Sept 1999
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1- Intro
2- What is considered search engine spam
3- FTC cracks down on porn site for stealing
search engine listings
4- How to avoid getting your search
listing stolen
5- Search engine news
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1- Intro
Last week we ran into a story about a porn site that had stolen
search engine listings from hundreds of popular sites and then
had trapped visitors on its site by using a technique called
"mousetrapping".
We contacted several of the victims involved in last week's
incident and were able to acquire more details from Japanese
Friendship Garden (one of the victims).This month's newsletter
will be based on search engine spam and how it can be avoided.
Hope you enjoy this month's issue, and as always we ask that
if you like our newsletter, please forward it to all your webmaster
friends or whoever might be interested. Subscription is completely
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Thanks,
Submit Express
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2- what is considered search engine spam?
When the web first started, it soon became obvious that there
would be a need for search tools. Consequently, several search
engines appeared, many of which are still around.
During those early stages, achieving a top 10 ranking was an
easy task due to two reasons. First, there were very few sites
back then and thus less competition. Secondly, you could easily
improve your rankings by a few very simple modifications to
your page.
One of the techniques to improve rankings was to repeat keywords
on your page as many times as possible. This made the search
engines think that your page was more relevant than others.
Many people went one step further and made the text invisible
by using the same color text as the background. A few people
even started using unrelated keywords for their sites such as
"sex" to attract more traffic.
However, search engines started getting smarter and began to
implement algorithms in their spiders to detect any such abuse.
Nowadays the search engines are very smart and will consider
such techniques to be spam. If they see such spam, they will
either penalize your rankings or in extreme cases ban your site
completely.
Here are a few things that are considered spamming by the major
search engines:
- Keyword repetition: Any keywords repeated using commas
or spaces several times in a row is considered spam. The search
engines will also count the number of keywords appearing in
your page and compare it to your page's total word count.
If you use too many keywords compared to the total word count
on your page, this will also be considered spam. In general,
we recommend not using more than 6-10 keywords per 100 words.
If you use more, your rankings may be penalized.
- Invisible text: Any text that is the same color as your
background will be considered spam. If you use an image for
your page, make sure that your background color in the tag
is not the same color as your body text.
- Tiny Text: Very tiny text may be considered spam.
- Repetitive submissions: In general, we do not recommend
submitting your site more than once a month to major search
engines. Note that resubmission of your site does not help
improve your rankings. Your page's ranking is entirely dependent
upon your page content. However, we recommend submitting your
site to the search engines whenever you make any modifications
to your page. Some search engines allow daily submissions
of the same site, but will keep track of all your submissions,
and if they see that you are submitting your site too many
times, they may penalize or ban your domain.
- Redirections: Page redirections or META Refresh Tag is
considered spam by most search engines. The reason for this
is that many spammers regularly send an unrelated site to
the search engines and then use redirection to take you to
another site.
- Non-related keywords: If you use keywords non-related to
your site, it is considered spam by many search engines. Although,
the search engines do not have a way to detect this, somebody
may report your site, which will result in removal of your
domain.
The above techniques are considered spam by many of the major
search engines, but each search engine may have slightly different
criteria. If you have a concern about a technique you are using,
you can visit their websites for more details or contact them
directly.
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3- FTC cracks down on porn site for stealing
search engine listings
Last week FTC cracked down on a porn site operator for couple
of spam techniques known as "pagejacking" and "mousetrapping."
The offending page stole hundreds of pages from high traffic
sites by copying their source code to their server and then
submitting the listing to the search engines. Once the visitors
clicked on the search results listing, the page then used a
redirection method to go to a porn site. Once there, the visitors'
BACK button and EXIT buttons were disabled via a JavaScript
code, making it almost impossible for the visitor to leave the
site.
Some of the websites that had their pages stolen included Harvard
Law Review, the Japanese Friendship Garden and NewWorld.com,
which owns the popular Adrenaline Vault game site. Some of these
website owners complained to FBI, FTC and the search engines.
This resulted in the FTC asking Network Solutions to shut down
the domain names for the porn site, which included www.atariz.com
and www.pirate.lynx.com.
We wrote to several of the people who had their sites hijacked,
asking for details about the incident. The site operators for
Japanese Friendship Garden replied to our email. John Cornelius
is the president of Lighthouse Technology, Inc., the company
that hosts the Garden's web site, and has been the one most
closely involved in discovering the incident's factual details.
Below is what he had to say:
1) Is there a company press release about this incident?
Where can we find it?
No!
2) Which search engines had the hijacked listings?
To my knowledge the only search engine on which the pagejacking
succeeded was Alta Vista. We received no complaints about
other search engines.
3) Which search engines did you contact to remove these
listings? Who else did you contact besides search engines?
Alta Vista! Initially we contacted the FBI as well but
they were unable to pursue the issue because we could not
show a sufficient value for the damage caused. The matter
was eventually referred to the FTC who conacted us.
4) How did you contact them? By phone? Email? Was it
easy reaching them?
I did not contact Alta Vista but I believe that the person
who did so contacted them both via telephone and e-mail. The
response was adequate although I cannot speak to the ease
with which it was done. Contacting the FBI was a lot like
contacting any other governmental entity. The initial contact
was fairly trivial but it was referred around for several
days while they figured out who would do what, if anything,
about it.
5) What did the search engines have to say and how
long did it take before they complied with your request?
I believe that the problem was corrected within 36 hours
of our initial contact.
6) What were the keywords used and what were the listing
positions?
The specific complaint arose from a search for "Japanese
Garden" however since the entire page was hijacked it presumably
could have been anything in the keyword list which is quite
long. The hijacked page was #3 on the list and the real page
wasn't even on the first page of hits which, I think, consists
of 20 hits.
7) How did the listings appear on the search engines?
Were they exact copy of your listings?
It was, except for the URL, which is in a fainter font than
the title and initial text.
8) What happened after somebody clicked on one of these
hijacked listings?
The hijacked page appeared for a fraction of a second
followed by the pornography site. Hitting the back arrow returned
one to the hijacked page for a fraction of a second followed
again by the pornographic site.
9) What kind of legal action are you taking against
the porn company?
No direct legal action is underway nor, to my knowledge,
contemplated. The technical contact for the site is cooperating
with the FTC on this and other matters however.
10) Is there anything else you would like to add that
may interest our newsletter readers?
With respect to the current matter, it would be inappropriate
to comment since the matter is currently the subject of an
action by the FTC. In general however I believe that this
and other nonsense going on over the Internet exhibit a profound
lack of moral and ethical substance in this rapidly expanding
business segment. The quest for financial gain has become
the only metric by which companies are measured and there
seems to be a competition between them to see which one can
be the more outrageous. Self regulation has, to this point,
been a dismal failure in much the same way that asking a 5
year old to have good judgment would be a failure.
In the current frenzy to exploit technological resources
for profit and "stature" it appears that as an industry we
have decided that it's O.K. to cheat, lie, steal, and engage
in subterfuge in order to satisfy our greed and our egos.
Such behavior diminishes us all, no matter how innocent we
may think that we are, and has the potential to destroy something
that has taken 30 years to build, namely the Internet. Given
the ubiquitous nature of the beast and its enormous value
to those who do use it responsibly it may be time to rethink
the paradigm.
I do not speak for the Japanese Friendship Garden Society
of San Diego other than to observe that the incident you refer
to has been a great insult and loss of prestige for an industrious
and conscientious group of citizens who have given their time
and money to creating a work of beauty and joy for the people
of San Diego.
I am the president of Lighthouse Technology, Inc., the
company that hosts the Garden's web site and have been the
one most closely involved in discovering the incident's factual
details. While we know of no way to prevent such incidents
in the future we stand ready, willing, and able to track the
rascals down help to expose them for what they are.
John Cornelius aka jc@lht.com
President, Lighthouse Technology, Inc.
As you can see, this was a very unfortunate incident that could
happen to anybody. Below we will tell you how you can avoid
such a problem and what to do if your site gets pagejacked.
To read more details about the incident, please see the websites
below: http://www.ftc.gov/opa/1999/9909/atariz.htm
http://news.excite.com/news/zd/990922/13/ftc-cracks-international
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4- How to avoid getting your
search listing stolen
Many search engine marketers work for months to achieve a good
ranking in the major search engines, only to find out that someone
else simply copied their source code and stole their ranking
from them. There is not really an easy solution to avoid this.
Below we will tell you about a few things you can do to avoid
this from happening and what you can do once your page has been
pagejacked.
To avoid this from happening to you, you will need to know
exactly how search engines work.
After your submission to the search engines, a robot or a spider
gets sent to your site to index your page. This may be instant
like AltaVista, or may take several weeks like Excite. Once
the spider visits your site, your site content gets stored in
a local database by the search engine. After this, you will
need to resubmit your page each time you make any changes to
your website, or there is no way for the search engines to know
about the changes until the next time they do a major crawl.
Search engines regularly do a major crawl and re-visit all the
sites in their database to remove all the dead links and refresh
their database. However, the major crawl may be only once a
month, or may take several months.
One thing you can do to prevent your source code from being
stolen is to replace your optimized page with a regular non-optimized
page, right after the spiders visit your site to index. You
can tell when the spider has visited, if your server keeps a
log file of all your hits. This will work for awhile, but once
the search engines do a major crawl, they will run into your
non-optimized pages. So this technique will not work that well,
unless you know exactly when the spiders will visit you. Still,
this is a lot of work and not worth doing it this way.
Another solution is to use cloaking software. Cloaking software
is designed to show the search engines your optimized pages,
and the visitors your regular pages. It also enables you to
show each search engine a different page. So you can have a
page optimized differently for each search engine, without having
to create several doorway pages.
Up to now I have been hesitant to use such software, as I thought
they could be considered spam by the search engines. After doing
some research and finding out exactly how cloaking software
works, I can tell you that there is only one search engine currently
programmed to detect cloaking software and considers this to
be spam. Infoseek specifically mentions that they will consider
the use of cloaking to be software spam. The rest of the search
engines do not have a policy against cloaking software, but
do have a problem if you try to send them keywords that are
non-related to your site. So, as long as you use such software
for legit purposes, you will be OK. In fact, the search engines
love to see relevant search results in their database, and don't
really care how you get it there. Since the cloaking software
looks at the IP address or domain of the visiting spider before
it displays the optimized page, all you have to do to comply
with Infoseek is to treat them as a regular visitor by not including
them in the IP list.
I have looked at some cloaking software on the market and I
found one that complied with Infoseek
requirements. It is called ICS
(Inexpensive Cloaking Software), only $45. Their website
is at: http://www.icsave.com/
Please note that a cloaking software will require you to have
your own domain name, and may have other system requirements
such as PERL and SSI support. Installation may also require
some technical knowledge as far as changing file permissions
and running PERL/CGI scripts.
Here are some of the things you can do after you find out that
your search listing has been hijacked:
- Notify the search engines immediately. Search engines are
usually very good with looking into this type of problem and
banning spammers.
- Check the offending page to see if they use META Refresh
tag for redirection. If so, resubmit their page to the search
engines. This should result in their site being dropped out,
as most search engines consider redirection to be spam. It
is possible that the offender replaced their page with a redirected
page after the search engines indexed it.
- Notify FTC. The FTC now
has a new Internet Lab to crack down on such spammers. They
will ask Network Solutions, the domain name registry, to remove
these domains.
- Look up the contact names for the sites in the WHOIS
database run by Network
Solutions. Record their names and report them to all the
above. Then try to contact them, asking them to put a stop
to the spam.
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5- Search Engine News
MSN Search is now using
AltaVista database for
its backend. If you remember, they signed a deal with AltaVista
a few months back to replace the Inktomi
service.
Google search engine is
not in beta anymore and has started full operation. The new
version includes a "related pages" feature and allows submitting
new pages. They plan to index 200 million websites in the next
few weeks. We plan to add this search engine to our free submission
script, but meanwhile you can add
your pages at: http://www.google.com/addurl.html
AOL Netfind is now using
Netscape DMOZ Open Directory
database and Inktomi for
its listings. The DMOZ results appear first, and then the Inktomi
results. As we had mentioned previously, it is extremely important
to submit your site to DMOZ Open Directory, as now they provide
directory listings for Lycos, HotBot and Netscape search among
others. If you are not listed please visit: http://dmoz.org/
Excite is planning on
increasing its database to over 250 million listings. Recently
we have noticed a slowdown in their listing turn around time
from the regular 2-3 weeks. A few of our client sites have been
submitted over a month ago and still have not gotten in. =======================================================================
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Copyright 1999 Submit Express - No part of this newsletter may
be copied or published without prior permission, but please
feel free to forward this to all your friends as long as you
keep it in its entirety.
