Jim R Posted March 29, 2007 Report Share Posted March 29, 2007 (edited) This is something I've been meaning to ask for awhile. It's probably been discussed here somewhere, but I'm not sure how I'd go about searching for something weird like this. Anyway, here's what puzzles me. For some time, I've been encountering bizarre results- on occasion (which is part of what puzzles me about this) when I do Google searches. I first noticed it maybe a year or more ago. My searches would often produce normal results, links that I would have expected to find, but at some point I noticed that I occasionally found very strange links as I scanned further down the page. Sites where thousands of random words existed on each page, seemingly by design. In many cases, much of the text was porn-related, but not always. I ignored it, but the more I've seen it, the more curious (and to some extent frustrated) I've become. Today, I saw something similar, but slightly different. I was doing a blog search (Google blog search), and about halfway down the results page (perhaps after about 20 normal links), I see a fairly long list of what seem to be actual blogs with random combinations of lettes and numbers as the actual blog titles. The terms that I'd used in my search turned up somewhere in the series of seemingly random phrases that are found on the pages of these blogs, each of which are links to another page of some kind of random b.s. Here's a link to one of these blogs: [url=http://11803-o-t.blogspot.com/2007/01/11803-o-t.html This is probably common knowledge to many of you by now, but I'm still not that well-informed about such things. So... wtf is going on here? Also, if anybody can explain the first type of example I gave (the general Google search where the results contain hundreds of random words, often porn-related). I'm sure someone can generate this sort of garbage fairly easily, but... why? Thanks in advance. Edited March 29, 2007 by Jim R Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Claude Posted March 29, 2007 Report Share Posted March 29, 2007 If the site has nothing to sell, it is indeed strange why the owner would do this. Google ranking is a science in itself. All the time, webmasters are trying to push their rankings with new tricks, and Google is trying to become immune against those tricks. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jim Alfredson Posted March 29, 2007 Report Share Posted March 29, 2007 The bots are taking over! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aggie87 Posted March 29, 2007 Report Share Posted March 29, 2007 The bots are taking over! "We have assumed control..." Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Big Wheel Posted March 29, 2007 Report Share Posted March 29, 2007 (edited) This is most likely an annoying scheme to collect money on Google AdSense revenue. The links on the blog point to pages that host AdSense ads, which are probably owned by the blog owner. Why does the blog owner go to the trouble of creating a blog in the first place? Most likely, the Google search results algorithm is smart enough to penalize his content-free AdSense-only pages, placing them very low in the search results and making them very hard to reach. So he has to try finding other ways of driving traffic cheaply to the ads, and linking like crazy from a blog might get ranked higher by search engines than his ads-only pages do. You can try reporting these kinds of pages to the Blogger support team when you see this kind of spammy behavior on Blogspot blogs. See here for more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_blog Edited March 29, 2007 by Big Wheel Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jim R Posted March 29, 2007 Author Report Share Posted March 29, 2007 Thanks guys. Big Wheel, I think I actually understood some of that. I always suspected something nefarious when I first encountered some of the heavily porn-infected text pages, but I suppose it's all about trying to hook people for one reason or another. I'm not sure I'll ever completely understand all this (probably because I really don't want to bother trying too hard), but one other thing I forgot to ask is... has anyone else encountered this phenomenon when doing searches? As I said above, it only happens occasionally (which seems odd), and if my memory serves me, it can sometimes occur to such a degree that it actually impairs my ability to find normal search results. For me, and despite the enormous power of Google, searching is often difficult enough that it feels like a challenging art form, so this kind of thing can really frustrate me. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Big Wheel Posted March 29, 2007 Report Share Posted March 29, 2007 I think it's easiest to understand all this stuff if you think of it this way: the business of the Internet today revolves around drawing eyeballs to websites. That's why, for example, Jim Alfredson experimented with putting ads on the Organissimo forum for a time - Jim got paid a little bit every time people clicked on the ads and visited the advertisers' websites, just as he gets paid a little bit now for people who visit CDUniverse through the forum and eventually make purchases. But other people are a lot lazier than Jim is - they aren't willing or able to build a real community of people, but they still want to make money by driving eyeballs to people's sites. So they resort to activities that sucker people into clicking ads and so forth. There's nothing usually very special about the fact that the ads are porn ads - it's just that porn ads are a hell of a lot more likely to get clicked on than ads for say, tractor parts. So it's more lucrative to a lazy person to host porn ads than to host tractor part ads. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Magnificent Goldberg Posted March 30, 2007 Report Share Posted March 30, 2007 it's just that porn ads are a hell of a lot more likely to get clicked on than ads for say, tractor parts. Blimey! Are you sure? MG Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Big Wheel Posted March 31, 2007 Report Share Posted March 31, 2007 one thing I forgot to mention: Google AdSense actually doesn't allow porn ads for the most part, so if you're seeing porn links on weird-looking websites, they are most likely part of a different advertising network or affiliated with the porn providers directly. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chuck Nessa Posted March 31, 2007 Report Share Posted March 31, 2007 one thing I forgot to mention: Google AdSense actually doesn't allow porn ads for the most part, so if you're seeing porn links on weird-looking websites, they are most likely part of a different advertising network or affiliated with the porn providers directly. Do you know this from professional experience? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Epithet Posted March 31, 2007 Report Share Posted March 31, 2007 I should, but don't. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jim R Posted March 31, 2007 Author Report Share Posted March 31, 2007 (edited) one thing I forgot to mention: Google AdSense actually doesn't allow porn ads for the most part, so if you're seeing porn links on weird-looking websites, they are most likely part of a different advertising network or affiliated with the porn providers directly. I'm seeing porn links in Google search results for search terms having nothing to do with porn. I think a lot of the porn sites (or sites trying to attract people to advertising) are using random word generators, and including thousands of random words on their pages in order to cause Google search hits. For example, I typed in oklahoma soundtrack download, and (granted, it was on one of the last results pages) look what came up: http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:tHrqM...d=619&gl=us There is NO adverstising on this page, that I can see. Just thousands of random words along with the porn-related heading. The Google search results also included some other porn-related links. Edited March 31, 2007 by Jim R Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jazzmoose Posted March 31, 2007 Report Share Posted March 31, 2007 Poor Jed... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
_forumlogo.png.a607ef20a6e0c299ab2aa6443aa1f32e.png)
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.