Trumblog

I don’t know if the news last week that Google was spammed my malware sites is scary, impressive or a vision of the future. What seemed to have happened is that sites with malware, destructive software that is usually uploaded to visitor’s computers without their permission, rose to the top of Google and other search engine results by using “comment spam” and “blog spam” to make these sites appear more popular and useful. This resulted in high page rankings for specific keyword phrases such as “how to cisco router vpn dial in” and “how to teach a dog to play fetch.” Why do this? The higher the rankings the more likely that malware would be installed.

Why is this scary? Malware can cripple your computer, steal personal information resulting in identity theft and generally bog down the internet. This is a real and growing issue that anyone online should at least be aware of. The fact that the major search engines were caught by this and either not proactively defending themselves or their defenses were breeched concerns me to0.

That’s the impressive part of this. As an online marketer I can’t help but tip my hat to these guys who used a few domains to achieve these results. They used complex, but well thought out key word phrases. They took advantage of basic known techniques for rank climbing and did it well. Yes the ends were nefarious, but knowing the effort that is put into these things for my clients, I have to be impressed.

So will this be more common in the future? Will it be harder for white hat marketers like me to achieve results? Is this just the tip of the iceberg for high ranking malware sites? Will this taint on search engines grow and make visiting the long tail of results that they make available more dangerous than it is worth? Time will tell.