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.

The other PR (Public Relations)

Just appropriate that following a post about PageRank, there'll be something with a more positive note.

TheMarker, a popular Israeli newspaper concerning economics, have published an article (in Hebrew) about phone cards collectors and colnect.

The Islands Phonecards Database story now has a Russian version (originally posted in English).

colnect.com has also been mentioned in Telecartofilistas and Dia de Folga, Brazilian blogs in Portuguese.

PR0

Forgive me Google for I have sinned. I don't know the nature of my sin yet but I'll probably eventually figure out what has happened and how come my website, full of original content (it's the world's most extensive resource for collectible phone cards information), has a PageRank of 0, aka PR0.

Seems like the lovely WWW is made of a myriad of rules that dynamically change and are quite hard to obey, even if you're one of the good guys. Unlike the real world where you usually know what's good and what's bad, here you have to figure it out slowly, understanding that causality isn't as evident.

PR0 is considered a punishment but since Google work in mysterious ways (and keep their algorithms confidential), not even a prayer could work here. One has to search deep in his heart (and on the Internet) what it is that was wrongfully done.

So here's my guess
At the end of March, I've moved to a new hosting service and decided to also move to the new domain and so http://telecards.islands.co.il became http://telecards.colnect.com

Since colnect.com (the project which will soon accommodate many different types of collectibles) is still under development I've made redirects from http://colnect.com, http://colnect.org, http://colnect.info and http://colnect.net, as well as from the old http://telecards.islands.co.il

And so, it's possible that this is considered a domain Spam (when one has a few domain that link to each other to get better search engines ranking) although no bad intentions were involved nor any trickery.

But the site's still on top of the results
Strangely enough, although my website was seemingly punished, it's still on top on the results page when Googling for telecards.

There will be more posts on SEO, SERP, Google. Meanwhile you can check out these tools for measuring your website.