The Panda update has produced some good, some bad, and some downright ugly – this is a story of ugly, in the form of 1990′s era style content scraping/remashing, and old-school poor-man’s cloaking, which together have produced Google SERPs that look like they’re from a ’99 Altavista query. Let us start by saying we do not condone this activity. We discovered this when one of our clients, freshtrends.com was the victim of a ruthless attack by an Affiliate and we have taken action to report all of the infringing websites to Google. The reason we are writing this is to inform webmasters to be wary; Google has not yet been able to eradicate duplicate content issues (essentially Googlewashing) and server side or Javascript cloaking is seemingly back on the rise.
The Discovery
Following an overnight traffic drop due to the “Panda update” we began investigating the potential issues of why the site was targeted. The main observations we found on WebmasterWorld from colleagues was that low quality, commonly duplicated content would be affected. At first we dismissed this as a potential cause because Freshtrends had been manually creating unique product descriptions for all products for years. Aside from Google Analytics, we looked for more clues of where our rankings had been lost and started grabbing chunks of text to use as queries – This is when we noticed that thousands of long tail phrases (resembling product title pages) such as:
“3mm Blue Zircon 14kt Yellow Gold Prong Set Labret”
Would bring pages upon pages of spammy search results instead of the actual original Freshtrends page containing that information. We were literally seeing the majority of the first 100 results comprised of nothing other than spammy domains within the .tk and .co.cc extentions. Here are a few examples and screenshots or SERPs:
Screenshots of first 2 pages of SERPsattached here and here.
The perpetrator was actually a member of the Freshtrends affiliate program via Commission Junction. Clicking through from the SERP links would get you a nice elegant Javascript redirect to the actual product page on Freshtrends.com (complete with Affiliate cookie). Sneaky right? This affiliate essentially hijacked the previous ranking for Freshtrends, sent the traffic anyways, and made a cut on the sales.
How did this affiliate fool Google?
1. Using .tk and co.cc domains he was able to mass-generate free and unique domain names. This meant that he could practically add a domain name per product offered on the site and create domain names that closely resembled all the words within a product title (including sizing and product variations).
2. The Affiliate then scraped all unique content from the original domain and added fake comments using a random twitter feed. Sometimes random Youtube videos were used. This fooled Google bots into thinking that it is an active page with comments and unique content. See Google Cache for one of the SERPs.
3. The Affiliate then used Javascript redirection (Cloaking) to send users to the site with the original content.
We contacted Commission Junction about this user, and they promptly had him removed. Since then all the domains we look at are returning 403 errors and are being purged from the SERPs… But as of this writing there are still copies in Google’s cache complete with the JS scripts that are used to cloak.
We also contacted Google about this. It seemed impossible to us that the first 100 search results for a product title could actually be spammy URLs with a .tk extention. I mean we’re talking about Google here… in 2011 – these look like prototypical spam sites from years ago and they’re dominating the SERPs.
Throughout the course of this Bing hasn’t shown any problems. In fact Freshtrends.com is on the top result for the query and no other .tk domains are on the 1st page. Perhaps Google’s caffeinated indexing has gotten so fast it can’t keep up with itself, and hasn’t got the time to account for quality… even after an update proclaimed to deal with just that.
Everything in this blog post was printed with the permission of Freshtrends.com, as they would like to see as much light shed on these shady practices as us. Has anyone else seen any recent egregious examples they’d like to share?
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Don’t have any examples to share, but this is really sneaky. I’m really surprised by the answer you’ve got from Google.
I hope they will tackle shortly.
Google getting too big for their own good? I noticed several similar results in the past for hot trending topics and not only did Google let you click through to the spam/malware site, but they even had the red warning page up. You’d think that would trigger some sort of failsafe, right?
Nice article. Glad I subscribe to your feed. Post more often!
Looking at the link profiles of the spammy keyword exact-match domains, well, they don’t have any links. Hmm, maybe Google shouldn’t, after all these years, still be boosting exact match domains for the exact match keyword – at the very least not for an essentially hijacked TLD (Tokelau) which are given away for free from a country that is all of 10 square kms.
Google has lost the plot altogether. Hardly any of their search results are relevant,and most of them are spam sites or fake virus alerts. Original content can be found at the bottom of the results.
After 10 years of using Google, I have switched to Yahoo, and I’m sure millions of others will do so, too.
I’ve been in seo for over 10 years, it really does feel like going back to the altavista days, it’s crazy
But I don’t understand,
if the domain has the keywords in it, it should RANK higher. Freshtrends does Not have those keywords in their domain name, so how could they expect to rank higher for any of those keywords ??
the other issue is one of “ethics” or rather protecting one’s commercial interests
i do Not believe that google are in business to protect the monetary or commercial interests of millions of private companies
you can’t go and beg google to “take someone’s domain down” because the person is causing you “income loss” or is cheating you money. the problem with such an approach is that every company that sells some widgets out there could come and tell google that THEY ARE THE REAL owners of the brand or the first person on the planet to own such-and-such brand, and NOW google would have to play God or play Judge arbitrating over the commercial/financial interests of these two.
I am Not sure if google would even be able to employ enough people to do this sort of arbitration as it would quickly run into Millions of queries/requests/complaints per day.
What if a spammer comes to google and tells them (showing ALL the proof) that he is the REAL owner of some brand or product ?? should google now go ahead and REMOVE the top rankers from their position (which THEY ATTAINED first) and now INSERT the new spammer’s website as the top ranker ?
i Don’t know guys, maybe i am missing the boat totally on this in some way, but it appears to me that vendors cry foul over crazy expectations. when a vendor fails to protect his brand in a “ranking game” , are they supposed to go and BEG google to remove the TOP ranking guy and **put the vendor** at the top instead ? i mean even if this is against the affiliate program’s T&C, when it comes to google and organic ranking… you CANT buy your position to the top spot hey …. neither can you BEG your way into the TOP spot when you’re out-ranked
) you’ve got to EARN your rankings by working for them in the SEO game, period.
Hi Mossi, I see your point, but aside from the scraping content issue which Google has constantly say they addressed (see here), the question is this: Are these the most relevant results? It’s not just about having keywords in a domain name. Otherwise Zappos.com should be outranked for the word “shoes [specific name of product]” by something like shoes-specific-shoe-product-size-7.tk It would not make sense. So domain name containing a keyword could be a signal, but when it is given too much importance Google SERPs start losing relevancy.
Relevancy is Google’s “Main” objective, if they screw this up long enough and searchers consistently get irrelevant results they will go elsewhere. It is no coincidence that Bing is continuously growing these past few months. Google users are increasingly finding irrelevant results in the top ten for long-tail search queries.