What is Search Engine Spam: Google-Spamming
By now anyone with an email account is quite familiar with "spam"; you probably receive a dozen or more spams a day, and many more that don't arrive were blocked by your ISP (internet service provider: AOL, EarthLink, BellSouth, etc.)
But now, a new form of spam is growing: search engine spam or GoogleSpamming. Google-Spam is websites that add no value nor original content, but have been designed to achieve a high ranking in the search engines, particularly Google.
Here's how it works
A Google-spammer searches in Google for an unusual collection of ordinary English words, such as " into Google. Whatever comes back as the top 10, 20 or 25 results, he copies and puts on a webpage. He may slightly alter the appearance, so as not to look like a direct copyright infringement, but often they don't.
Now, when Google spiders the web and finds this page, you can bet that its algorithms will rank that page as number 1 for that phrase that the spammer use. Why? because he is feed backing to Google a single web page that contains all of the phrases and links to websites that Google has already rated as the top 25!
How does the Google-Spammer profit?
Simple: he actually put GoogleAds on the page along with other click-through and affiliate programs. So every time some one click on one of the ads or buys a product advertised there, he gets paid! Even though he never ships a single product himself, nor created any new, additional, or useful information.
Why Is This Bad?
Who cares? Well you should, if you use Google and other search engines, because it means that he's wasting your time when you go to search by taking you to a page of links that you already saw on Google, and if anything are more out of date. In addition, he's bombarded you with advertisements. So you've learned nothing and wasted your time looking at his page, stolen from Google.
What Can you do about it?
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First, report pages like this to the search engine where you found them.
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Second, learn to recognize the url's (website addresses) of the Google-spammers.
Examples:
Pure Google-Spam:
These guys make no attempt to disguise that they have just copied links from Google results pages: http://cheeseboro.xpnetworksecurity.info/ , http://cheeseboro.xpnetworksecurity.info/ , http://www.aspiringgeek.com/gramm/ ,
Disguised Google Spam
In this variant, the website attempts to alter the list of results in some way so that it is not a blatant cut-and-paste copy of the Google results for a subject
Web Spam
This isn't really spamming Google, as much as it is just a webpage that is spam in itself. They have actually provide a few paragraphs of information, usually at a summary or general level, about the topic, but then ALL further links are via Google Ads. Which means if you want any more information, you'll have to click on a link for which they will get paid, merely by you clicking the link. Since they are generalist and cover dozens and dozens of unrelated topics; they aren't adding much value at all; just more noise on the internet.
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Infobert is an example of this. Click, under computers, on their link for information about Adware. Notice that for any of the tools to actually solve your adware problem, you must click on a GoogleAd, and Ka-Ching! they get paid!
Here is the beginnings of a list of Google-Spammers:
And please let us know about any suspicious calls or emails you receive. We look for patterns so that we can alert the authorities and victims to new scams, before it is too late!
For a comprehensive list of national and international agencies to report scams, see this page.