Google's New Challenge: Keyword Spam

By Dave Mathews
4/25/2008 10:52:00 PM

SAN FRANCISCO--At the 2008 O'Reilly Web 2.0 Conference here, Google spam maven Matt Cutts' session on "What Google knows about Spam" identified a new threat: not the Viagra ads that clog our inboxes, but keyword spam on websites and rogue blog comments that plague online communities.

Keyword spam is the use of words, frequently having nothing to do with the site content where they are placed, put into a web page in order for the page creators to get traffic directed to them from search engines. These pages are then used to drive advertising clicks from unsophisticated users or for spreading viruses. Typically these sites contain hundreds of misspelled words to attract users that quickly typed entries in search engines.

This keyword text spamming does not have to be visible, Cutts said. Font and background web page colors can be matched so that they are invisible to browsers, but picked up on by computers and search engines that read the underlying code. But these tactics can be used for "good" under the analogy of search engine optimization. Known as search-engine optimization (SEO), this is technically not spam – it's the effort to rise above the fold in search results.

Google's "PageRank" – a key to what makes their search engine so effective – employs an algorithmic method of trust and reputation to help prevent this type of spam. While this is done though the company's monitoring cross-promotional links (along with some unpublished "secret sauce") eBay and Amazon use a manual user feedback mechanism to let people know that their community members can be trusted for commerce activity. Large sites can increase traffic by tweaking internal links and URL names, Cutts said. Small sites can get more traffic by fan and community cross- linking.

But with the vast number of bloggers today, a second type of spam is much more prevalent: comment spam.

Cutts offered these tips for community developers to eliminate spam in their platforms:

1.) Build reputation and trust into the service
2.) Be less of a target with hosted solutions
3.) Make the spammers send money, time or effort - in other words, frustrate them.
You can prevent spam attacks by using a CAPTCHA, or obfuscated series of words which most users find very difficult to read, Cutts said. A better idea, such as a simple math problem like what's 3+5 is a preferred solution, he said.
Many platforms like Google's hosted service Blogger can be made to require a valid email address or Google login for users to comment. With the vast number of GMail, Yahoo, or Hotmail users out there, hosting your blog on one of these platforms will make commenting easier and more frequent. As these platforms are hosted services, they are less likely to have malware or rogue code attacks on the server. As spam is getting increasingly dangerous with script attacks, if you run your own blog make sure that your operating system, blog software and database is frequently updated.
Google has created a resource for webmasters at its Web site that will notify you if your site is being spammed or taken over by rogue commenter's and provide education on how to prevent this in the future. It also is a home base for statistics and shows you how users are coming onto your site from their engine.
Cutts' final hint for opportunity was for those developers who could "distill trust out of noisy data" and called it "a great business model."