To search spammers, even death is a badware opportunity

Posted by Erica George Wed, 05 Dec 2007 20:32:00 GMT

The Bits blog at the New York Times yesterday highlighted a disturbing twist to a common spammer practice. Search engine spam, or spamdexing, involves spammers gaming search engine results by creating pages that pretend to have useful content, often based on current news items. Instead of new content these pages have links and text scraped from other sites, and are loaded with ads or badware.

The shameless twist observed by the Times is the exploitation of recent obituaries as news items, leading grieving friends and relatives to spam and badware sites instead of information about their departed loved ones. In the case profiled by the Globe, a website offered what it claimed was a video of the memorial service for a recently deceased woman. When a visitor clicked the link, he was prompted to download a video codec that included badware.

For friends and relatives who are dismayed to see their loved ones’ memories tarnished by search results full of spam and badware, there are some ways to fight back. Most major search engines offer a place to report search spam – here are reporting links for Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. Google also offers a way to report pages with badware that are found in its index, here.