-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 09/12/2015 09:07 AM, Shawn K. Quinn wrote: [...]
The best defense against this is may be to better advertise what they are trying to drown out with the spam, either intentionally or not.
Exactly. Google employs two contractors with an army of humans to review websites for "quality". Among other things they check for keyword stuffing, hidden text irrelevant to the site's content, etc.; on discovery, offending sites are de-rated and "sandboxed" so that only searches for the exact URL of the offender's site appear in Google search results. But an SEO contractor with hundreds of totally ignorant clients (i.e., hundreds of clients) can spread a well paid (or personal grudge based) suppression campaign like the one described across hundreds of domains to keep the spam alive and working. The distribution of "search spam" that is referenced here could be bad luck - some sleazy SEO contractor cut and pasted the text just because it was natural language and contained specific terms relevant to some of their customers' sites. Or, and IMO more likely, someone contracted to have the info in question removed from the Internet by poisoning search indexes. Either way, if you put up a web page that has the relevant text in it, that page should rise above the irrelevant crap in search results within a couple of months. The specific search terms you want to become findable should be included in an H1 header at or near the top of the page, and in the first paragraph. Naming an image on the page to include these words is an undocumented but effective trick. The same words and phrases should be included in the "description" meta-tag field of the page header. (The "keywords" meta-tag is ignored by search engines that use natural language analysis to categorize pages, i.e. all search engines today .) For best results, ask folks on THIS list (and elsewhere) to go out of their way to put links to your own counter-attacking page on their own websites, with search terms that have been poisoned by the SEO contractor as the visible text of the hyperlink. Links on a half dozen pages with Google page ranks of 2 or above can work wonders. Much as I hate to say this, setting up a Google Analytics account and adding their tracking code to your counter-attack page is a good idea, because pages with the analytics.js code will get crawled and indexed faster. People who "care about privacy" won't be affected because their browsers won't download or execute the javascript. A saboteur who has to hide his weaponized text from human website visitors (and the "owners" of the websites used) can't compete against well formed, visible text on pages that have lots of inbound links from "real" websites. Google is very up front about how most of their page indexing and ranking protocols work: http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-sta rter-guide.pdf :o) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1 iQIcBAEBAgAGBQJV9oKEAAoJEDZ0Gg87KR0LawwQAKyWsrRyYyg6DjrcFGD3lyPD Onk52V5NQAHTxEwcpxWk8u2K03V+onvQTFrbXgX7Fb84d5TEihsqsYnCb935C3nM goCQipskeIgpQ3+I0pe0AkvlcpYbyGATwYUPgKuquI6DDHMbjsGG/YnIXkc0GoY1 +rdmVqfOExWdlYndRjqUU7BlCNbemvn4M7jjkLhxzVYz2ZtgPj5PNztNltUXA+V/ y10th8tB6VTcXC4dUhZErm+gKycuvvGkRCXg3yZrW12I/siUoyTekSE5PtpYE0dg y6I0i9xmSrHS3XQ5VPwfXWbBHq+FLI3ClZORluxXmxkatWGXs0I7xoF3An8/tckK Poiayp4KyR3YDySDVjTT+WRmLRc6DDtq7AQmoQTS9WUd3Mtyw1QR+uOUc8MIYC6n tTpV8dByA1ps0Km8MVZ0qluxJNgeBSte0APCojzgJFJemEXjX1O1TXBC6O26iJyl 1QK0RsJE4RvqaL0qXgXDLhW2/UZPro20t0iHfP/W9xqP0L7GREA2fmFwq9xgW7W3 vh6Nr/YdU8A5KcXuZbVbUXEMrRy3w3e0xs4vUxeNel5d1ruqKHU+tvDJSLTqKsL0 zhS8UQsCW2Bv6jsX3UBhLZZEvGXjEGVidmYZedL9R9jMFADaeLpfnQ7eeDAlQHX5 V0a2kjTkWTvKjP6gKHfq =7USE -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----