Spammer interference in the Google search engine: analysis of causes and consequences

Google became the victim of a spam attack that lasted several days. Many domains were ranking for hundreds of thousands of keywords each, indicating the scale of this attack, which could easily reach millions of keywords. At the same time, spam was detected at the beginning of the attack, but Google failed to react quickly to this problem.

If you currently do a Google search for "craigslist used auto parts", every result in the top 20 is spam, except for the first two results from Craigslist. — Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) December 20, 2023

Spam sites seem to take advantage of at least three possibilities that are part of how Google ranks websites. These capabilities are not new and have been used by spammers for years, but not to the extent they have been in recent times.

🚀 Spam sites find opportunities in two types of low-volume searches. The first possibility is the local search algorithm: Local search is a type of search that occurs when people are looking for something nearby, such as a restaurant or a movie show time. This is a more permissive algorithm that allows you to rank a local restaurant without links. The second possibility is long tail keywords: Long tail keywords are low phrase volume queries that occur once a month or once a year. Accordingly, these queries are less competitive, which makes ranking easier.

• 📌 Google gives new sites a short period of time where it has the benefit of the doubt while the Google algorithm identifies the site during a short honeymoon when the site can rank for search queries.