The Google Long Tail Fail Whale

About a year ago, the power and speed of a caffeinated Google was supposed to help improve long tail search query results. [click to continue…]

Hijacking Google Rankings Through Content Scraping and Cloaking in 2011

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?