Polish spam takes over Google

by Patrick Altoft on April 20, 2009 / 8 responses

Google has apparently been over run with some kind of Polish spam (on .pl domains, nothing to do with Mr Sheen).

Queries such as this one are showing all the results for me at present & Web Pro News is reporting an impending algorithm update to fix things:

Google is set to make changes to its search ranking algorithm to combat the spate of links leading to malicious web pages appearing at the top of Google’s search results, according to an inside source.

The big problem with this spam is that it’s all designed to distribute malware and spyware onto the users computers and not all the domains are being flagged up as “this site may harm your computer”.

With over a million links pointing to some of the domains this isn’t a small operation.

It reminds me of the time one spammer used wildcard sub domains to get 5 billion pages indexed in Google within a week before being caught. Those pages ranked for pretty much everything.

Web Pro News has more info:

Sean-Paul Correll, a security analyst for PandaLabs provides a partial list of the keywords and phrases targeted in this highly organized attack and provides a video to illustrate how it works. Though many of the examples target Nissan, Panda says over a million target Ford alone.

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Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.