How to Get Billions of Pages Indexed by Google

A Romanian company has taken spamming Google to new heights. Monetize, a blog dedicated to tricking search engines, described how the company got Google to index over 5 billion webpages – copied from legitimate sites – within three weeks. Yahoo and MSN were fooled too, eventhough not nearly as bad.

The story was featured by Digg, reddit, and Techmeme. Due to the publicity, the indexed pages of these domains were quickly removed by Google.

According to Ana’s Lair, the search spoofing project was fairly simple. It requires an SQL-driven auto-page generator, a modification of DNS software, and redirection/cloaking code to show Google one thing and the user something else.

Apparently the spammers’ sites did well, with some domains like eiqz2q.org and t1ps2see.com ranking under 10,000 in Alexa. Non-coincidentally, the sites are running some AdSense ads too. It really doesn’t take a mathematician to know that you can earn a good deal of money from billions of pages indexed by search engines.

On the web:
Email Battles – How Billions of Bogus Pages Undermine Search Engines, Advertisers and The Web
Guardian Unlimited – How to get billions of pages in Google
Rough Type – The very long tail of spam
Zoli’s Blog – Proud of Being a Spammer?
Geek News Central – How to have 5.5 Billion Pages Indexed by the Search Engines