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February 10, 2007

BlogSpot Redirect Spam Floods Search Results

Spammers found a new way to drive traffic to their spammy sites or affiliates: create tons of free BlogSpot blogs, put some content in the templates, create links between all the blogs and redirect the visitors to the spammy sites. Apparently, this scheme works and the redirect seems smart too.

A search for "how students loans affect fico score", BlogSpot redirect spam dominates the top 100 results (all the top 35 results are BlogSpot blogs).


Here's what you see when you click on the top result:


... and what Google sees:


Another query that shows a lot of spam BlogSpot blogs is "how to transfer music to blackberry". Most of the blogs don't contain any post and they only use the homepage, by changing the template.

{ Via Digg. }

7 comments:

  1. Steve Rubel noticed this a while ago too:
    http://www.micropersuasion.com/2007/01/googles_blogger.html

    ReplyDelete
  2. That's related, but different. Steve found actual posts that use name of popular blogs to attract more visitors and redirect them to spammy sites.

    The sites I'm talking about are void, except for the homepage (so they're not actual blogs), and use a strange form of cloaking.

    ReplyDelete
  3. At Digg, I basically said:
    I'll check on this. My impression was that something was happening in the migration from the old blogger to the new version of blogger, but I'll definitely check with the blogger team about tackling this.

    It's not a Google bomb, of course.

    ReplyDelete
  4. It seems to not be doing this anymore. Good thing.

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  5. Well having firefox configured OK I had problems being redirected form that pages (first FlashBlock blocked javascript that was apparently used to redirect, than I couldn't see any ads that were filtered by adblock). Not that I'm unhappy wth it :). Well only defende from spammers is having things OK on client side and not counting for servers.

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  6. Conor Cleary, you'll see different things at different data centers right now, but I've asked folks to look into it.

    ReplyDelete

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