I wrote about this in my blog. You can read the entire story there. It appears that a spammer has found out how to infiltrate the Google index without being caught. Here's what is happening in a nutshell: Some searches (very specific phrases, and I won't list any of them right now - Google knows which they are) return results with a large number of .cn (Chinese) sites. The .cn sites are often scraped content from legitimate U.S. websites The legitimate sites are being ranked below the scammed .cn sites for these competitive keywords. When a user clicks on one of the .cn sites returned in the result set, the user is redirected to an entirely different page which attempts to install one or more pieces of malware on the user's computer. If the user is not protected, they become infected - I don't know the specifics of the infection as I AM well protected The .cn sites don't appear to be hosted ANYWHERE. They are simply redirected domain names. How they got ranked in Google in such a short period of time for fairly competitive keywords is a mystery. Google's index even shows legitimate content for the .cn sites. It appears that the faked sites are redirecting the Googlebot to a location where content can be indexed, while at the same time recognizing normal users and redirecting them to a site that includes the malware mentioned earlier. This is an obvious violation of Google's guidelines, but the spammers have found ways to circumvent the rule and hide it from the Googlebot. These sites are numbering in the millions for many different keywords and phrases, and appear to be developed on an automated basis. Because of privacy laws, it's hard to track down who owns the domain names - Google has the power to do so, but there has been about exactly zero information from Google about the problem so far, and even many SEO experts and webmasters are not picking up on it. I wrote more in my blog post, including some of the underlying issues I see and a bit of conjecture. http://www.googlewatchdog.info/2007/09/spam-and-virus-sites-infesting-google.html
I have seen this and some old sites that are not even around anymore. It seems like some of the serps are a year old or older. Alot of junk sites listed from certain terms.
Google appears to be making MAJOR changes to not only their algo, but also to their underlying infrastructure. I've seen some older sites that show up for their cached pages in the index.
I'm sure Google will have this fixed in no time. Either that, or they'll just block or penalize .cn domains. It may sound harsh, but if a country is willing to protect the privacy of scammers and spammers, then they can't really complain when their domain gets devalued by private search engines.
I've been receiving many spam comments on my website that are links to .cn websites. I think there trying to link juice off my site. To get there spam sites indexed
My opinion is that Google is trying to come up with a fix that doesn't include a ban of an entire TLD. That may be part of the reason for the delayed PR updates that so many people are fretting over. If you read the entire blogpost, you'll see that many of these sites don't even actually exist other than in Google's index. That's a scary thought...
Yes ive noticed an influx of targeted spam submissions in my directories as well and many times its cn. thx malcolm
I heard of a program that does this, shoot forgot the name, it was like shadow something, and its expensive, its $2,500
I remember hearing something about that quite a while ago, but I'm fairly certain that Google stopped it in it's tracks. This is a completely new issue.
Great blog. I wanna see if for myself. Well I don't wanna click it, but I wanna see it. A few popular searches turned up nada.
I'm not giving up any of the search terms used, but you can see a screen shot at this page: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/014828.html I don't want to show a search term that could get anyone infected with a virus. If you notice the screen shot (about halfway down the page), you'll see that the .cn doesn't actually have a dot in it - it's some sort of character (probably Chinese) that appears to look a lot like a period in the English translation. It's obvious that Google engineers don't know how to deal with the odd character.