Last year, this rather infamous spam artist was successful in getting millions of pages indexed at Google. Around the forums and blogosphere, this little spam went down in history as a slam again all the SE's, but especially Google.
Basically, the spammer used a combination of sub-domain cloaking, forum and blog spamming, and various redirects, to get
billions of pages indexed in Google.
Of course, is sent a shock wave around the SEO and Blog world, and even wound up on Matt Cutt's doorstep when poster's to his blog
demanded to know what the hell was happening.
Well, demanded is a tough term, but there where a bunch of very ticked off people, being that Big Daddy had just rolled out, and this was not supposed to happen. But happen it did. And now it's happening again, but with a Google Property.
The spammer in question? TopSearch10 (dot) com (No link to this rat from me)
This time, however, he (or she, this is almost the year 2007 you know) is using Google property to do it. and it's the same property I lovingly use to communicate with the outside world.
Yeap,
Blogger, or more exactly, sub domains of the blogspot domain, are being used as cloaked redirects to this spam search results of paid advertising.
I found this out when I was looking into another Google (apparent) property called
SearchMashI was doing some research for keyword searches for one of my sites, and I found this
wierd result set.That's when I started checking around, and found that these "blogs" all redirect to Mr. Spammer. Of course, I this guy does this every year, but what really freaked me out was that he was using Google property to do it.
For instance http://mb-accomm.blogspot.com/ (NO LINK FOR YOU)
Typically, this spammer uses forum and blog spamming software to flood small forums and blogs that don't have anti-spam measure in place to stop attacks like this. Here's an example
http://seborga.net/ubb/Forum2/HTML/000052.html (No link for you Mr. Spammer)
However, he does it on a
MASSIVE SCALE, creating hundreds of thousands of links to his sites, and low and behold, blammo! Spam listings in SERP's all over the SE's.
I don't know enough about spamming technology to say that he's actually using the Blogger service to do this, or if he's spoofing the blogspot url, but it does make your eyes spin in your head.
What really scared me, or impressed me, depends on your point of view, is that this spammer is actually BOLD enough to try using a trusted domain name like blogspot. It's not the first time that trusted domains have been used in this way, but there are over 13 million blospot sub-domains being indexed right now. Last year, this spammer used a few of his own domains, but once they where identified, they where dealt with.
However, this time around, the spammer is using a domain with MASSIVE amounts of indexed links from a trusted url. This is a little scary for a few reasons.
- Whether he's spoofing or actually using Blogger to do this, how did it get past the technological Giant that is Google?
- How is this going to adversely affect blogger users? When I link to a url, I want that link to be beneficial, because I trust the content, and I'd like to think that my little blog link might give that linked content some SERP juice. I'd hate to think that my little blogger blog will be considered a bad site now.
- How will this adversely affect sub-domain indexing. A lot of sites out there use sub-domains as honest methods to create a new "site" or information, such as forums or blogs, that are bona fide reasons for such uses. If this sends the algo keepers in a frenzy, what will happen next?
I mean, those are just a few of my concerns. I'm sure Google will clamp down on this asap, and in all honesty, I'm probably freaking out over nothing. But Google is THE source of search and technology. There's always going to be someone out there that tries to float under the radar and try to abuse it, but on this level?
Actually using Google property, to spam Google? It makes my head spin, and is very disheartening.
rumblepup will be watching this one.
