Google gets gamed (and RAFD0)

IT TOPICS:Emerging Technology, Security

Duck and cover! It's IT Blogwatch, in which black-hat search engine optimizers find a chink in Google's armor. Not to mention a striped RAID array of floppy disks...

A search engine spammer has managed to get Google to index billions of pages, according to John "Alex/TheHoff" Firmani: "You can make hundreds of keyworded subdomains and MSN will think quite highly of the pages. Same goes for blogspot and other blogs– they do very well on MSN and sometimes on Yahoo. Now Google and the new BigDaddy crawler is showing an even more idiotic preference when indexing and ranking subdomains ... eiqz2q.org -- depending which datacentre you hit, you will see between 3.8 and 5.5 BILLION RESULTS. Even worse… the domain is EIGHTEEN DAYS OLD. That’s right, in under 3 weeks, one person has managed to get one domain 5 billion pages indexed in Google ... Coincidentally, the sites also have 3 blocks of Adsense ads on each page. I wonder how much that one person is earning per day with billions and billions of pages indexed and ranking? ... Aren't you glad that some of your sites ... have been de-indexed to make room for this?"

» Ana Aman wants people to stop blaming Google: "they are not perfect but still the best on removing spam sites ... of course you would probably expect G to act faster, but I think they want the banning process to be automatically to avoid further spam. If they ban manually, tomorrow 10 others will spam again. Here is a quick explanation on how he did this whole madness [click through to read] Have you noticed anything spectacular? No! Any webmaster with a few programming knowledge can do this... but it will be totally unethical."

» Nicholas Carr muses on the economic incentive to do this: "Loaded with AdSense ads and content swiped from other sites, it has already become one of the web's top 7,000 sites, as ranked by Alexa ... if you have a billion pages (all automatically generated, of course) and each pulls in a penny a year, that would earn you a cool ten million bucks per annum, or about 27 grand per day. It's not hard to see the incentive, is it?" Zephram Stark comments: "If I don't find a search result useful, I steer away from it, which tells my Google Personal Search (Beta) that I prefer not to see pages like that. The result is exactly what I want: pages that I find more useful rise to the top on subsequent searches. A similar effect happens to the types of pages I ignore in my search results or manually remove from my search history ... With no conscious effort on my part, my search algorithm has customized itself to my preferences. Soon beta testing will be finished, and millions of un-gamable personalized algorithms will figure into the whole. While other search engines are trying to grok how to censor spam-sites, Google has created a system where censorship is unnecessary."

» Zoli Erdos is disappointed to see instructions on how to spam: "Naive me ... I thought spammers would prefer to call themselves marketers, and would generally stay away from using the term "spam". Oh, boy, how wrong I am. Some are actually proud of being spammers ... Alex, a 'SEO bloguru' lays out the easy steps how everyone else can do it ... Censorship is bad ... yet I am really unhappy to see this" to which Pascal Belloncle responds: "actually think this not such bad thing that the recipe is public. Think about it this way. Instead of having one person doing it, tomorrow, you'll have a 1000, and next week who knows... And what do you think is going to happen to their income? Yep, that's right, it is going to decrease to a trickle since there is a finite amount of searches every day, in essence decreasing the incentive to do it, hopefully to the point where they realize it is not worth it"

» Andreas Wacker wacked this out [sorry]: "It’s interesting that all those super smart phd holders at google never built it in a trigger in their code that would check if a domain would go from zero pages to five billion within 3 weeks. Actually a domain growing by 100,000 pages within a month is supicious. Like blogspot ;-)"

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And finally... Scott Fudali's striped array of 13 USB floppy drives

Richi Jennings is an independent technology and marketing consultant, specializing in email, blogging, Linux, and computer security. A 20 year, cross-functional IT veteran, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. Contact Richi at blogwatch@richi.co.uk.