How fake sites trick search engines to hit the top
December 9, 2009
The key to getting ranked well in a search result is to go everything that a search engine bot would deem “quality content” which will give it a higher ranking.
In this example, Stickley created a fake site (creditunionofsc.org) with the consent of Credit Union of Southern California (cusocal.org), which focused on tricking the search engines into believing that the crawlers were scanning a legitimate site. All Stickley did was put link after link inside the site to create the appearance of “depth”, even if the links led to only the same picture of the credit union’s front page.
He ranked #2 on yahoo search and #1 on bing search (both already removed. However, he never made it past the 6th page on google (which does over 2/3rds of all search traffic in the US).
An extremely well trafficked site such as Bank of America would always outrank a fake site, but hackers have been known to hack into education websites such as university sites, stuff them with links to the scam site, and then via “link building”, make the search engine interpret the scam site as a legit site.
Original Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_tec_search_engine_safety
