Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Our members here also note that many of these domains use an odd character instead of a dot - possibly part of the scheme. Also, these spam domains may be from anywhere, and not neccesarily China at all.
Warning for those doing detective work - many of these spam domains will attempt to install malware on your computer.
...nine of the top ten results are these weird Chinese sites....the more specific and detailed the search request, the more likely Google is to list these Chinese sites. The issue has apparently been reported to Google, but if the basic algorithms allow this sort of result, even banning the specific sites will not stop this sort of abuse.[news.yahoo.com...]
IF people start getting spyware warnings when clicking on links then I'd say they stay away from GOOG and it's going to take a long time before a trust has been built up again.
Let's be realistic: Most people are never going to hear about this problem, and if they do, they'll put the blame on the shady sites, not on Google.
If Google and Yahoo (see Dvorak's column) are having a "CN domain Spam Plague," they'll obviously need to find fixes--not for publicity reasons or to retain trust, but simply to protect unaware and therefore vulnerable users.
The word "sutra" originates from Sanskrit - so programmers from India would also be a possibility
Sutra in this case is a software product made by Russians to assist search engine spammers in distributing their traffic from multiple spam sites into designated areas: if you search for "sutra tds" you will find more info about it.
Does that mean that the first 3 are "trusted" and can't be touched by anything? What type of sites is it? Authority sites?
"Most people are never going to hear about this problem, and if they do, they'll put the blame on the shady sites, not on Google"
If you go to a store and buy some milk that is bad, would you blame it on the milk farmer or the store? Would you buy milk from that store again?
Absolutely yes, provided I have bought milk there previously without any problem, and that the grocer would take it back and give me a free replacement. Everyone knows that crap happens.
IF people start getting spyware warnings when clicking on links then I'd say they stay away from GOOG and it's going to take a long time before a trust has been built up again.
Hmmmmm, this brings a thought to mind -- if only PC users are vulnerable to these spware/malware attacks then maybe there is still a chance for Mac users to rule the Internet. :)
A 'Text Link Ads' seller out there is leading the charge on the Russian front. Not the real advertising company that no longer ranks for their domain name.
Google drops the mainstream paid link advertisement sellers and replaces them with massive link spam sellers - ironic.
How about Google just block all .cn domains -- with certain specific exceptions for well-known, established .cn sites -- from the USA-displayed SERPs until they come up with an algo fix? That should be a cinch to do.
The Great Firewall of China in reverse! There would be some poetic justice in that.
In looking at the spam links on some of these .ca and .ru sites. It seems the links are generally well hidden on the pages - almost like someone is sneaking them in.
I'm guessing they must have picked up my URLs from the SiteMap autodiscovery mechanism in robots.txt.
[mattcutts.com...]
...this spam was a little different than the typical brute force attacks that people have tried before (.be, .info, etc.) and... we were looking at making some infrastructure changes to better tackle any .cn issues we saw. There are a few changes to be made before I’m completely happy, but one is already done and another change is pending, so we’re in a better position now than (say) last week and I expect us to continue that progress.
I sure would like these site gone, just like everybody else, AND the ones that are still in top of search results.
[edited by: tedster at 2:21 am (utc) on Oct. 4, 2007]
[edit reason] report specific domains directly to Google [/edit]
Someone here had a theory about Google not being able to either read the domain names right with unicode chars and not being able to see that the "title url" and the domain link belonged to the same site, hence not removing spam....
Anyway, the [space] cn sites are still there and other .cn sites too. Maybe not as many, but still there especially when you add a location to your query.
Here is what I see.
They show up for relatively long tail searches that appear to not have many trusted results in the main index and these are being pulled from the supplemental, which probably does not have enough entries from "normal" sites.
The pages are stuffed with keyword rich content that is random jibberish. The format is typically 1200-2000 words then lots of internal links with the keywords in the anchor text and another 1000-2000 words after. Sprinkled in is four or five header tags with keywords as well.
At the bottom of the page are links to quality resources to make the page look more "legitimate"
The page includes javascript that checks to see if the referrer is a user following a Google serp and redirects the user to a site that is serving up trojans that backdoor your computer. Nice
So G is getting gamed and the casual user is getting owned. I think far to many people put far too much faith in how good Google really is. The quality of serps I see are pretty poor most if the time for things I look for.
This should be easy to fix. Wonder why it hasn't been already.
