Google Warns About Search-Spammer Site Hacking 59
Al writes "The head of Google's Web-spam-fighting team, Matt Cutts, warned last week that spammers are hacking more and more poorly secured websites in order to 'game' search-engine results. At a conference on information retrieval, held in Boston, Cutts also discussed how Google deals with the growing problem of search spam. 'I've talked to some spammers who have large databases of websites with security holes,' Cutts said. 'You definitely see more Web pages getting linked from hacked sites these days. The trend has been going on for at least a year or so, and I do believe we'll see more of this [...] As operating systems become more secure and users become savvier in protecting their home machines, I would expect the hacking to shift to poorly secured Web servers.' Garth Bruen, creator of the Knujon software that keeps track of reported search spam, added that some campaigns involve creating up to 10,000 unique domain names."
Re:Confirmation (Score:5, Informative)
Except that that's not what the summary mentions. The summary is talking about people hacking websites to get more "good" links to their site, rather than having to rely on standard link farms that are then blacklisted. It's like comment spam, only with hacking of servers instead.
Re:And what about search farms? (Score:3, Informative)
I don't see any "X" (or any other icons) with my search results.
Re:And what about search farms? (Score:3, Informative)
CustomizeGoogle is a firefox plugin(which hasn't been updated for 3.5 yet) lets you ignore domains.
I had a ton on there.
http://www.fixya.com/ [fixya.com] seems to have risen up now that I'm searching on how to fix some lawn equipment I inherited.
"Yard Machines fix belt" and it comes back with http://www.fixya.com/tags/yard_machines_deck_diagram_belt [fixya.com]
Of course this is 100% useless.
Those sites are fun to mess with friends. "Dude, did you know that there's an entire webpage on fixing your impotency?"
Google needs web spam to profit. (Score:4, Informative)
Google can't solve this problem because their business model requires web spam.
Google is in the advertising business, not the search business. Search is a traffic builder for the ads. Google's customers are their advertisers, not their search users. They have to maximize ad revenue. The problem is that more than a third of Google's advertisers are web spammers, broadly defined. [sitetruth.net] All those "landing pages", typosquatters, spam blogs, and similar junk full of Google ads are revenue generators for Google. Every time someone clicks on an AdWords ad, Google makes money, no matter what slimeball is running the ad. Google can't crack down too hard, or their revenue will drop substantially. Google does have some standards, but they're low.
Google went over to the dark side around 2006. In 2004 and 2005, Google sponsored the Web Spam Summit [technorati.com], devoted to killing off web spammers. From 2006, Google sponsored the Search Engine Strategies [searchengi...tegies.com] conference, where the "search engine optimization" people meet. That was a big switch in direction, and a sad one.
As we demonstrate with SiteTruth [sitetruth.com], it's not that hard to get rid of most web spam if you're willing to be a hardass about requiring a legit business behind each commercial web site. Google can't afford to do that. It would hurt their bottom line.
However, cleaning up web search results with browser plug-ins is a viable option. Stay tuned.
I've seen one of these hacked sites (Score:3, Informative)
I saw this in the wild a few weeks ago. I had a google email alert running for my bank, which pointed me to a page which was blog-like but when you looked closer it was completely auto-generated gibberish. They had built the whole thing based on a list of banks and insurance companies. As it was under envsci.rutgers.edu I guessed they had been compromised.
I reported it to the webmaster and I see that it is gone (both from Google's index and the server). Not a word of thanks though. How long does that take...
Maybe someone here will give me a medal instead?
Re:And what about search farms? (Score:3, Informative)
If that really worked, I wouldn't still see so many damn "experts-exchange" results since I'm sure I've 'x'ed at least 5 dozen of them.