How to Ruin a Good Thing

I like the internet. I like Search engines. I like PPC. This kind of crap will kill it all.

How Billions of Bogus Pages Undermine Search Engines, Advertisers and The Web: "Over the weekend, Monetize, a blog dedicated to tricking search engines, described how a blackhat got Google to index over 5 billion webpages within three weeks. Yahoo and MSN were fooled, too, though nowhere near as badly. (MSN, for example, indexed just 62 pages before cutting him off.)

Searchers who landed on the pages were treated to copy scraped from legitimate websites, along with Pay-Per-Click ads from Google or Yahoo.

The effort seems to have met some success. Third-party traffic monitor Alexa noticed enough activity to rank at least one of the rogue sites among the 2,000 highest traffic sites on the web. That's a phenomenal ranking for any site, especially a three week old site based in Romania.

According to Ana's Lair, the search spoofing project was really fairly simple. In the end, the scheme required an SQL-driven auto-page generator, a modification of DNS software, and redirection/cloaking code to show Google one thing and the user something else.
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