Archive for the ‘Google’ Category

Hacked Website Spam Running Rampant in Google Search Results

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

Over the past couple weeks, I have been seeing more and more hacked websites rank very well for topical keywords in the Google search results. It appears that all of the sites in question are in fact legitimate websites but somehow share a common vulnerability which enables them to be exploited by the hackers to easily rank for specific keywords and distribute malicious spyware.

For example, I just tried a search for more information on “Anthony Sowell” who is the serial killer in Cleveland that the evening news keeps covering. The screenshot below shows that the four websites ranked from the 6th to 9th positions are all compromised and share the same parameter “?kkk=anthony-sowell.”

If you click on any of those 4 results, you will be redirected to another domain that attempts to install the malware on your computer.

Want more screenshots? You got it.

I picked some more examples of trending keywords on Google Trends, such as the company “Coins for Anything” that was recently highlighted in the news. Five of the Top 10 results are spam.

And yet another one for some guy named “Robert Lozier.” In this case, 3 of the Top 4 results are spam.

I have seen other variations such as “?q” and “?loop” and “?mowp” so it’s not just the “?kkk” parameter.

Historically, I think Google has done a pretty good job of combating spam and malware sites in their search results, especially when compared to any of the other search engines, but it seems recently that the amount of spam has increased significantly. Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

Yahoo! Shuts Down GeoCities & Blows SEO Opportunities Worth Millions

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

Yahoo! purchased the popular free web hosting service GeoCities in 1999 for $3.57 Billion dollars in stock. And on October 26, 2009, Yahoo! shut down GeoCities for good. Any website on GeoCities that was not transferred to a new web host by Monday is gone forever. Granted, most sites built on GeoCities were festering eyesores and for the most part nobody will lose sleep over its demise, but Yahoo! really screwed the pooch on handling the closing when it comes to SEO.

Let me explain.

As of October 28, 2009, there are 7.45 Million GeoCities URLs still indexed in Google. Go ahead, click that link and try to visit one of the sites listed. For example, Dr. Doo Wopp’s site “all about me and my love of the doo wopp sound” at http://www.geocities.com/doowopp21/ is no longer available and redirects to a Yahoo! 404 page. Multiply that one site times 7.45 Million and we’re dealing with a huge number of sites that will simply vanish.

I just did a search on SEMRush to find out the popular keywords for which GeoCities URLs rank in the Top 20 in Google for, and it came back an astounding 686,270 different keywords that generate an estimated 11,947,000 visitors from Google each month. It’s hard to fathom a website that got nearly 12 million visitors a month from Google alone will disappear.

For example, one of the keywords reported by SEMRush is the keyword “sayings.” According to the Google AdWords Keyword tool, this keyword gets over 1.2 Million searches a month.

Currently, the GeoCities website at www.geocities.com/heartland/lane/2470/lslists.htm ranks 4th in Google for a keyword that gets 1.2 million searches a month. Once Google re-indexes that site and is served a 404 error page, that site will be removed from the index.

At the very least, you would think Yahoo! would put forward some effort to preserve their search engine rankings and most of that traffic, right? Apparently that isn’t the case. Since Yahoo! is simply forwarding the GeoCities URLs to 404 or 410 permanent error pages instead of redirecting the sites with SEO friendly 301 redirects, the search engines will eventually drop all of the missing URLs from their indexes and Yahoo! will lose out on all of the invaluable search engine rankings and traffic that has amassed over the years. It baffles me that a company as big as Yahoo!, not to mention a major search engine, would make these decisions without keeping SEO in mind.

UPDATE - LocalSEOGuide.com made a similar post called Yahoo Flushes GeoCities, PageRank & Million$ Down The Drain. Check it out!

Google Caught Manually Changing Search Results for The White House

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

I caught this tweet from RustyBrick this morning: “Amazing, Google changes search results for White House http://bit.ly/1BuL80.”  The link points to an article on SERoundtable.com which explains how Google has appeared to have “made a change” to push a certain page on www.whitehouse.gov show up at the top of the search results for a specific query. What is even more striking is that the original poster mentioned that Bing already served the “correct” page, and Google apparently rushed to fix it.

This is significant because Google has had a longstanding philosophy of  “no manual intervention.”  Below is an excerpt straight from the Official Google Blog at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/introduction-to-google-ranking.html.

No discussion of Google’s ranking would be complete without asking the common - but misguided! - question: “Does Google manually edit its results?” Let me just answer that with our third philosophy: no manual intervention. In our view, the web is built by people. You are the ones creating pages and linking to pages. We are using all this human contribution through our algorithms. The final ordering of the results is decided by our algorithms using the contributions of the greater Internet community, not manually by us. We believe that the subjective judgment of any individual is, well … subjective, and information distilled by our algorithms from the vast amount of human knowledge encoded in the web pages and their links is better than individual subjectivity.

I am curious to see Google’s response to this. I am sure they will say something along the lines of “we didn’t directly change the SERPs manually, but we tweaked our algorithm to get the desired result.” Either way, incidents like these can definitely shake the trust of Google’s loyal userbase.