Spam Archives

Ann Smarty goes through the conflicts of reporting competitors as spamming Google search results. Yes, this is a topic we covered many times here, including:

• 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.

A WebmasterWorld thread links to a post at Agerhart.com showing screen shots of Yahoo! Autos cloaking.

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.

In a WebmasterWorld thread, Brett Tabke points us to a PC World article that mentions that up to 80% of blogs are infested with offensive content. This content includes:

• 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.