What's Behind Door Number 2?

03 Oct 08

A client of mine recently emailed me in something of a panic. For the purposes of this post, let’s call her Samantha Smith. Samantha’s message was something along the lines of:

I just Googled myself [and] there is this crazy eye treatment shit under the heading of SAMANTHA SMITH! How did that happen????

So I, too, Googled “Samantha Smith” (of course, I actually Googled the client’s real name). The first result was her site – the one I had built for her. The second result was to a site with single page. The title of the page was SMITH. When I went to the page itself, there was a picture of some eye care product called Eyederma along with 5 or 6 paragraphs on the subject of (I think) anti-aging, written in an English so execrable that it utterly defied comprehension. In other words, total gibberish.

What was more interesting was that there was other content on the page related to Samantha’s last name. Content like Yahoo and EBay search results for “SMITH” pulled into the page and displayed alongside the eye cream and anti-aging nonsense. The URL of this page is also of note—it was something along the lines of:

http://suspectsite.com/?q=smith

I tried changing the smith in the URL to a few different things—such as beck, jolie and some other things. Sure enough, each time page reloaded with a modified URL, the eye cream and gibberish text was there, but all the content that was pulled into the page from Yahoo, EBay and other sources changed to match the change I made to the URL. For instance, http://suspectsite.com/?q=jolie put a bunch of Angelina Jolie related content on the page.

Of course, this site stinks of spam, but I dig a bit further just to see exactly what we’re dealing with. I click on the eye cream photo, as its one of the only external links on the page (the other content was stripped of links that it would normally have). I’m taken to an EBay store where the seller sells this Eyederma cream along with lots of other medical and beauty products of dubious efficacy. Prevalent among the offerings were pills of the fat burning and penis enlarging variety which were being sold for large sums of money.

Clever.

By the nature of what they do, spammers have to be clever. They have to find ways to game things in their favor and drive traffic in their direction even if their methods are less than scrupulous. By building out this one page in such a way that any parameter passed into the URL dumps a bunch of search-engine friendly content onto the page relevant to that parameter—but has nothing to do with what they’re actually trying to sell—the chances that their page will show up in unrelated search results increase exponentially, and the unwitting will click through.

I soon learn that Google has a name for this type of page that spammers put together—the Doorway Page. According to their webmaster documentation:

Doorway pages are typically large sets of poor-quality pages where each page is optimized for a specific keyword or phrase. In many cases, doorway pages are written to rank for a particular phrase and then funnel users to a single destination.

These guys were clever in that they used a single page and “optimized” it for different keywords just by changing the URL.

The Solution

The next question is obviously what can we do about it? As it turns out, Google has a form that you can use to submit spammy search results to them for their review. If they deem it to be spammy, they’ll remove it from their index. Simple as that.

It should be noted, they actually have two versions of this form – the public version and the webmaster version. The difference between them is that reports submitted via the webmaster form are guaranteed to be reviewed, where that’s not the case with the public one. The only caveat is that you have to verify that you have a legitimate site that you own or manage to be able to access the webmaster form along with a number of other tools that would make a webmaster happy.

So, if in your searches you come across some spaminess, be sure to let Google or whoever you’re using to search know about it. It’ll make our intertubez a cleaner and better place.

©MMII—MMX Michael Bester