Spam from Google?!

Just a short report this time around on a strange referral spam that showed up briefly on my Blogger statistics. This time it was http: // dailydeal . de / gutschein-freizeit-ruhrgebiet-alpincenter-ski-tageskarte-060913

 

Checking out the spam in my trusty virtual machine setup revealed a professional site that held up under further scrutiny. A little research revealed Google owns the company which is a typical special offer promoting kind of place. DailyDeal was purchased by Google in 2011 and is based in Germany. Of course I’m not German, so talk about hitting the wrong target!

Now why would a false referral from a Google company show up in the first place?

This is where things get murky and necessarily go into the realm of speculation. My first thought is that the provider of the deal is trying to goose the results by paying a runner of a botnet to spam the listing. However, it is more likely a competitor to the tour outfit is engaging in negative SEO.

What is negative SEO? Search Engine Optimization is the process where a website builds up presence in Google, Bing, Duck Duck Go, Yahoo, and other search engines on the Web. Much is done by trickery in the HTML coding of a site, making sure keywords (short matches on content) are present in certain amounts.

The most tricky and dangerous optimization involves link exchanges so that it looks like the site is popular. Google has automated algorithms that periodically hunt down any behavior that looks like that. When a detection is made (real or false) an automated penalty is assessed against the webpage. This is all done by software and appealing to a human to quickly straighten out a false penalty is nearly impossible.

That means you can frame a competitor for building up paid links by purchasing said links. This is part of the “black hat” methods to boost your business on the Net by lowering the rankings in search results of your competitor. They can be dropped many pages in ranks by negative SEO.

While it is speculation, there is a higher probability that this referral link is pushed by someone other than the seller of the ski trips than something they did for themselves. However, they may have paid someone for SEO and that company may have engaged in bad practices.

So there is a mystery here that I won’t see solved. There are other possibilities including Blogger/Google getting the stats system screwed up to the point that an error caused the referral to show up.

At least this isn’t a dangerous or hostile site spreading malware.