Save Us From Index Spamming / How to Make Google Carry Your Slogan

As the number of internet users and available web pages worldwide continue to grow exponentially, the importance of maintaining a high index on search engines is magnified with it. Consequently, many spammers or special-interest groups wishing to spread a particular message have developed more sophisticated techniques for "cheating" their way to the top of search results. One of these newer methods involves exploiting sites that display a 200 Code for error messages by adding the spammer's unsolicited content into Google's (or another search engine's) indices for the purpose of generating traffic the next time a user searches for that term. For more details about this technique, see this previous blog post on the subject.

However, a more interesting phenomenon is the recent adoption of this method by political organizations and other non-commercial action groups. For example, typing the phrase "Save Us From Berlusconi" (see Image 1) into Google generates countless results in this fashion, evidently a result of the efforts made by individuals and organizations opposed to the Italian Prime Minister to get their message across.





This was brought to our attention after the messages appeared in the search engine indices for the site Transposh. Similarly, these indexed pages can also appear even without a specific search being carried out for them (see Image 2), a trend that has been noticed by the Colnect administrator who reported the problem originally.



This relatively recent spamming method has the potential to undermine the legitimacy of search engine results and consequently make some users think twice before clicking on a link that appears at the top of their results list. Google and the other major search engines need to put a halt to this problem before it becomes even more prevalent and completely compromises the integrity of their search functions.