A different type of keyword spamming

October 19, 2005 12:41 PM

I have been noticing more and more websites using Google to index their restricted content. For example, this search (top item) brings up what is supposedly a full 30 KB paper, but visiting the link we get a different page that goes to a login. Even the cache carries the false page. Are these websites abusing Google, or is Google permitting it and why? Why doesn't this stuff belong under the ads?
posted by zek to computers & internet (10 comments total)

That's why I installed the refspoof toolbar from google. IIRC, it should let you in if you spoof the referring page as a googlebot.

It's really, really, really lame security. Note that in the UK this will land you jailtime, although in most other countries this isn't considered hacking.
posted by shepd at 12:57 PM on October 19, 2005

Whoops did I say the refspoof toolbar was FROM google? I mean FOR USING WITH google. The refspoof toolbar is a firefox plugin, third party, no association with google. Sorry!
posted by shepd at 12:58 PM on October 19, 2005

In this example, the author has padded the document with hidden keywords to boost the document's ranking on Google (view the source to see how).

This may violate Google's Webmaster Guidelines, although I imagine they can't investigate every abuse.
posted by justkevin at 12:58 PM on October 19, 2005

This is beyong hidden keywords, there are 161 separate DIV tags with a lot of what would be the major keywords of this article in context within it. This means that if you hit one of these keywords in your Google search, the "flavor text" will often appear to be part of a sentence or content on the indexed page, but really all these sentence fragments are seeded within hidden parts of the page. This seems to definitely violate the webmaster guidelines.
posted by jessamyn at 1:33 PM on October 19, 2005

Looks like you can read the whole article in "View Source," if you don't mind a slight headache.
posted by Joleta at 1:34 PM on October 19, 2005

Not quite the whole article, just 161 selected snippets. There is always the Dissatisfied? Help us improve option (this link is specific to this Solzhenitsyn search) at the bottom of every Google result set...
posted by Pigpen at 2:03 PM on October 19, 2005

Perhaps it is a deliberate tactic to entice people to subscribe to the content?
posted by randomstriker at 2:37 PM on October 19, 2005

FYI, the refspoof extension didn't permit me access to the archive.
posted by Mo Nickels at 2:56 PM on October 19, 2005

Thanks all -- appreciate the info. I didn't realize there was so much to be found in the Page Source. Now I have a better idea of what they're trying to do. I also submitted the comment to Google as Pigpen suggested.
posted by zek at 7:40 PM on October 19, 2005

This means that if you hit one of these keywords in your Google search, the "flavor text" will often appear to be part of a sentence or content on the indexed page, but really all these sentence fragments are seeded within hidden parts of the page.

Who could suggest that neo-cons would mislead anybody?
posted by dhartung at 8:28 PM on October 19, 2005