Mediarun Search Marketing News

Malicious SEO links need to be 'tackled by Google'

April 15th 2010

Search Engine Optimisation News

Google is constantly updating its search engine results page algorithms and SEO marketing professionals are always battling to adapt to those changes - so that their clients can maintain their high search engine rankings.

And Google is fairly open about the changes, providing plenty of information and a number of analytical tools to help firms make the most of their search engine optimisation campaigns.

But this openness, which includes free software such as Google Trend, has a major downside. According to security software developer Zscaler, spammers are taking advantage of these free tools and using them to saturate Google's search engine results pages with malicious links.

Zscaler claims that in recent tests, some of the firm's search results contained 90 per cent malicious links.

Taking the most searched for term on Google Trends at the start of April - which was "tri energy" - Zscaler noted that there were 90 malicious links in the first 100 search results. Of these, 86 redirected users to fake anti-virus websites that attempt to hijack a person's computer with malware. And Google only highlighted four of the search results as malicious initially - however, this was increased to 87 warnings after an eight hour period.

Conversely, when "tri energy" was searched for on Bing, Microsoft's 'decision engine' returned just four malicious results.

These were on the 2nd, 6th and 7th search engine results pages.

Zscaler claimed that while this large number of malicious search engine optimised-links is relatively uncommon, the issue of cybercriminals exploiting search marketing techniques to promote dodgy software is widespread.

"According to Google Trends, it is not unusual to have malicious Web-links in 15-20 per cent [of] results from among the first 100 on Google search engine for a highly hunted phrase," Zscaler said.

Adding: "If Google is not serious about the problem of Blackhat SEO (search engine optimisation) poisoning, then malicious web-links will, for sure, increase greatly in number, something that probably had already started."

A recent report by internet security firm Sophos showed that SEO poisoning techniques are unlikely to die down any time soon.

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