Mediarun Search Marketing News

Could SEO become less transparent?

April 29th 2010

Search Engine Optimisation News

One of the great things about search engine optimisation is the levelling effect it has in the world of digital marketing.

Any firm that has a website can get in on the action and start optimising their content to boost their Google ranking.

The DIY approach to search engine marketing will certainly have less of an impact than if you hired a professional SEO Company - but the key point here is that with Google's transparency surrounding search, anyone can create content that will improve their chances of appearing high up the firm's search engine results pages.

However, it looks as if Google's openness about search engine marketing could be in jeopardy.

According to a new research paper presented at a recent Usenix event, virus and malware hosts are using paid-for ads and the latest search engine optimisation techniques to distribute their warez.

The Google researchers behind the new paper - Moheeb Abu Rajab, Lucas Ballard, Panayiotis Mavrommatis, Niels Provos, and Xin Zhao - claimed that fake anti-virus domains have more landing pages than any other form of malware distribution sites and their webpages are generally saturated with trending keywords.

The researchers said: "Unsurprisingly, as the popularity of fake anti-virus has increased, so has the number of times fake anti-virus domains are delivered by ad networks."

Commenting on the growing trend of using search engine marketing to distribute malware, Don DeBolt, director of threat research for CA's Internet security business unit, told Media Post: "They have perfected the use of Google trend data to build viable targets, because the content indexed is driven from popular searches at any moment in time."

"In the past we saw mass keyword SEO, where static content was placed on compromised Web sites and later indexed by Google, but now that content has grown more dynamic."

Google has come under increasing pressure of late to deal with the problems of black hat SEO and malware distribution and, according to Bit Defender, users of Google's web browser, Chrome, have become the latest target for cybercriminals. The latest scam involves encouraging users to follow a link to "A New Google Chrome Extension", which is actaully a fake update hosted on a dodgy website.

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