paragraph in the Wikipedia External Linking Guide. It discusses the possibility of sharing link spam data with Google (and presumably other interested parties) in order to monitor and potentially penalise spammers.

The idea is still more of a suggestion then an official statement of intent from Wikipedia, although it would be interesting to see whether existing records of past link spamming would also be shared (opening up a can of worms for SEOs who use such tactics).

Is this just an off the cuff remark by a rogue editor? A warning shot across the bows from a tired Wikipedia? Or some other idiom which I've yet to think of?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch.

Ever wonder if you are stepping over that gray line of spam with the search engines? Well, if you feel you are doing anything excessive, then don't, according to MSNdude at WebmasterWorld. In a post MSNdude made yesterday, he said;

Instead of "sometimes less is more" perhaps it would be clearer to say "remember that spam is often about excess." If you are doing something to excess -- something that you're hoping will impress the search engine, even though you know it'll annoy customers -- then you should reconsider. That's all I'm saying here.

Got to love that, don't you?

Also, he notes that "80%" of the notes he received about problems with MSN Search recently have nothing to do with the MSN update that took place a couple of weeks or so ago.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Brian White, part of Matt Cutts webspam team, has joined Search Engine Watch Forums to continue the outstanding Google to Webmaster communication we have seen recently. Brian adds some more detail to our post yesterday on Web Hosts Found Cloaking Webmaster Content.

Brian explains what exactly is being done by this fraud:

We've discovered that the likely explanation is that a third party gained access to a number of sites and dropped files in these accounts (including a modified .htaccess using rewrite rules) for the purpose of rewriting the home page through a proxy script. The proxy script adds links when Googlebot visits, and in a sinister twist, adds the rel=nofollow link to cap off PageRank bound for any external URL not under control of this third party. As Danny noted, they also add a NOARCHIVE meta tag to disable the cached version in results.

He then clarifies that Google has made sure to block any PR boost or ranking boost this person is trying to achieve.

Finally, Brian explains additional methods for you to see if this is a problem on your site.

At the risk of allowing the folks who created this to adapt, you can use Google Translate to confirm the behavior. Check any of the affected sites (no Cached link) on the Google search ["hairy sex porn free"] via Translate to see the cloaking, since the proxy script checks for a visit from Googlebot IP addresses, and doesn't discern between a regular crawl visit and a Translate request.

Continued forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums and welcome Brian!

Web hosts are typically in a very powerful position. One such example is discussed at a Search Engine Watch Forums thread showing how one Webmaster was finding "strange results" in the Google search results pages. The results contained pornographic terms in the description area of the search results for that listing.

Matt Cutts from Google explains that this is not any form of 302 hijacking but rather a rude cloaking bot implemented by the web host.

To me, it looks like this webhost is cloaking. Then including links to porn on the cloaked page that is served to Googlebot. Neonblitz, this is just me speaking my personal opinion. My personal opinion is that if you find out your webhost is cloaking, monkeying with your content, and adding porn links to your page, you'll want to think about whether that webhost is treating you with the respect you deserve.

So be careful with whom you host with. This can hurt you big time, both in rankings and in search results branding. How can you tell if this is happening to you? Well, I guess you can try the site command search (i.e. site:www.domain.com search in Google) and look through all the listings. Or even conduct a site command with a porn phrase such as [site:www.mydomainc.com porn] or [site:www.mydomainc.com sex] and see what comes up.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Sometimes people steal content and graphics and tools directly from a site, by including the include file. What this means is that if the original owner of the content changes it, the change will be reflected on the sites that stole it. This happens often with images, where people just call the image directly from your server, instead of putting a copy on their own server.

In a WebmasterWorld thread named I need help having fun with my competitor!, someone was bold (or dumb) enough to steal a flash file pulling it directly from the original source's site. So he asks other Webmasters for ideas on how to "have fun with" his competitor. Here are some of the ideas listed;

• Change the ad to say, "this Guy steals, come over here to my site and get a 10% discount" and make it click over to your site.
• "This site has closed, please visit yoursite if you would like to place an order"
• Make a new banner that reads; This weeks special offer: 75% discount on all prices as listed in our shop! (A non-clickable banner of course) --- ha the phone calls
• Automatically forward the browser to any URL you program it to
• Make the flash take up the full screen and blink the "Blue Screen of Death."
• In big red letters "DANGER! DO NOT BUY!" and any referring link from eBay gets shot to a hardcore porn site page with some nasty offensive images so people will be ticked off from the start and not bid on his/her stuff.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

There is an interesting thread at WebmasterWorld that asks, "What can you do when Google doesn't act on spam reports?" Here are some of the feasible actions one can take, that were mentioned in the thread.

• Strengthen your own site
• File a DMCA complaint with Google, they must act on those
• This idea may be a bit too nasty for some
• Here is a more detailed approach to filing a DMCA request

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

As WebmasterWorld & Search Engine Watch Forums member, glengara, points out in a thread named "Spam is an Arms Race" - Douglas Merrill/Google, the BBC News featured an article on link spam today.

The article is named Google to stay focused on search but it has a number of mentions of search spam. Here are some quotes;

"Spam is an arms race," said Mr Merrill, adding it was a multi-million dollar industry which was trying to fool search engines.

Unlike spam e-mail, web spam tries to trick search engines into featuring websites selling products such as drugs high up on a list of search results.

The spammers exploit the way search engines work by bombarding blogs and comments pages with links to their websites.

Google prioritises websites in their search results if a particular page is linked to by other sites.

Mr Merrill said: "Spammers are highly motivated. There is a lot of money at stake."

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums & WebmasterWorld also at DigitalPoint Forums.

Long long time SEO forums member, Nintendo, posted a thread at DigitalPoint Forums a couple days ago which revealed the work of a spammer. Soon after, a blogger posted the step by step guide on how this spammer got billions of pages indexed within Google all within eight days. Here is the summarized guide;

(1) Register a domain name (could be new)
(2) Set up server to manage domain and subdomains and subsubdomains
(3) Buy article databases
(4) Develop a content scraper script
(5) Create a blog comment spam script and set it loose
(6) Wait about eight days

After the story got Digged, the site has been delisted at Google.

Some quotes for you from Ammon Johns;

Is Google broken? No. Go back just 6-7 years and these pages would not have surprised you - spammy redirecting doorway pages like these were everywhere. You expected to see some of these in virtually any SERP before Google. The fact that so many people are shocked and amazed at these is itself testament to how far the search engine algorithms have come.

The real black hats practitioners regard work like this as amatuerish and foolish. It closed another loophole, rather than continued to quietly use it.

Forum discussions at DigitalPoint Forums & Cre8asite Forums.

Friday, I asked New York Times Allowed to Cloak Content? Where I explained that I felt the NYTimes was indeed cloaking content, based on Matt Cutts interpretation and that they are receiving special treatment from Googlebot. Danny Sullivan posted his thoughts in the forum thread, stating clearly;

Do I think the NYT is spamming Google? No. Do I think they are cloaking? Yes. Do I think they should be banned because Google itself warns against cloaking? No.

Yes, Danny believes they are cloaking. But no, Danny, as do many, feel that Google should not ban NYTimes.com or others like them.

Of course, there are others that do not feel that this is a typical situation of cloaking. And cloaking can be defined differently. But I prefer to use Google's definition of cloaking, or at least Matt Cutts definition.

Strong question:

IF IT'S SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION, I NEED TO KNOW IT BEFORE I CLICK!!!

That would be nice, I try to always let my readers know when I link out to a subscription required link. Some news search engines do that also, but adding "registration req." or "subscription" in small text. If Google is allowing this, then at least give us that detail. And at least enable all publications to do the same. And clarify your policy on such "cloaking" practices.

Continued forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A SearchDay article by Danny and Chris over at Search Engine Watch named Getting The New York Times More Search Engine Friendly talks about how Marshall Simmonds (first with About.com and then acquired by NY Times) made the NYTimes.com search engine friendly. Part of that process is to allow the search engines, including Google, to access, crawl, index and rank content that would require a username and password by a normal Web user.

Danny and Chris ask the question and answer it; "Isn't this cloaking—serving different pages to a search engine and an individual web browser? Yes, it is." Yes, there is a BUT;

Although both Google and Yahoo warn against cloaking, Marshall says both companies are aware of what the Times is doing, and apparently condone the practice.

"They want the content, and they're very interested in displaying it," says Marshall.

Reviewing the latest from Google on cloaking you see that Matt Cutts makes a clear distinction;

So IP delivery is fine, but don't do anything special for Googlebot. Just treat it like a typical user visiting the site.

NYTimes.com is clearly doing something "special for Googlebot" here and in terms of how Matt Cutts defines "acceptable cloaking," this does not fall within those terms. At other engines like Yahoo!, Ask and MSN, engines that have not taken as strong a stance on cloaking, this most likely would be acceptable. But at Google, I believe, based on Matt Cutts continued campaign against cloaking, this would not fall within Google's webmaster guidelines.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

An other recently featured thread at WebmasterWorld is named What Can I do about Blog, Forum, and Community Spam? Spam in blogs, forums, and other types of online communities is exponentially getting worse. Heck, I even turned off and disabled completely the commenting and trackbacks ability a couple days ago. I now required people to go to our forum to comment. Why? Because the spam was getting so bad, that it was greatly affecting the performance of accessing the site and also affecting other applications. I disabled it, and presto, we are back in business.

So what can community Webmasters do?
- Well, they can take an extreme and turn of blog comments and blog trackbacks, like I did
- Require registration
- Have active moderators
- Use captchas
- Disallow or flag certain regions via geo-detection
- Use throttle limits

What is interesting, one person claims they blocked certain geo regions and noticed a 2 percent drop in traffic, but a 95% drop in spam.

More ideas in this members only section at WebmasterWorld.

To clarify before even beginning, Yahoo! does not necessarily uses these techniques, they are just patent applications issued by Yahoo!

Bill Slawski posted an outstanding blog entry at SEW Blog named In Yahoo We Trust - The Link Spam Patent Application discusses one of Yahoo!'s papers and a patent application on fighting Web search spam.

(1) Combating Web Spam with TrustRank which discusses how non spam pages link to non spam pages, as Bill describes in short.

(2) Link-based spam detection which describes, similar to PageRank, the ability to "manually identifying reputable seed pages" and "separating reputable pages from spam pages."

Forum discussion on these topics at Cre8asite Forums & Search Engine Watch Forums.

A WebmasterWorld member posted a thread asking how critical it is to register a domain name for longer than a year. He asks, because his hosting company claimed that registering a domain name longer than one year, will improve his rankings in Google.

First, there is no conclusive evidence that the patent that Google issued that shows how a search engine can use domain registration length to determine the 'spamminess' of a site will be applied to Google results.

Second, if it did, why wouldn't spammers who can potentially make millions a month, spend an extra few hundred bucks to register a throw away domain for ten years.

Three, it is not right for a hosting or domain registration company to profit off of this, in my opinion.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: It seems Google has gone on the record saying domain registration length does not impact rankings.

There is an interesting thread at Search Engine Watch Forums named Hidden Links On Colgate-Palmolive Site. SEOs are debating if Colgate Palmolive is using hidden links on it's site to spam the search engines. Go to http://www.colgate.com/app/Colgate/US/HomePage.cvsp and click on the link at the bottom that reads, "Click Here To View Other Colgate-Palmolive Products." It opens up more links, that in itself is not the hidden links, we are talking about. What I know want you to do is go to the text only Google cache of this page, you can see it here. Notice that there are more visible links available to be seen. Here is a side by side;

What We See:

What Search Engines See:

Basically, they are using CSS to style some of the links as normal text and other links, to look like they are normal links. Many many many sites do this. Either for SEO reasons or for cosmetic reasons. The question is, is this considered spam or against Google's terms of service?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

There is a known vulnerability that came to light yesterday based on a WebmasterWorld thread named Links hijacked in search engines. It is called DNS Cache Poisoning, and can affect your search marketing campaigns, big time. What happens?

Sub Attacks

Once an attacker has managed to poison a DNS cache, there are a number of ways they can subvert protocols that rely on DNS. Some of the potential methods are listed below.

Redirecting Web Traffic

An attack of this nature might range from a simple annoyance to a financial nightmare for a great number of people. The goal here is to set up a website that looks enough like the original so as to not raise any suspicion. Then the domain is hijacked via cache poisoning for as many ISPs/companies as possible, causing their traffic to hit the phony site instead.

Some of the sub-attacks here are:

Redirect a popular search engine to a pop-up ad site.
Redirect a bank website to gain access to account passwords.
Redirect news site to inject false stories and manipulate stocks.

From http://www.lurhq.com/cachepoisoning.html.

This can be a major issue for you and you should run a DNS Report today at http://www.dnsreport.com/.

For more information visit http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/dns/cache/.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

The latest in Google paid links and spam scandals was brought to light yesterday in a thread named Paid Links, Hosted Doorway Pages Back At Stanford Daily at Search Engine Watch Forums. AussieWebmaster discovered a page at http://daily.stanford.edu/forex/forex.html which served up content and ads for forex, the page has been 404ed just recently.

AussieWebmaster investigated a bit deeper and learned that The Stanford Daily only sells hosted content pages to Maverick Insight at maverickinsight.com.

It has been reported at 6:42 PM (EST) that the page has been removed from The Stanford Daily. GoogleGuy came in a few hours later and posted a response, saying that he will investigate this from Google's side.

What is the big deal? Well, Stanford is where Google was born. Danny has his SEW Blog write up here.

I rarely use Froogle as my shopping search engine but for some reason, I did this time. And like most shopping search users, I sorted my results by lowest price. I was looking for the lowest price on keyboard wrist wrests and filtered the page as such. The first result is a "Fellowes Premium Keyboard Mouse Tray & Gel Wrist Rests!" for only $0.99, now that is a good deal. But trust me don't click, it is a pornography spam page. Seems like Shop Priest is good at Froogle spam.

Why report this, because this is the type of spam that makes me sick. At least spam relevant pages. :) I reported the first case of Google Search by Number Spam back in May. Vertical search is cool, but when the big engines allow it to creep inside the main results, it has to go through the same quality filters or else you run into trouble.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Matt Cutts write Confirming a penalty where he specifically is talking for Google in his post. He said in a bold statement;

I can confirm that Google has removed traffic-power.com and domains promoted by Traffic Power from our index because of search engine optimization techniques that violated our webmaster guidelines at http://www.google.com/ webmasters/guidelines.html.

This is not only huge for Google, in that they have started calling out names of those they ban. It is also huge support for Aaron Wall's Defense Against Traffic Power.

As you can imagine, there are many forums talking about this including;

• Search Engine Roundtable Forums
• Search Engine Watch Forums
• WebmasterWorld

Honestly, I felt this whole story was not a big deal. But I was wrong. Philipp Lenssen is always digging up interesting things on Google, including BMW's Doorway Pages but even when I first saw it at a forum post in our forum named Google, Spam and Big Companies I thought to myself, big deal!

But then Danny wrote it upand then Matt Cutts ripped the site right out of the index, and showed the whole world what he has done.

Then it got slashdotted and Digged, so now every Webmaster in the world should know what cloaking is and why they shouldn't do it.

Forum discussions at Search Engine Roundtable Forums, WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.

Update: David Naylor reports this also at www.bmw.fr.

Marcia posted a thread at Search Engine Watch forums named Plagiarism, Splogs and Search Engine Spam where she quoted a blog entry at Plagiarism Today named Why Sploggers Splog The snippet Marcia selected was ironic, to say the least.

One of the interesting things that came out of my discussion with the reformed splogger is that Google is not the target of splogs. As odd as it may seem, Yahoo indexes entire sites much more quickly than Google and is even faster at picking up Blogspot blogs because it considers it such an important domain. Thus, even though the service is wholly owned by Google itself, Yahoo is the first to snatch up links contained with it....

The desired end result is that Yahoo searchers will be directed to the junk domains where they will then click on the Google Adsense ads. This arrangement is not only very profitable for the splogger, since they get a sizeable chunk of the revenue from each ad click, but is very beneficial to Google as they are getting money directly from Yahoo’s visitors.

Now I am not sure if there is a study done that shows that:
(1) "Yahoo indexes entire sites much more quickly than Google", I hear that not to be true. That Google is quicker, but there has never been a wide study done on this. I am basing that on forum chatter for the past four years or so.
(2) [Yahoo] "is even faster at picking up Blogspot blogs because it considers it such an important domain." Again, not sure where this is from but I won't argue.

But if those two statements above are true, which I do not think they are a 100% true, then it is funny.

Yahoo! ranks blogspot splogs high, Yahoo users click through, yahoo users are more likely to click on an AdSense ad, Google makes money, sploggers make money.

Of course this can be applied to any search engine, even Google. And it can be applied to any advertising program that is easy to sign up with and pays on a cpc basis, even Yahoo!.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Wednesday night, during the "Exhibit Hall - Cocktail Reception" I spoted Matt Cutts a few yards away from the Google booth. On my way over to say hi, which I really didn't do the whole time being at the conference, some Scandinavian folks came over to ask him a question.

They explained that they run a Vodka site (not sure on the brand) and said they needed to pre-qualify that anyone who enters the site has to say they are 18 years of age or older. They asked, if they would be allowed to add a popup via JavaScript that sits above the page content, and only goes away, if they answer the pre-qualifying question. Matt said its a tough question, but in that case, he would feel comfortable with it.

Matt explained that the page was not "cloaked" because it was not showing different content to the search engine and the end user. And that it would be an acceptable use of this strategy, to enable the bots to spider the site and pre-qualify users before seeing the content.

Of course, I chimed in, I doubt the Scandinavians knew who I was anyway. I said, Matt - I am shocked that you would say that. To use a JavaScript popup, to hide content for some end users and show it to others. That is just mind-blowing that a person of your reputation would say that it would be acceptable. Matt started to explain why it would be acceptable, and then the Scandinavians also started to explain to me why it would be fine. I quickly said I was just giving Matt a hard time and I agree with them.

Matt explained to me later, after getting permission to post this entry, that he may not be ok with using a CSS layer above the content. He explained; the he "was only referring to JavaScript that would do a pop-up, not layers." He further explains, "But if both a search engine and the user get the same content, and the content includes JavaScript that a user must affirmatively answer yes/no, that wouldn't violate our guidelines."

My only question to Matt now is the following. Matt, what about those new young GoogleBots? Are they allowed to see content meant for the eyes of 18 year olds or older? I mean, how does the dog years work for GoogleBots? :)

Last night Gary blogged on A New Report on Estimating Link Spam. Gary explains that the "21 page (pdf) technical research paper from the Stanford InfoLab that takes a look at link spam." The paper was written by two folks at Yahoo and two at Stanford; Zoltan Gyongyi (Stanford), Pavel Berkhin (Yahoo), Hector Garcia-Molina (Stanford), Jan Pedersen (Yahoo).

Read Link Spam Detection Based on Mass Estimation if you dare. :)

Link spamming intends to mislead search engines and trigger an artificially high link-based ranking of specific target web pages. This paper introduces the concept of spam mass, a measure of the impact of link spamming on a page's ranking. We discuss how to estimate spam mass and how the estimates can help identifying pages that benefit significantly from link spamming. In our experiments on the host-level Yahoo! web graph we use spam mass estimates to successfully identify tens of thousands of instances of heavy-weight link spamming.

Forum discussion soon to be at this thread at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Stuntdubl posted an absolutely well written thread (no one he is a WebmasterWorld moderator) at Search Engine Watch Forums named Anatomy of a Successful Reinclusion Request. In this thread he discusses an effort he is making to get one of his clients back into the Google index after participating in a "link manipulation program" (or that is the thought of what got the site de-indexed).

He asks other SEOs to share, in the thread, what works in the reinclusion request email, sent to Google. He posted his initial thoughts as follows:

Suggestions for improving the likelihood of reinclusion: - Fess up - If you did something wrong admit it and fix it
- Don't ASK WHY- You know what you did, or most likely some potential causes - At least fix those if you're going to ask WHY
- Don't whine - If it is the fate of your business you should probably be buying adwords anyhow
- Don't be a recidivist - pretty self explanatory - if you get special consideration and abuse it you won't get it again
- Don't bug 'em - G is NEVER probably going to get through their mountains of e-mail...don't make it worse
- Re-read the webmaster guidelines several times before sending off your request.
- Contact a professional and have them review your site for potential infractions, and diagnose if it is indeed a hand banning.
- Be polite - Google doesn't owe you anything - You're lucky you got free traffic is long as you did you filthy spammer

Matt Bailey added that, in his experience, "80% of the site owners that think they are banned have a technical issue that can be solved."

Join the Anatomy of a Successful Reinclusion Request to share your thoughts and ideas.

There is a pretty popular four page thread taking place at Search Engine Watch for the past week. To be honest, I have stayed away from it for the most part. The thread is named How Long Does It Take For Search Engines To Remove Spam Sites?

But that question is really not answered. The discussion goes into the ethics of reporting spam. Some relate it to snitching on friends or colleagues. Some say instead of reporting the spam, work on making your site better. Some say, they report spam because they felt mislead, while others report spam as part of the SEO package they offer clients.

I personally like the question, "How Long Does It Take For Search Engines To Remove Spam Sites?"

It depends of course. I have reported spam here before, and it took less than a couple of hours to be pulled. Point being... reporting spam via the spam reporting tool would probably take a much longer time then reporting spam in a very public setting, such as a forum or a blog. Why? Because it is embarrassing for the search engines to have such blatant spam in the SERPs and to then have members discuss it in a public setting. That is why WebmasterWorld, one of the most popular and active discussion forums on the Web, is so against link drops. Just one of the many reasons, actually.

Jason Dowdell wrote a blog entry named Content Spam Remix.In that entry he talks about content remixing and relates it to content scrapping. I believe the term content remixing comes about from music remixing, where musicians use other musicians art and remix them together to create something new and unique. As you can imagine, there was/is lots of controversy on this topic - and I am the last one to know much about the music industry's take on it.

Content remixing, I believe, is the same but with content. Jason says that smart bots that crawl the Web for content on a specific topic and mix it all together would fall under that category. I believe not so.

Remixing is an art according to all musicians that do it. To automate an art is oxymoronic. A bot can be programmed to perform certain tasks and repeat. That by definition is not art. So in my humble opinion, "content remixing" is not the same thing as scrapping content from a page in an automated fashion. What I do consider to be "content remixing" is the blog community. For example, this entry is referencing Jason's entry. Jason references two or three other blog entries. We all have our own opinion on a topic. We share language, we quote each other but add our own tune, opinion, to the topic. Automation can not accomplish this, if they could - we would be in a world of EPIC 2014.

There is an excellent post at WebmasterWorld on the topic of Log Spam. Log spam is one of the oldest methods of link spam out there and it is often not discussed in forums (I know, compared to other methods, log spam is not discussed often). First, let me quote this excellent definition.

What is log spam? Oganisation setup a system to visit every domain (website) and 'request' their own domain (as if it were a page on the site).

What does log spam do?
The result of this is in the logs (and therefore your stats page) in the request report (NOT to be confused with the referrer report) within the stats for the popularity of each of YOUR web pages you see links to the log-spammers pages.

Why do they do it?
- Mainly to get links pointing to their site from stats pages,
- Partly to encourage visits from those viewing stats pages.
Sure, most stats pages are password accessed or have a 'noindex' meta tag, however there are many stats pages that are open or even have some PR.

Why is it bad?
Log spam messes up your stats reports, e.g. you don't have a page called http://ebay/
but your stats report says that page has been viewed (requested) 100 times.

Now, in this thread, the thread creator said he caught Google log spamming. Its a fact that many well known Web sites do this, he said "Yahoo do it, ebay do it and lots of other companies do it." But why is Google doing it? Do no evil? Is this even true? Questions remain to be answered in the thread named Google in my 'log spam'.

Been following an interesting thread today on SEOchat that details an issue a webmaster is having with getting his websites IP penalized on Yahoo because Yahoo finally caught up with some spammers on the same IP. He relates most of his problem to significant decreases in ranking positions for his site and is wondering how to possibly come out of the situation back to his normal positions. He goes on that the "pages were not "de-indexed" so to speak. Rather, they have all just dropped very very far in the serps". I thought it was an excellent question as I have seen other threads on the forums detailing this same issue especially with Yahoo. A past thread on SEW called Rackspace hates Yahoo? or Vice Versa? is a good summary of some past issues sites have been facing and how active they can be with this issue.

The forum member on SEOchat is looking to see if he can possibly avert issues that could arise potentially with Google. If Google did penalize him for the issue he would me sunk. Some of the other members recommend possibly switching to a new IP class as soon as possible and waiting it out to see what happens. Others are questioning whether this is a problem or not.

For those that are looking to get reincluded back into Yahoo or possibly see about getting a new review of the site. A thread at Threadwatch tell the story of a member who got his site reincluded into the index over night by asking for a new review. In that instance he used the following link to ask for a new review. For those that are facing issues with Yahoo this url might be of use. http://add.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/ysearch/cgi_feedback

Continue reading Punished C-Class, any chance..

Yesterday Gary Price at SEW Blog posted an entry named New Technical Report from Stanford Discusses Link Spam. I, of course, get all excited about this new paper to discuss how to prevent link spam. I print it out and shortly later, I read the introduction on the first two pages. Then I stop reading it and start a thread, which I should have named New Paper, Old Methods, Link Spamming.

It is probably not fair of me to be quick to judge, and trust me, I will read the entire 22 page paper. But this line in the introduction turned me off, as soon as I read it:

Link spamming refers to the cases when spammers set up structures of interconnected pages called link spam farms, in order to boost the connectivity-based ranking, most frequently the PageRank.

Why?

(1) "spammers set up structures of interconnected pages" - good link spammers do not interconnect pages, at least not nowadays.

(2) "most frequently the PageRank" - good SEOs know its not critical when link spamming to get links from pages with high PageRank. They just get links from as many pages as possible.

This is just one sentence, you can read the full paper: Link Spam Alliances (PDF).

The other day we discussed how Google Outranked itself for Google, but now, we see some pay back. Someone was actually daring enough to page hijack the Google AdSense page. DotComicide has a screen capture and Jensense has a very detailed write up on how it happened.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

I just got my first cold call from India offering a reciprocal link exchange. Sounded much like those other cold calls we get here for outsourcing Web development and design to India. But this one was asking about a reciprocal link exchange. The call lasted about 20 seconds but I thought I should notify you guys. I prefer the emails, deleting those (if they are not caught by spam filters) takes about 1/20th of the time.

I believe we registered our phones with the National Do Not Call Registry.

randfish, started a very interesting thread over at Search Engine Watch Forums named Banned by Yahoo! - A good thing? The story is that one of his clients (or maybe his site) was banned by Yahoo! for being perceived as being spammy (probably has to do with Yahoo!'s overly aggressive duplicate content filter). Their rankings drop in Yahoo!, but the client (office managers) have no idea. In fact, the client calls randfish and asked him, "how did you manage to filter out the bad requests?" In fact, the randfish tells us that his client claims "it's been great for productivity so far."

Few things...

(1) Does Yahoo! provide less relevant referrals in the commercial real estate market?
(2) Do "spammy sites" make for less productive office environments?
(3) Does Google and MSN provide better results then Yahoo!? Even though, so far, our tests show that Yahoo! is the most relevant.

This should make for an interesting thread.

I am not sure if this is a major issue or simply a generic fluke but...

A thread at SEO Chat reports of a user going to MSN Search and being asked to provide evidence that he/she is an adult. The method of evidence, provide your credit card information.

Classic signs of a phishing attempt. If you see this as well, please run a spyware/adware program on your PC (I think AdAware is a good free one, but I use a Mac). I wonder if this specific phishing attempt is only targeting MSN Search users or more wide-spread then that.

I always wondered when content spammers would begin taking advantage of some of the "Smart Searching" functions, provided by the search engines. I have been tracking a package of mine and decided to use Google. So I entered in a UPS tracking number, for example, 1Z W64 W91 67 4523 244 6 and using Google's Search By Number feature, it brought me the following results.

But it is perfectly ethical, since they are not cloaking, the cache page is exactly like the landing page. Don't worry, nothing is currently being shown on that landing page besides for tons of numbers and a link to the site.

I started a forum thread at Cre8asite Forums.

Press releases have been a very popular strategy in the search engine optimization industry for a couple years now. If you wanted immediate top rankings in the news portals of the engines plus some additional quick anchor text links, you send out a press release. Here at the Search Engine Roundtable, we even did our own, I wrote up the results under the entry Press Releases & Search Engine Optimization. A new forum thread at Search Engine Watch named Press Release Spam discusses how easy it is to write a press release on about anything and get it widely syndicated. The example the thread creator (mod mcanerin) used was named SEO Firm Raise My Rank Announces New Client and Search Marketing Experiments which is a 154 word release. In the release, if you read it, it is basically mocking the PR system available to us. "Experiments for the week included an attempt to determine the efficacy of the use of search engine submission forms and a study of the attention spans of editors working for online press release services."

In the thread Mikkel deMib Svendsen says that this is not spam. He said, "The offender in my mind is the stupid editors and algos that accept such bad press releases and the sites that agrees to show them." So if the press release distribution methodology is not yet abused enough to be an issue, how much longer until strict guidelines are issued?

Brad Fallon from SEO Radio has a forum like discussion going on that I find to be hilarious. The title of the discussion is named Interview with a Blog Spammer, where Brad links to an interview of Todd "Oilman" Friesen. Brad says as follows:

One point is that the most successful spammers eventually go white hat -- short term, less money, long term they get to stay around. Did you know that many of the current internet marketing gurus started out as rank email spammers? True story.

If you continue to read the thread, you will fine some of the funniest comments ever. Forum members basically drop real remarks and then a spammy like link that follows. My favorite comment is by Max on April 20, 2005 at 03:50 PM. I had to share this with you.

Eight hyphens to be exact. A thread at SEO Chat named Finally, the secret to Google rankings revealed refers to a domain name that has eight hyphens in it and nine keywords.

Normally I would not point out a site like that, but I have not seen one that long publicly mentioned in a while. I find it interesting that the domain name doesn't somewhat match the title of the page (Nikko Megatech Remote Radio Control Vehicles) nor is the heading of the page using an H1 tag - it's using a graphic that looks like text. I am sure there are other things but that is all the time I got. It does rank well, so it obviously has a few links.

Sorry if this is a "spam report" but I just appreciate the domain name so much, I had to share.

WordPress, a popular open source blogging software, was caught spamming search engines by using its link popularity and $3 per article company. I found this by way of Oilman's blog, where he gives sage advice, "What have we learned from this? Negative divs are pretty freakin stupid - cloak your links if you're serious."

So what happened? As Waxy reports, they used their high PR, link popularity and cheap content writers to design articles "specifically to game the Google Adwords program." The 120,000 plus articles were already pulled from Google but hopefully Yahoo! will leave some of them around for show and tell.

How did they get caught? Virtuelvis explains that they were including a "-9000px text indent: This makes the link invisible to human visitors with CSS, and visible to every search engine on the planet." Technically, this is not IP Delivery and many professional cloakers would not consider this cloaking. As oilman said, "Negative divs are pretty freakin stupid - cloak your links if you're serious."

Update: Just noticed Tim Mayer from Yahoo! blogged it at 360, so Yahoo! might pull the results soon. In addition, I am still trying to make out who the individual is that Tim circled in red. If you can't view the blog, you might need a Yahoo! 360 Invite, you can get them from me here, if that doesn't work, you need to be added to his friends list.

Eric Scheske from Crux Magazine, a normal Internet searcher, wrote up an entry complaining about a particular search experience. Basically he searched on the question (Ask answers questions) What's the name of the famous black transvestite? and arrived at the "Your search is likely to return adult content" page. It looks something like:

View Large Image

Eric selected the last option "No - Please show me filtered results that limit my exposure to explicit adult content." and then when the results came up, he clicked on the first link. This is his word by word description of what happened next:

Criminy! I was pounded with homosexual porn. I quickly clicked the "Back Button," and my screen was filled with more porn. I tried to close the whole internet application, and another screen of porn popped up---with about a half dozen pop up ads for porn. As my mouse flew around the screen clicking those upper-righthand X boxes, more would pop up. As it intensified, I felt like I was playing a video game�all the while afraid that one of the secretaries would walk in my office, see my screen filled with that stuff, screech in fright, and throw up her hands, thus launching a bundle of files against the wall. After thirty flurried seconds, I finally had all the porn boxes and sub-boxes closed.

At first, I felt the user was upset that such a site can get be displayed at Ask Jeeves when he selected the "No - Please show me filtered results that limit my exposure to explicit adult content." One would expect the word "limit" would not allow for the first result to be so offensive to the user. And Jeeves received some bad press about serving porn to school kids. But the searcher was more upset with the actual pop ups and how it over took his computer. Maybe more of a reason for this user to download and use firefox. It goes to show you, that maybe, just maybe, users are blaming themselves for the bad results that show up in a search engine and not blaming the search engines.

This morning, I was notified that I had new gmail. The message contained the subject "Google Messenger For WINDOWS" and showed me how to download and installed "Google Messenger For WINDOWS." In the past we discussed Instant Messaging by Google - gIM, twice but nothing announed by Google on this topic as of yet. The email message contained an overview of the program:

Google Messenger is an instant messaging program that lets you send instant messages with cool emoticons, send pictures and other files to your friends, see when someone is typing a message to you, page a contact's mobile phone, and much more.

This wasn't the first time we reported on viruses found in Google, the last one, was the first Gmail Phishing email known. This one, the first Gmail Messenger virus that I have seen. I have reported it to Google, as they asked last time (comments for that past entry were deleted due to a crash).

Many of you know the name Marcia from the forums, but I bet many of you did not know Marcia had a blog named MarciaHoo. Early this morning, Marcia posted a case of what is called a domain hijacking, but this time through the use of a meta-refresh. Yes, old school, but still an issue, as Marcia points out.

It seemed as if Marcia had doubts about pointing out such a case, but I think even the "spammers" in the industry, are fed up with this hi-jacking stuff. As she said in her own words, "I�ve deliberated about whether to post this publicly, but it has to be done." Marcia recounts how she found the hijacked domain name, I am sure it will make an interesting read for many of you.

The 302 redirect issue, also known as Page Hijacking, has been an issue for a long time now. A thread at WebmasterWorld is 46 pages long, almost 700 posts, plus many other threads on this topic can be found at WebmasterWorld as well as all the other SEM forums. A well respected forum participant named Claus, has created a resource on this topic named Page Hijack: The 302 Exploit, Redirects and Google, here is the absract:

An explanation of the page hijack exploit using 302 server redirects. This exploit allows any webmaster to have his own "virtual pages" rank for terms that pages belonging to another webmaster used to rank for. Successfully employed, this technique will allow the offending webmaster ("the hijacker") to displace the pages of the "target" in the Search Engine Results Pages ("SERPS"), and hence (a) cause search engine traffic to the target website to vanish, and/or (b) further redirect traffic to any other page of choice.

Deservingly, it was slashdotted, and bakedjake started a thread at the WebmasterWorld Community Forum to commend Claus on his efforts.

There are forms of cloaking that some would consider acceptable practices and then there are some forms of cloaking that everyone would consider unacceptable. One such case of cloaking was presented by Phil Craven over at the Search Engine Watch Forums under the thread title Obnoxious cloaking scam. In that thread, Phil discusses a case where he found a client being taken advantage of by his hosting company. Basically, the hosting company was basically serving up a cloaked page to the search engine bots on arrival. In these cloaked pages were added text links to benefit the hosting company, without the consent of the client. In addition, new subdirectories are added to the unsuspecting client's site.

GoogleGuy saw the thread, as PhilC and others wanted to and offered to help. Its important for this type of scam to get out there in the public, so please tell people about this thread and type of cloaking.

One of the more scarier spam'ish tactics being deployed out there was the Hijacking of Google results through redirects. A post over at Search Engine Watch Forums named Evidence of Progress with Redirects/Hijacks?

In this post, "DaveAtIFG", old time admin at WMW writes that he was shown an example of a possible hijacking attempt that was put down by Google. When he dug deeper, he noticed several things:

1. When I click on/follow the link in the Google SERP, it goes directly to Liane's site bypassing the listed domain, island-search.com.
2. Also, when I follow the Google link, I see a 204 "No Content" Response code. (I've NEVER seen this used before, but perhaps I simply never noticed.)
3. Google's cache of the "island-search.com" page displays Liane's site, sans images.
4. If I surf directly to the URL included in Google's listing (www .island-search.com/go.php?id=3034), I see a 302 response code.
5. A not very thorough search of the island-search.com site revealed two "normal" links to Liane's site, both return a 200 response.

There is nothing like good old fashion content scrapping to generate high end, cheap, weird looking content. There are many people who do it. There are many ways to do it. I am calling out one content spammer, because he is messing with our forums. And you should know not to mess with our forums. :)

http://qaix.com/ - no link for you

They have reportedly ripped content from WebmasterWorld, SEO Chat and other forums on the Web. I spot people ripping my content off all the time, its a full time job to track these people down.

BakedJake posted a link to a new anonymous interview at the Register named Interview with a link spammer. I bet BakedJack knows the name of this anonymous link spammer. :) Anyway, it makes for a nice read. Here are some quick quotes; because I need to run.

So how and why do "link spammers" - as they generically call themselves - do it? Are they the same as the email spammers? What do they think of what they do, ethically? And what can stop them? If you're affected by this spam, say because you run a blog, or a website, or like the other 99.9 per cent of Net users just come across the stuff, Sam explain the important thing to remember is it's nothing personal. They're not targeting you personally. They're just exploiting a weakness in a system which blossomed just at the time that Google cracked down on the previous method that spammers used, where huge "link farms" of their own web sites pointed circularly to each other to boost each others' ranking.

Will the initiative by Google, Yahoo and MSN, to honour "don't follow" links defeat Sam and his ilk? "I don't think it'll have much effect in the short, medium or long term. The search engines caused the problem" - we didn't quite follow this bit of logic, but Sam continued - "and they're doing this to placate the community. It won't work because most blogs and forms are set up with the best intentions, but when people find hard graft has to go into it they're left to rot. To use this, they'll all have to be updated. The majority won't be. And there'll just be trackback spamming."

Today I was skimming some http log files for a particular page of mine. In the last hour, I received 50 visitors (unique IP addresses), but only 5 had referring data. Looking a little closer, the ones without the referring data were all using Internet Explorer on Windows and had "FunWebProducts" within their user agent.

So I did some Googling and FunWebProducts is another one of the million or so hijackware/adware/spyware toolbars that users unknowingly install on their computer. The interesting thing about these guys is they infected a very large percentage of the Internet's users very quickly. And now that I know what they are, I recall seeing their banner ads all over the place (including yahoo.com).

It doesn't seem to do a complete block of referral URL, just external ones (you will see image requests have a referral URL of your page for example). But then again, external referrals is the more important ones. I probably would have never cared or noticed how widespread the infection is if they didn't block the referral data. In truth, it's probably not blocking referrals directly, and instead does not show the referral URL of people using the search function it installs. I'm not going to install it to confirm though, sorry. :)

So now the assignment for all the readers... check your web logs and see what percentage of your visitors are not giving you referral data. You might be surprised how many of them have FunWebProducts within their user agent.

Check out NickW's post named LinkCondom - Stop the Spread of NoFollow Viral Link Skank!. He found or created a new site at http://www.linkcondom.com/, to mock the new nofollow attribute by Google, Yahoo and MSN. Extremely funny!

Yesterday we found out the nofollow attribute was coming to a search engine near you. Google, Yahoo, and MSN all announced this news yesterday at their respective blogs. I assume if Ask Jeeves had a blog, they would have been part of this announcement. Major blog development supporters include SixPart - MovableType, LiveJournal, Google's Blogger, WordPress, Flickr, Buzznet, Blojsom, Blosxom, and MSN Spaces.

Danny Sullivan has an excellent write up on what this is all about at his entry named Google, Yahoo, MSN Unite On Support For Nofollow Attribute For Links. Personally, I think I might add the tag to the comments here. But I am not yet sure. Since adding the image security code, I have had two comments that were spam. So I am thinking about just opening it up and linking directly. Why? Because people who comment here are on topic to the entries and provide insight. This tag is to prevent comment link spam, or any link spam - if you do not have a link spam problem, then you should be fine. I think this should be a default option in all blog software, all guest books and some forums - because many people just let their sites go to hell. It is an excellent way to prevent linkage spam in that case.

I know we are discussing implementing such a tag at SEW forums. But the question is where should it be implemented. So what about the SEO forums, what are they thinking?

• Search Engine Watch Forums
• SEO Chat Forums
• Cre8asite Forums
• WebmasterWorld Forums
• HighRankings Forum
• V7 Forums
• IHelpYou Forums
• SitePoint Forums
• WebProNews Forums
• SEO Guy Forums
• DigitalPoint Forums
• WebWorkShop Forums
• Google Blogoscoped ThreadWatch (Blog/Forum)

Danny Sullivan is on a mission to do something about link spam (comment, guest book, trackback, forum, and so on). In a recent entry at the SEW Blog, Danny wrote on the topic of Google To Add "Nofollow" Tagging Of Links To Fight Spam? The proposal is to use the following within your links; <a href="http://www.site.com/page.html" rel="nofollow">Visit My Page</a>

By adding rel="nofollow" it would instruct the search engines to not string along any "vote" "weight" "importance factor" to the page it is linking to.

My thoughts are that the same can be done through JavaScript redirect tags. If the search engines can not find the links, then they will not count. This blog ensures that all comments go through a redirect script, but it does not stop the spammers from spamming this blog. So a simple "nofollow" tag might not do much either. In theory, it makes sense.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch.

Daniel Brandt released a Scraping and ad-stripping Google's results script for free to the public. What is really interesting, is that at the same time, Orion posted a theoretical thread named Fractal Spam, which discusses a pattern he has seen from the top N results. Also, pretty much at the same time, an other thread named Meta Search Legal Question was started. So we have all these topics about scrapping Google, ad free results, ranking your site higher through search results and meta search engines - the legality of it.

Interesting occurrences, dont you think? Daniel from Scroogle, once again caused a major blog and news frenzy over his work. Coverage can be found at Inside Google, BattleMedia, Outer-Court, Brad Hill, TechDirt, The Register, ThreadWatch, and TopRank.

About an hour ago I am sitting at my desk, all my employees are gone for the weekend, except one that is on the phone. The phone rings, and I answer and this guy named [name removed] introduces himself. He says he is from [name removed] and he is friends with some of my SEO friends. Ok, so he caught my attention. [name removed] then tells me about how he reads this blog often and is a big fan. Hmm..... He then goes on, about wanting me to link to him from this blog. He said that he has a mentioning of the blog on his site, but its not an active link. I then followed up, asking to look at his site. I go to it and see an ordinary SEO Company's Web site. I then ask [name removed] , do you have any tools or sections of interest on your site that would interest you guys (the reader)? He said yea but he wants a link of his choice. I said, that I do not do link exchanges - I said that if you think this site will be of value to your Web site visitor then link to it. I said if [name removed] or [name removed] has something of interest to the Search engine Roundtable reader, then I will link to it. He then said that "I do not work that way" and abruptly hung up the phone.

I then strongly thought about the call. It made me angry. This is the ONE reason why SEOs have a bad name. This SEO is not interested in his Web site visitor. He is only interested in traffic. When I link out, I do so with the intent that it is of use to the reader. You know, I frequently link out from here - simply because it makes it easier for you guys to get to what I am talking about. Of course we all want to rank well for particular keywords, but there is a professional method to do it.

I wrote many times on creative ways to get links, see:
- One-Way Link Building - How To Guide
- Slick Links - Building Links the Cool Way
- Proactive Linking - WMW Conf 7
- Link Building and Referral Tracking - WMW Conf 7
- or do a search this site

For some reason, I think I can rank fairly high for [name removed]. Question is, how upset am I in a few days from now. This is probably the worst rant I ever did publicly, and I might just delete this soon. I am sorry if you feel this is uncalled for, but I really spent time thinking about this before posting.

Comment spam is a huge problem, I had to set up several methods of spam protection in the past and still people still try to spam this blog. I am personally tired of cleaning my blog from comment and trackback spam, but it is part of the blog experience I guess. Of course I can shut off comments or make it really hard to comment at this blog, but I rather not.

Danny Sullivan wants to start an indexing summit in order to do something about it. You can provide your feedback in the Time For An Indexing Summit? thread.

There has been a lot of debate out there on the black hat and white hat side of things. One thing you will rarely find is a black hat tell on an other black hat. However, there are some white hat firms that are starting to add "spam reporting" to their SEO package. A thread over at HighRankings named Spam Reporting 2, Obligations and Issues details some of Scottie Claiborne's issues with spam results:

1) Relevant spam is often not removed
2) Algorithmic penalties do exist
3) Some sites do well despite spam techniques, but probably not because of them

It is going to make for a very interesting thread.

I have yet to discuss the topic of domain hi-jacking through the use of redirects in detail. Please do not expect me to detail how to accomplish such a hi-jacking of a domain name, that will just make things worse. But this has been a larger problem for at least a few months now. Basically, through the use of redirects, 301s and 302s, you can either seriously hurt an other domain's backlinks or take them away. Again, I am staying very vague.

There is a 34 page thread on this topic at WebmasterWorld named Dupe content checker - 302's - Page Jacking - Meta Refreshes. In addition there is a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums named Come on Google, Fix it !!!. I briefly mentioned this in the Q & A session at the WMW conference (see the last Q & A). Yahoo! has once again said they have fixed the issue and the "changes have been rolled out and will take place incrementally over the coming weeks." Google, I am not aware of any changes being made.

Inbox flooded with link exchange requests? Have no idea if you should take them up on their offer or not? An interesting thread over at Highrankings discuss what to look for in a good link exchange. With link building growing steadly and more and more webmasters realizing the benefits of such techniques, it necesssary to use your time wisely. In my own inbox I get anywhere from 5-15 link requests a week. How many do I actually respond to? Maybe one email total. But rarely does it go beyond that. Last week I received two requests from a realtor that had the website name wrong including the page they wanted a link on. I wrote realtor back telling him this was of no interest and that he might change the way he approached webmasters for link exchange. Get the facts straight, and make it personal and of value.

Additionally most of the time the page that your link will be on, ends up in some psuedo link directory hidden deep within a site or very unorganized and of no value whatsoever to my site. These link directories and their category pages in my opinion are not effective ways to help grow your site. I am sure you can think of some you have seen lately. You must search out link exchanges that are a VALUE to your site for the search engines and your visitors. Look for pages that are not overrun with useless links. Also, be sure that on the link page a search engine spider can actually find your link. Avoid pages that parse the link with an outgoing script. My general rule of thumb is that if the email is automated: Do NOT respond back to it.

Some things to consider about these email:
1. Where will your link be located on the site? Cheap directory or useful resources page?
2. How new is the website, will it be worth your time to presue this link exchange? Will it actually help me in the search engines?
3. Is the site of value to users? Or is it just generated for the purpose of search engines rankings?
4. How many sites are on the page you receive a link from? More than 15, you might want to forget it.
5. Is the email directed to you or a huge generated email list?

If you just don't know what to do, you best bet is to take Scottie's advice: "Hit the Delete Button".

Continue reading I Am Kinda Sick of Link Exchange Requests

Do you ever exchange links with other Web sites? I am sure most of you that do this, look to see if your links are actually on the pages that you exchanged with. In addition, I assume that you check to make sure that the links do not go through redirects.

Links, as most the readers here know, are incredibly valuable. The anchor text of your links can make or break your page's search ranking. There are dozens of reasons why a link exchange would be turned down. (1) Obvious, they do not link to your page. (2) The link goes through a redirect and does not pass PageRank or any value whatsoever. (3) There are way too many links on that page, do the value of all links are diluted. (4) They hide links with white text on white background (dangerous). The list goes on.

A thread at SEO Chat discusses this and wether or not it is the responsibility of the link exchange scammee to notify the others. There is a list of links on a page, all of those links were exchanges. The members plan is to contact each link owner and notify them that the links from this scammer are not passing any value. Is this member being a Good Samaritan?

You know Google purchased Blogger not so long ago. Blogger is a free service to set up a Weblog to manage your personal content. This site is a form of blog, but I opted for Movable Type over blogger for numerous reasons. What is kind of ironic, is that people are using Google's Blogger to set up dozens of free blogs and then setting up hundreds of keyword rich anchor text links to point to pages. This is being discussed at two forums, I'll just give you a link to the HighRankings thread.

So you have just taken over a new clients site, you have got all the details situated, and you know they have doorway pages infecting some area of the site. First step, is to get rid of those bad boys. Step 2 is to make sure the search engine knows there are no more pages in that location. So, what do you do to best remedy the situation, without doing your client or website any harm in the search engines?

Additional Important Questions:
Do I use a 301 redirect or a 404 page not found in place of these pages?
Do I need to conserve the pagerank of the original page by passing it on?
What happens if I use a 404?
What if the search engine have already spidered these pages?

There is a good thread over at Cre8asite Forums that details this very case. The member Mike521, dealt with a situation just like this, he got rid of the doorway pages generated from a previous company, and recommend a 404 page not found to be put in place. Basically removing the page completely. Ammon Johns goes on to say that "Search engines should always drop any correctly formed 404 error URL. The only times a search engine retains a 404 page is when the custom 404 page has been poorly done". Additionally if there is no real value on the doorway pages in terms of pagerank it would seem pointless in doing a 301 or 302 redirect to another page.

Check out the thread on Fixing Doorway Pages

Interesting thread at SEW Forums named Ethics on Spam Reporting. This thread is interesting because it talks about ethics from the other side of the coin. Most of the time, threads discussing ethics are on the topic of using "black-hat seo" techniques. But what if you find a site that is using these black hat techniques, is it ethical to report them to the search engines?

Just a different twist to the classical debate between black hats and white hats. Make sure to check out the thread at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Yes, site rankings can be literally highjacked by your competitors by (1) stealing your content and (2) using a 302 redirect. How does it work? GoodSite.com ranks in the number three slot at Google. EvilSite.com comes along and copies the content directly from GoodSite.com. Then EvilSite.com puts a 302 redirect from EvilSite.com to GoodSite.com.

Many believe that Google looks at this as EvilSite.com as the new page for GoodSite.com. Why? (1) Same content and (2) the 302 redirect gives it a spin. So Google will go ahead and remove the GoodSite.com page from the listings with its duplicate content filter and replace the listing with EvilSite.com.

Now of course, you got the 302 redirect sending all the traffic from EvilSite.com to GoodSite.com, right? Well, not if they are only giving this 302 redirect to Google through IP Delivery. What this does is effectively allow searchers to go to EvilSite.com, because the 302 redirect will not redirect the actual users.

The bate and switch worked.

A huge thread on this topic is over at WebmasterWorld.

I would like to thank Max Chirkov for giving me the details for some of this entry.

A thread over at Search Engine Watch named Huge Google delisting of the SEO leaders in Europe discusses the banning of several large European SEO firms from the Google index. If you know French, you can read the forum discussion over at a French forum at Webmaster Hub. These firms feel that Google is picking particularly on French SEO firms for their use of doorway pages.

A thread at WebmasterWorld named Google's response to: Redirected URL discusses one members experience with a backlink, that she believes, was responsible for de-listing here site in Google.

She was listed in a directory that was using a bunch of redirects. I am not sure which directory it was, and why she would believe that her exclusion from Google would be from a directory listing but she does. Obviously, she knew something was a bit sketchy with the directory. :)

The reason I note this thread is because of jdMorgan post (moderator at WMW) msg # 8. I'll quote some of his post here:

To clear up some points here, the first thing you need to do when considering a listing in a given directory is to use the server headers checker to see what kind of redirect(s) the directory uses on its links. Examine the output of that utility, and look for the server response code. A 301-Moved Permanently is acceptable. A 200-OK or a 302-Found (Moved Temporarily) is not acceptable. You will get a 200-OK response for pages which contain a meta-refresh (not good). Multiple redirects are not good, but could be acceptable (I don't know - see final pp below), but starting with the listed URL, follow each redirect manually with the headers checker, and note the response code and the URL being redirected to, entering each URL into the headers checker in succession to "follow" the redirect path.

How not to conduct link exchanges? Do not send out hundreds of unsolicited emails with the same link exchange message. A thread named Ticked Off By Cryptic Link Requests over a HighRankings discusses this. I personally delete these emails as soon as I see them, most of them don't even get into my inbox (thanks to spamassassin).

Imagine that, an army of bots that crawl the Web for pages that look to be spamming the search engines. This kind of makes me scratch my head and want to build this myself.

Some of the downsides or challenges:
- Would these bots need to comply with the robot.txt file? So if someone excludes "spam bot" can it crawl anyway?
- How is spam defined? I guess we can have some sort of level of spam and chart it from green to red. That can work (thinking out loud).
- If the search bots can't pick up the spam, then how can my army of spam bots pick them up? Do the spam bots need to wear camouflage? :)

This topic is currently being discussed over at the Search Engine Watch Forums.

At what point do you give up on a site which has been banned by a popular search engine? That is the topic of one thread over at WebmasterWorld. Many sites have been reported to have been banned or penalized by Yahoo! Search. The unusual thing is that the site owners honestly do not know why the site was banned. In fact, the site does well in other search engines like Google, Ask Jeeves and MSN. So now what?

Several individuals feel that leaving the old site up but excluding Yahoo!'s bots in the robot.txt file AND putting up a new site specifically for Yahoo! but excluding that site from the other bots in the robot.txt file is the solution. This way, the site continues to rank well in the other search engines and you get to start from scratch with Yahoo!.

Do ditch the old site and start from scratch with Yahoo! Search only.

Weekly, I log in to my Orkut account with the intention of deleting all the spam in my inbox. I expect it, it is waiting for me and then destroy them. I am actually thinking of emailing Orkut's developers for a feature request. The requested feature would be an easier way to delete the messages in the Orkut inbox. Currently they display 5 messages on one screen. I can then click "check all" and then delete the messages. It would be much more efficient, if I can see 50 messages on one page and then check all and delete that way. What I do now is repeat the process of deleting mail 5 pieces at a time, it takes too much time.

In fact, I received a spam message asking people not to spam. The subject of the message was "Gosh Stop Spamming!!!!". Now how funny is that. This is like pre-school.

Here is a screen image of me half way through my deletion process, including the spam message to stop spamming.

Google is constantly combatting search engine spammers (I know some to do not like to be called this, so sorry). This past update, they began blocking an other type of spam named onmouseover JavaScript page redirects.

My understanding of how this spam tactic works is that when a searcher visits a page the second the mouse hovers over the page contents or background, the page redirects to a new page. So the first page (the one that initiates the redirect) contains keyword stuffed content that is not meant for the end user. Search engines rank this page high in the rankings and then when a searcher goes to it, they are automatically redirected.

Now Google is filtering out this type of spam tactic according to jimh009 at WebmasterWorld. GoogleGuy offers some support for those that were tricked into using this spam tactic by an unscrupulous SEO.

I know that we pulled the plug on some specific spam pages recently. If you paid an SEO and they somehow convinced you to put spam like sneaky redirects using an obfuscated JavaScript onMouseOver on the body tag on your pages, or other stuff like links to their doorway domains or their other clients, please make sure that you read http://www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html and http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html#quality before contacting Google. First, you need to make sure that you've removed any redirecting/spammy pages that were on your site. Make sure that every junky page like that is completely gone before you write, then you can send an email to webmaster [at] google.com with the subject line "reinclusion request" as give us as much detail as possible about the situation.

I believe that one SEO had convinced clients either to put spammy Javascript mouseover redirects, doorway pages that link to other sites, or both on their clients' sites. That can lead to clients' sites being flagged as spam in addition to the doorway domains that the SEO set up.

Again, make sure you completely remove any doorway pages or links to spam that an SEO convinced you to put on your site before you write to Google about reinclusion. It reflects badly on your site if you write about reinclusion and then we check and the spam pages are still live on your site.

Good move Google - makes for happy searchers.

Think your safe while searching Google? Well the bad news, is that sometimes you maybe not be aware that the Google results you are getting have been altered to benefit the growing adware/spyware industry. If we didn't have anything else to worry about in searching the net, there appears to be a form of adware that is able to hijack google results and insert ads to make them appear as if they were real results. At the last second right before the search is completed it alters the results just slighty. Most would not notice this. Disturbing yes...Relevant no way...A big problem yes for organic results.

This form of spyware was brought to my attention by a friend of mine who was quite perplexed that such bad results came up when she did a search for "boat scotland". While I am taking a trip to Scotland in the next few months, I was interested to see what she found, and too check out some boat trips in Scotland as well. Unfortunately I wasn't able to see the altered results (I didn't have the adware) so I asked her to take a screen shot which is shown below. You will notice the first 2 results are served ads, that serve content from what appears to be tripadvisor and expedia.com. There is no "cached" page, and all that is available is "similar pages". Upon examining the links further, I copied the domain into the address bar, and bamn! an adware company domain where the named company (http://www. webthiswebthat .com/search/validate.php), setups up shop to spread the malicious objects to who ever wants to web this and web that in their spare time.

Now how to remove such adware? I did some research on how this possible searchenginespamware made its way to my friends computer. It appears she picked it up from visiting a site that force loaded this into her browser objects. Either that or she downloaded it without knowing while downloading something else. In any case, it can be removed, but its quite difficult. So to add insult to injury, once you remove the adware, it will come back next time you start up your computer. Ahhhh! Not to fear, here is a list of good programs to start using to help clean up your system from this trash.

Spybot - All around good program

BHOdemon - great program for guarding your Internet Explorer Browser Helper Objects (good details too)

Spyware Blaster 3.1

Ad-aware - classic removal program that works well

Spy Sweeper - Supposedly this is the only program that will remove the above spyware on one cleaning.

A thread at WebmasterWorld discusses someone's theory that he has been penalized by Google because of conducting a heavy amount of cross linking between sites. I posted about a week ago on this topic and named it Pyramid Linking Strategies, which discusses how to avoid such a penalty.

But what do you do if you are already penalized? Some people place the noindex, nofollow tag in the robot.txt file. Then they revamp their sites and remove this tag. Build up new links in a triangular fashion and work hard on getting new links.

I visit John Battelle's Searchblog daily and it hurts me to see the amount of spam that is submitted through his commenting system. This blog uses several tactics to block comment spam but I often find myself using the spam at John Battelle's blog as a method of proactively preventing spam here.

I visit his blog, look at the recent spam he gets and copy and paste those URLs into the MT-Blacklist. It really helps but each time I do that, I feel a little guilty. The guilt comes from me benefiting in a little way from the comment spam at his blog. Just needed to get that off my chest.

A post by Bernard, a moderator at IHelpYou Forums, at DigitalPoint's Forum, which lead to a thread at IHelpYou Forums discussed Yahoo!'s troubles with handling 301 redirects. Here is the story...

Normally when you take down a page at one URL and then put it back up at an other URL, you use a 301 redirect to tell the search engines that the page has been permanently moved to a new address. A 301 redirect as defined by the W3.org is just that, a permanent redirect. Google and other popular search engines tell all Webmasters to use this technique when moving pages.

Yahoo! on the other hand tells people to create a page that says, this page has been moved here. What Yahoo is telling you to do is create a "doorway" page. Most of us know that doorway pages are SEO No Nos. So for Yahoo! to tell its SiteMatch customer to generate doorway pages instead of using a 301 redirect, is just not right. Those doorway pages can run the site owner the risk of getting penalized by Google and other search engines.

This leaves the Webmaster in a tight position. If they stick with the 301 redirect, Yahoo will treat it as duplicate content. If they switch to the doorway page all the other engines will treat it as a doorway page.

The standard for page relocation notification has been 301 redirects. Yahoo!, like all other search engines, need to support this standard.

Ben Edelman, the individual who brought the whole WhenU's case to light, has posted a very interesting comment at this site. He said:

A few people have asked me which SEO WhenU used. After all, it would seem to be perfectly natural for WhenU to name the SEO, and to let the SEO confirm WhenU's statement of what happened here. But all the news coverage to date is silent as to which SEO did the work -- even news publications that directly interviewed WhenU's Avi Naider on this subject.

So, this seemed like a subject ripe for some technical examination. I've taken a look, examing IP sharing and HTTP responses. All signs point to Synergy6. See my new addition to the site:

Which SEO Did WhenU Use? The Best Inference: Synergy6
http://www.benedelman.org/spyware/whenu-spam/seo.html

Ben Edelman
benedelman.org

Thank you Ben for sharing this information.

Excellent new thread over at WebmasterWorld on the topic of the five most important search engine optimization techniques to avoid when optimizing for Google.

1. Don't keyword stuff anchor text repetitively, either inbound or internal. Keep it down to a certain percentage of the total anchor text per page; use variations. Variety is the spice of life!

2. Don't go hyphen-happy in URLs, stuffing directory and file names with keyword phrases.

3. Don't presume to think that what we see the competition doing that's obvious is the thing that's causing their sites to rank well.

4. Don't assume it's one "algo" that's the answer. Extract the sensible academic principles behind each of them out there and apply the solid principles they teach to sensible site and page construction.

5. Try not to think like an SEO. ;)

Number five is my favorite, "Try not to think like an SEO."

Check out the responses here.

Lately it seems there has been an increase in datafeed driven/affiliate content sites out there. I myself have made quite a few. How search engines are going to eventually treat these sites is an important issue that should be discussed.

We all know Google says that duplicate content is a "don't" and as such you risk being banned or penalized for doing it. But what exactly is duplicate content? It isn't just affiliate datafeed sites, such as those using Amazon AWS, that have duplicate content. People often create sites using feeds from Wikipedia and DMOZ, is this duplicate content? You could find a press release from Tivo on thousands of news, financial, or electronics websites. Is that duplicate content? What about game cheat sites that all list the same cheats? How is Google going to figure out what types of duplicate content to ban or punish while leaving other types alone? Other than with manual review, is it even possible? Datafeed driven sites are only going to increase in number., search engines will have to do something.

I am a relatively new ODP editor. Getting elected was fun and joining the group of hundreds (possibly thousands) of volunteer editors was very respectable. My category was filled with about a 150 sites waiting to be reviewed, so I began tackling the task at hand. Going through each request and trying to determine if the site's content is unique, useful and relevant to my category.

Some sites were a perfect match, all I had to do was clean up the title and description and click add. Other sites are just pure junk and are submitted by people seeking ODP links to boost an other page's PageRank, those are easy to detect and delete as well. However, there were many and still are many sites that are border line spam. Sites that look pretty, have nice information but in reality are just affiliate sites. To tell you the truth, I built one or two myself, but I would never dream of listing it in the Open Directory Project (ODP).

There is a thread over at HighRankings that discusses a thread over at the ODP's public forum Resource Zone. It covers a topic just like this, where a "Meta Editor" (those are ODP Kings) can spot these types of sites in a glance. I guess over time and with more edits, I too will be able to spot these types of sites. Until then, the spammers will continue to solicit links from ODPs.

WebmasterWorld has a very interesting thread taking place named Award Winning Sites or Problem Sites?. A upset Web site owner saw a company build several sites that basically run off the same data set (probably same database) but have a different design and layout to them.

We have all seen examples of this while shopping online. One example is:
FootLocker.com & EastBay.com. See both their product landing pages for "Jordan Men's Air Jordan XII Retro Low" sneaker, FootLocker.com & EastBay.com. Not only do those pages look almost exactly the same, so do the homepages.

Brett Tabke, quickly defends the this practice as stating they have "done an outstanding job of building out quality sites and promoting them in a leading edge manner. They represent some of the best that the promotion world have to offer and I will not hesitate to reward that quality work by purchasing from them again soon." "They are all unique and quality sites," Brett said.

However, not everyone at the thread agrees. Check out the thread here.

I must say, Danny Sullivan was quick to respond on my one critical post on the SES conference.

To be fair, I have quoted his response below:

Yes, suffice to say, we don't want you overwhelmed with notices. For any show, we might typically send out two or three emails. Usually, it something like the show is coming, then the agenda is up, then hey, the deadline for a discount is approaching. The content should be slightly different, and always with a reason to keep in touch with you.

We honestly get few complaints about this. Seriously, I could count them on my fingers, that few. And of those few, it's usually, "why did I get so many in one day." That happens because despite deduping attempts, occasionally people are indeed on more than one list and not spotted.

For example, I'm on several different Jupiter lists, ClickZ, ClickZ Stats, SEReport, SEUpdate and SearchDay to name the ones I can remember. I got one email sent to me today as part of being one of those lists. The deduping seemed to have worked.

I'm also on a separate list just for people who expressly want to get notified about SES shows. That caused me to get a second email. It would be nice if that was also deduped, but at least I understood it more.

If any of your readers feel like they are getting too many emails, or have gotten duplicates on the same day, feel free to have them get in touch via our feedback page and I'll forward the information so the SES staff can look into the problem.

cheers,
danny

I have attended a couple Search Engine Strategies Conferences in the past, so of course I expect one or two email notifications about the up and coming Toronto show. But I have to say, I must have received 10 emails about this Toronto show already. And I expect to get a few more before it the show takes place.

I think it might be because I am on several lists. One as a conference attendee, one as a newsletter member, one as a paid member of SearchEngineWatch and one as an advertiser at one of the events. This is not really an excuse to receive so many notifications about the same event. I am sure Danny Sullivan would agree with this and maybe send Jupiter a note on this, but I do not expect changes soon. It all depends on the number of people who complain.

I like Danny, Search Engine Watch and the Search Engine Strategies conferences. I just don't like all the email notifications about them.

Researchers at Stanford have produced a paper on search engine spam or as they define it web spam.
You can read the paper here...
Some extracts raised my eyebrows such as...

"... Please note that according to our definition, all types of actions intended to boost ranking, without improving the true value of a page, are considered spamming."

Does that mean removing session ids or changing a company name in the title tag to include a keyword is spam by their definition?

There are various techniques left out (hopefully intentionally as it is a spammers guide as it is). Their suggestions for search engines to better their algorithm make sense. I believe however Google already implements at least two of their suggestions.

I received the following in a spam email today:
"Hello, I am (name deleted), GOOGLE LISTS ME #1 IN THE WORLD FOR:
'PERSONAL SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION ACCOUNT REP'"
There's a greater than zero chance that this post will outrank him in a couple weeks. I hate to be mean to Harry, but any fool can rank if they're the only one trying.

I refer to what (name deleted) is doing here as "straw man SEO" - you can't beat the real SEOs, so you construct a straw man like 'personal search engine optimization account rep.' Do people actually spend money with this guy, or did he resort to spam because he had no chance?

Poke fun in this thread at the Best Practices forums, about the worlds #1 ranked personal search engine optimization account rep.

Another good example of a phrase that is not competitive, would be MONEY BACK SEARCH ENGINE PLACEMENT PROS which is the latest conquest of our "Straw Man SEO of the Year." I wonder how long his #1 on Yahoo for that "gem" will hold up...

There are a couple threads at the forums that discuss how Yahoo differs from Google. Some of those threads point out that it is easier to "spam" Yahoo with simple "on-page seo elements" then it is to with Google.

Check out both these threads:
--> Yahoo Is More Spammable Then Google?
--> A Yahoo! Search Ranking Observation...

This is a blog and all blogs with comments enabled are valid targets for "comment spam". So how does one protect their blogs from "comment spam"?

What is comments spam? If you ever heard of Google Bombing, then you already know what comment spam is. But if you don't know, comment spam is when one manually or automatically adds comments to the blog entries with links to their Web sites in an effort to increase the external links to that site and increase the sites PageRank/Popularity in the eyes of the Search Engines.

This webblog is powered by Movable Type, a very popular and free Weblog platform. MovableType has added several patches to reduce the likelihood of this blog getting hit by a comment SPAM bot. The first thing they added was "ThrottleSeconds", this allows the blog administrator to set the number of seconds between comment posts before the individual can post an other comment. So if someone from the same IP address tries posting in 60 seconds after he/she posted again, it will not allow for it. This attempt gets logged in the configuration and you can later ban that IP address from entering your site. The second prevention method they have added was to enforce a redirect link for any comment author URLs. This is to discourage people for posting repeatedly for the sole purpose of increase PageRank. For more information on this, please visit here.

Finally, what I just added last night to this blog was a new blacklist method of spam protection. This is similar to how SpamAssassin combats email spam but for a Weblog. This plugin is called MT-Blacklist and is "a Movable Type plugin to eradicate comment and trackback spam".

This morning it prevented the first attempt:
Time: 2004.03.18 07:38:38
IP Address: 208.233.33.11
Information: MT-Blacklist comment denial on Search Engine Roundtable Weblog: (levitra|lolita|phentermine|viagra|vig-?rx|zyban|valtex|xenical|adipex|meridia\b)[\w\-_.]*\.[a-z]{2,}

Shall I ban this IP address? :)

While its relatively not too difficult to optimize for Inktomi in general, getting blacklisted by Inktomi is actually a little easier than most realize. I believe a lot of it stems with people over or out doing the optimization of another website that ranks well in Inktomi. Keyword density is not always a magic bullet for Ink. The problem with getting penalized in Inktomi is that most are not even aware of what they got blacklisted for in the first place, they assume the worst and that the "sky is falling". Well despite titanic fears of the worst and short of getting abducted by aliens there shouldn't be anything to fear, its relatively easy to get back your rankings in Inktomi. The first thing people should do is look at their website to begin with. Do this before emailing Positiontech or Inktomi with vague questions as the to the nature of your site. If you identify possible problem areas and be specific you are more likely to get a better answer. Here are some problem areas that have popped up in the past for people who got blacklisted.

1. Hidden text contained within or off the viewable area of the website or page
2. Formatting meta-tags that are incorrect in syntax or appropriate length. This applies to meta data and titles as well.
3. Meta data that has nothing to do with the page itself.
4. Cascading Style Sheets can create problems when used incorrectly.
5. Cloaking pages that either direct or feed the Slurp robot something other than what is originally there.
6. Affiliate URL's, inserting affiliate id's within a URL.
7. Redirecting visitors for no apparant reason
8. Heavy inbound linking for artifically raising link popularity, could possibly apply to networks of sites that cross link only with a single network.

Someone contacted me today to ask me why they had been kicked out of Google, A quick investigation revealed a link that simply redirected back to the page, using
-script language="JavaScript">
-
window.location.replace('http://www.domain.com');
//---

-script> I asked for the source code of the actual page and was sent a complete BS spam page called a "Smart page" If anyone here uses these pages or is thinking about it DONT! This particular person was kicked out of Google and you will be too,

Here is an example of code you should never have on your server (A smart page? Whats so smart about it?)

Continue reading "Smart Page - Spam still alive"

If you haven't seen Danny Sullivan's post in response to one of my critiques on a track that took place at the SES Conference on Day Three, then check it out. This post is actually not in response to that but does discuss the points from that track.

Web analytics can be crucial in understanding how your users get to your site but then, more importantly, what they do once they get to your site. We all know that traffic can be good and can be bad. We do not want to optimize for keywords and drive traffic to our sites that have nothing to do with our site or what it is selling, that just wastes server resources and costs money. We do however want to optimize for the best keywords, by best keywords I mean - keywords that have a high conversion rate. A conversion rate can be a purchase, someone filling out a contact form, someone calling for more information or even someone adding a comment to your blog post. Many of the famous speakers are the SES conference call this a "call to action" and I am pretty sure that Shari Thurow came up with that term, or at least made it what it is today.

Many Web analytics programs give you the ability to track these call to actions from the search engine or entry point to the final conversion point. This funnel is an important criteria when it comes to tracking your success and an SEO/SEM. As Danny Sullivan said, it is not totally about how well you rank for keyword A or keyword phrase B, its more important if your keywords are converting into what you want them to convert to (call to action).

Continue reading "Web Analytics - SEO/SEMs Best Friend"