Strider Search Ranger

By Jimmy Daniels
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

Researchers from Microsoft and California University have been following the spam money trail and have uncovered the companies and some of the techniques they use to get doorway pages listed in search engines and how they use the traffic they get to make big bucks redirecting visitors to advertiser sites or using such programs as Google Adsense. The researchers also noted that 22% of their sample that were cataloged as spam were blogspot urls, and that most of it was going through two web hosting companies.

“A small number of rogue actors who know what they are doing can create an enormous amount of disruption,” said David L. Sifry, chief executive of Technorati, a blog-indexing company that works to keep junk pages of this sort out of its indexes. “It’s sort of like putting a blindfold on you and spinning you around three times and then taking off the blindfold and showing you an ad.”

Surprisingly, the researchers noted that the vast bulk of the junk listings was created from just two Web hosting companies and that as many as 68 percent of the advertisements sampled were placed by just three advertising syndicators. Source: Researchers Track Down a Plague of Fake Web Pages

We Say: The important thing is they have found out how they do it and how to find out who is doing it and for what advertiser. On the Strider Search Ranger page, don’t get me started on that name, they even tell you how to do it yourself; if you have a blog that gets comment spam, using free tools like Fiddler and whois lookups, you can help follow the money trail. More here.