August 28, 2003
Ingenious Google spamming through Wikis
Well-linked websites rate better in Google searches. There's nothing new with that, of course, and spammers are aware of this. So what happens if you host a popular Wiki, like the Cocoon Wiki? Quite a while ago, somebody was inserting links in our Wiki that, at first sight, were perfectly innocent except for being slightly misplaced. Since one of the linked websites (http://www.apache-stuff.com/) however was abusing the Apache brand a fair bit, I started browsing that site, and found out it mostly consisted of pages grabbed from other places, without any credits or eventual copyright notes. Even worse, plenty of the innocent looking hyperlinks on that site were obviously pointing to p0rn sites. So I started removing references to that site. It was clear that the person injecting these links in our Wiki was trying to become part of the Google interwiredness mesh, increasing the chances of getting a good Google ranking.Since I just got the good news that I could go and fetch my newly purchased TiBook tomorrow, I went browsing Mark's interesting DiveIntoOSX Wiki. Knowing Mark's other venue, I'm pretty sure he has great Google rankings. So it was a bit to my dismal that I found out that same spam linker had been injecting links in that Wiki as well. Even worse, Google learned me that a lot of other Wikis are being infected by this spam linker. If you maintain a Wiki, make sure you are not listed here:
Looking at the results of these searches, the people behind this spamming sure knew their stuff. There's links to Wikis, links embedded in comment forms, and much other stuff. Beware.
Comments
Found two new ones on a Wiki that you know today:
http://www.sunstar.ws
http://www.popkalaset.nu
As this page looks like the official reference for such sites, I'm adding them here ;-)
Posted by: Bertrand Delacretaz at September 18, 2003 04:38 PM