Google’s BMW blacklisting is an affair with many ramifications.

We have noticed a huge increase in “black hat” SEO by a number of companies, although few as high profile as BMW. This gives us issues because it has a big effect on blog spam. Suddenly a humble keyword search on a customer’s brand is flooded with a blizzard of bogus sites. The sites look like this:

http://www.mownhose.com/

They have no archive, the content is nonsense and the sole function of the site is to spam a keyword.

I got this one by using the search term

“aluminium”

What is intriguing about this is that the link is misformatted.

It looks like this

http://www.mownhose.com/7//

and gives a 404 error.

I don’t entirely understand why this is so …

These companies are using techniques which are designed to give them authority in particular search strings. They are then selling this authority to … well, who knows, but probably someone in the Aluminium business.

The fact that companies as big as BMW, as Ricoh have been doing this shows that spammers have evolved from working for the gambling and porn industry into having a roster of “legit” customers. Work done by our company recently identified a highly respectable company as the beneficiary of a web of complicated links from affiliate schemes via invisible sites. Google say that they have a fix for the problem, but my guess is that they wouldn’t have chosen as big a beast as BMW to blacklist unless they wanted to fire a loud shot across the “black hat” SEOs’ bows.

Update:

Even weirder: here is someone trying to spam the name “Alan”

http://alanblog.morsalan.com/

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 9th, 2006 at 11:23 am and is filed under Google, Ricoh, BMW, Splogs, Spam blogs, Market Sentinel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.