Spamming of Yahoo/Google Directories

Directory spamming on a new dimension?

[IanWil01]

After about 8 years of drifting around the web I have just tripped over a master spammer beyond belief. It has been so well done that it appears that he has bluffed every engine to date... how the spiders miss his hidden linked code at the base of every page is beyond me!
The result is that anyone looking for [snip] content - regardless of what they search - ends up in this guys network of mainly stolen content web pages.
The problem is that when a site user places a booking they believe that they are at the actual holiday operator's site - but nope - you guessed it our friend has just scammed another booking...
It seems that most [snip] operators are oblivious to this guys 50 plus domains and related interlinking.
How does a person go about setting the ledger back to even and shifting this dude out of the search indexes?
This is almost a new age crime!
Cheers - Ian

[edited by: 2_much at 7:31 am (utc) on Sep. 17, 2003]
[edit reason] no specifics [/edit]

[percentages]

Welcome to WW IanWil01.

>This is almost a new age crime!

No it is someone taking advantage of the shortfalls in current SE's....I say good luck to them. They were smarter than the competition and are most likely getting the rewards right now.

Is this person taking a risk? Probably, but then if they make several hundred thousand dollars from it before SE's decide they are "cheating", why would they care?

If they do get caught I'm sure the only thing that will happen is a minor setback for a couple of months while they come up with another scheme to delude SE's.

For as long as people use SE's others will attempt to manipulate them by whatever means possible. If you want to beat these folks you are going to have to spend more time thinking about how to do it, and less time complaining about it;)

You may see that as harsh.....but this is not a government controlled industry, it is free enterprise....anything goes, if it makes a buck people will do it;)