Google is in the midst of a horrendous black hat SEO attack. With thousands of malware and spam websites swarming the search engine every which way, Google engineers have led a successful fightback against what may soon turn out to be the single most powerful black hat attack in history.

On Monday, a popular security blog operated by Sunbelt Software reported that thousands of spam domains were showing up in search results. I experienced this first hand as a part of my daily analysis of the World Wide Web. Spam websites were showing up usually at the bottom of the first page, dominating about 5 to 10 pages of the Google SERPs. You might have experienced this as well if you recall seeing page upon page of .cn links in the Google search results.

This was ostensibly caused by clever scripts that basically exploited Google’s own technology to get back at the world’s biggest search engine. These scripts basically used GET queries to spider Google’s search results, crawling resultant SERP links and saving content from those websites. They then reconfigured the content, rehashing words to create new (nonsensical) sentences. This made those websites appear to offer real website content to the Google search engine, thereby warranting high rankings on the results pages.

In other words, the strategy involved massive automated domain registration of expendable low value domains, ripping content off other Google’s SERPs and creating whole new websites with rehashed content, cleverly disguised to appear original but making no sense to the human reader. Google spiders could not differentiate between rehashed, nonsensical, unreadible content and original content. This actually lead to blackhatters ranking high in the SERPs for fairly competitive keywords, which actually surprised me and my colleagues.

Amused at the sheer volume of .cn (China) domains showing up in the search results, I mentioned this fact to Nathan about a week ago. I am prone to think that these blackhatters were probably not Chinese.

This is proably one of the most prominent instances of Google using human knowledge and judgement to override its search engine software. This can be a precedent of increasingly subjective assessment of the World Wide Web by Google.

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