Massive Google Search Spam
-
We have come to know that one of competitors of our client is spamming Google search results on massive scale. If we search with keywords like "iphone spy apps" , "text messages spy " etc then most of results from 3rd or 4th page onwards show totally irrelevant sites but when we click on those results/pages then all redirect to either http://topspysoft.com/ OR http://www.mspy.com/ . They have been doing it on massive scale for last few months against hundreds of queries and populating hundreds of search results. If use some country specific Google site then again hundreds of results come from totally irrelevant country specific domains (au,nz,uk etc) and they all redirect to topspysoft.com or mspy.com.
Can you please tell how they are doing it and how they are able to do it on such a massive scale without getting noticed by Google ? Is there any way to report this issue to Google as the current only allows one link ?
Following are some of the spam urls to give you an idea
www.crcincva.com/doc/20-best-iphone-spy-apps/
chefitupkids.com/top-10-spy-apps-for-iphone/
jarestaurant.com/text-spying-apps-iphone/
www.lisamishler.com/qn/phone-spy-apps-uk
tigerdenus.com/spy-apps-for-iphone-no-jailbreak
palmhousestl.org/templates/phone-location/iphone-spy-apps-uk.htmlI'm also attaching couple of images which show that almost 80% of results on those pages are actually spam pages
-
thanks for the reply. I can understand your point but the issue is that there are hundreds of sites for each of hundreds of keywords. It is almost impossible to contact the webmasters and report that their sites are hacked. They also keep on adding new sites
-
I haven't investigated at all on your issue - but I did see the post just above mine here where ameliavargo made the point that if a site is hacked - then that might be the case...
And this is something I know can happen via our own experience with one of the major crab boat partners on "Deadliest Catch" TV show being hacked and gaining BIG link juice via those hacks (solved of course now!)...
Look for hackng is I guess what I'm saying too!
-
My guess is that these URLs you list have been hacked. I would inform the site owners if you can find their contact details. They can sort it out from there to remove the offending pages. If I owned one of those websites, I would want to investigate the possibility of being hacked.
-
using doorway pages to spam the search results and gain higher rankings is certainly against the rules and google shouldn't have any problems finding it and punishing them.
if you want to take matters in your own hands however, you can report them here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreportform?hl=en
-
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
I redesigned a clients website and there is a pretty massive drop in traffic - despite my efforts to significantly improve SEO.
Hi there, I redesigned a clients website that was very old fashioned and was not responsive. I implemented 301 redirects, kept the content pretty similar, website linking structure very similar - the only things i changed was making the website responsive, improved title tags, added a bit more information, improved the footer and h1 tags etc.. however although clicks are fairly similar search impressions have dropped about 60% on average over the past week. The old site had some keywords linking to pages with no new content so i removed those as seemed like black hat seo tricks and also there was a huge list of "locations we deliver to" on the homepage followed by around 500 citys/towns I removed this. Could this be the cause for the drop? as i assumed those would do more harm than good? Fairly new with SEO as you can probably tell. Looking for advice on what may be the cause and what steps I should take now. Thanks for reading! duGeW
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | binkez321 -
How Do You Know or Find Out if You've been hit by a Google Penalty?
Hi Moz Community, How do you find out if you have been hit with a Google Penalty? Thanks, Gary
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | gdavey0 -
Google Organic Ranking & Traffic Dropped
Hello, We have been struggling to keep our website (http://goo.gl/vS37qA) ranking well in Google since April 30, 2015. For some reason at that time, there were around 15000 blocked pages (mainly Magento layered navigation pages) showing in Google's Search Console. We used canonical tags, and now all these pages have been removed from Google's index and Google Search Console. We didn't do anything that is against Google's Guidelines. Currently in Google Search Console we see:- Around 50 crawl errors- no malware- no blocked pages - no other error messages in both Webmasters tool.We have never practiced black hat SEO, paid for links, or used tactics that Google penalizes. We noticed in the last few months there are around 1000 Chinese/Russian/Japanese links points to our website, and we have used the disavow tool to notify Google of these attacks.Any help would be greatly appreciated in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | NancyH0 -
80% of traffic lost over night, Google Penalty?
Hi all.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Hemjakt
I have a website called Hemjakt (http://www.hemjakt.se/) which is a search engine for real estate currently only available on the Swedish market. The application crawl real estate websites and collect all estates on a single searchable application. The site has been released for a few months and have seen a steady growth since release, increasing by 20% weekly up to ~900 visitors per day. 3 days ago, over night, I lost 80% of my traffic. Instead of 900 visitors per day I'm at ~100 visitors per day and when I search for long, specific queries such as "Åsgatan 15, Villa 12 rum i Alsike, Knivsta" ( <adress><house type=""><rooms><area> <city>), I'm now only found on the fifth page. I suspect that I have become a subject of a Google Penalty. How to get out of this mess?</city></rooms></house></adress> Just like all search engines or applications, I do crawl other websites and scrape their content. My content is ~90% unique from the source material and I do add user value by giving them the possibility to compare houses, get ton of more data to compare pricing and history, giving them extra functionalities that source site do not offer and so on. My analytics data show good user engagement. Here is one example of a Source page and a page at my site:
Source: http://www.hemnet.se/bostad/villa-12rum-alsike-knivsta-kommun-asgatan-15-6200964
My Site: http://www.hemjakt.se/bostad/55860-asgatan-15/ So: How do I actually confirm that this is the reason I lost my traffic? When I search for my branded query, I still get result. Also I'm still indexed by Google. If I am penalized. I'm not attempting to do anything Black Hat and I really believe that the app gives a lot of value to the users. What tweaks or suggestions do you have to changes of the application, to be able to continue running the service in a way that Google is fine with?0 -
Spam linking site how to report
I have a spam linking site that is generation thousans of links to my site. Even if i have a good link background, this is the only spammy i have, each week number of links comings from it increases by 500 , i know have 3000 links for that site and 1800 for other sites, but that one keeps growing What should i do, i dont want that link it is imposible to remove as webmaster does not respond
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | maestrosonrisas0 -
Can i send a disavow if a detect a spam link
I have detected than one web domain is generating 2400 links to my site should a use a disavow tools, as it is imposible to have contact from webmaster and no response to your emails My web as not been warned or penalized, but i dont like this link, and i want to inform google of that,. If google acepts the disavow file, should i still see on my webmaster tools that web links, or will they desapear thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | maestrosonrisas0 -
Interesting spam: Wikipedia trackbacks
I've been getting some very interesting spam on my wordpress blogs lately: trackbacks on wikipedia articles that are obviously spammy. By that I mean that the comment on wikipedia are obviously spam and the link to my blogs are removed before I even arrive at the page or get the notification. The trackbacks are posted on valid wikipedia entries. My concern is that this is a move by an unsavory competitor to try to get my sites in trouble. I can't really see how this would be effective though. All I can come up is that it might eventually get my domains banned from being linked to in wikipedia. I can't think of any problems this would cause in google or other SE's. What could be the purpose behind such a spam campaign? Any feedback?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AdoptionHelp0 -
Is the SORBS-SPAM list a big deal?
Someone here pointed out that my server ip is on the SORBS-SPAM list and I was wondering if this was a big deal, and how it might have got there, and I would go about getting it off the list?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ayetti0