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You Know You're in a Seedy Sector When...

Rand Fishkin

The author's views are entirely their own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

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Rand Fishkin

You Know You're in a Seedy Sector When...

The author's views are entirely their own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

Three of the top six results at Google are user-hijacking, cloaked re-directions to low quality ads disguised as SERPs, i.e.

Google Search for Low Cost Airline Tickets

Note that the UCLA page goes to a listing at Jercys.com, as does the OpenSourceArmenia result. The German AOL user page points throws us to Topically.org. What's really cool is to look at who's linking to those ranking pages :

  • Links to the UCLA page - 591 unique pages, including what looks to be a lot of international language spam pages
  • Yahoo! doesn't have the AOL.de page in its index, but MSN shows a few thousand links, also with a heavy focus on international pages.
  • Links to the OpenSourceArmenia page - 546 unique pages, again with lots of German & Japanese pages on the list.

These links look like automated blog, forum & comment spamming with the backbone of re-directed content on trusted domains/subdomains. For a whitehat SEO, this can at least help you infer the value of content on those domains and provides a nifty look into the spam underworld, and just how successful that spam can be, even for highly competitive searches.

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