MS Researchers Unravel Fake Webpage Scam

Researchers at Microsoft have uncovered millions of junk pages on the internet, created to attract search engine users to advertisement, by a small group of underground operators.

Microsoft researchers say that these small groups operate with the approval of some major advertisers, web page hosts, and advertising syndicators. The workings of the group involve a complex scheme, according to which they create false doorway pages, and co-ordinate with operators of web-based computers, who profit by redirecting traffic passed from search engines in one direction and then send advertisements acquired from syndicators in the opposite direction.

This system, of using questionable or illegal techniques to improve the ranking of a web site in query results is known as search-engine spamming. The practice has proved to be a problem for the major search companies, like Microsoft which struggle to prevent both spammers and companies specializing in improving legitimate clients’ web traffic, a field known as search-engine optimization, from undermining their page-ranking systems.

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Researchers have found that for some keywords like more than 30 percent of the results from major search engines were fake pages, created by spammers. Also, the researchers noted that such pages were far more prevalent in rival Google’s blogspot.com service than in other hosting domains.