“This, in my opinion, is partly the fault of Google, which seems to be putting more emphasis on content than on links.”
Trash list
Google has been besieged by search engine optimization (SEO) spammers who are abusing flaws in their search engine to rank a deluge of spam pages, sometimes for hundreds of thousands of keywords each, Search engine magazine reports.
“This, in my opinion, is partly the fault of Google, which seems to be putting more emphasis on content than on links,” marketing consultant Bill Hartzer told the site.
The problem was first spotted this week by SEO expert Lily Ray. In a post on X-formerly-Twitter, noted that searching for “Craigslist used auto parts” would overwhelmingly return pages of spam after only showing two Craigslist results. (Ironically, searching for that exact phrase now returns Ray’s post as the first result.)
And SEJ notes that many of the domains on the spam pages were recently registered. The brutal speed of the attack adds to growing concerns about Google’s functionality as entrenched SEO tactics have become more advanced, with emerging technologies such as generative AI increasing ease and scale with that these schemes can be executed.
As of Thursday, searching for other Craigslist-related questions still returns several junk results toward the bottom, but not as many as initial reports described. It’s not clear how many other search terms are still significantly affected, but it’s based on a general feeling that all is not well with Google search results.
Spam Wars
Search engines have long relied on backlinks, or links from one website to another, to help rank results. Having a lot of backlinks from reputable websites essentially tells services like Google that a web page is worth displaying.
But with the right tricks, spammers don’t need to rely on these coveted signifiers. According to SEJ, spammers are abusing what are known as long-tail keywords (basically longer phrases of highly specific keywords that are rarely searched for) to boost their page rankings.
Their specificity means there are fewer results to compete against, so spammers take advantage of this by creating countless spam pages created solely to serve these unpopular keywords.
Spam attacks also abuse the mechanics of local searches, which are narrowed based on the user’s geographic location. Spam pages may pretend to serve random locations as well as send long queues in order to increase their rankings even more.
Investigating the trail left by spammers, Hartzer created a link graph this revealed how intricately connected many of these junk websites were to each other. According to their findings, keywords seem to be driving spam attacks.
“This pretty much confirms the fact that everything is done by content, and not by links,” Hartzer. wrote to X.
In reply to another thread of Ray about broken Craigslist search results, Google search link Danny Sullivan said the issue is “under investigation.”
Sure, Google will probably weed out this latest spam attack as it usually does, but it’s a seemingly never-ending war of attrition that’s only getting harder to fight.
More on Google: Man is horrified when someone uses artificial intelligence to redact and repost all his content, with new errors
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