Spamdexing includes using unrelated phrases in the text of a web page to manipulate the relevancy or prominence of resources indexed by a search engine.
I was using the search term "scholarship for Filipinos" when I noticed that one of the top hits (no. 5, in fact), is this web page from Sulit.com.ph. However, if you visit that page, you will realize that nothing is related to scholarship for Filipinos except the following:
The actual page returned by sulit.com.ph does not serve the user at all, and only wastes the user's time and network resources. Nothing on it has something to do with scholarship for Filipinos. It is a clear case of spamming Google's index to increase the chances that it (sulit.com.ph) will have a share of the traffic from search engines. If you do an index (site:) search for sulit.com.ph to check how many pages it has in Google's index, you get a very high number: 11,200,000 (for comparison, the English Wikipedia has about 11,600,000).
(P.S. And yes, I have my own sulit.com.ph website.)
UPDATE: Another spamdexing page, this time for the search term "Philippine historical documents". This is personal, since I intended a year ago to be the number 1 Google result for such search term.
Also, sulit.com.ph uses cloaking such that for Google, the short link provided in the page (e.g. http://sulit.com.ph/philippine+historical+documents) redirects to the front page (http://www.sulit.com.ph). To test that, download the User Agent Switcher plugin for Firefox and visit the previous link using the default user agent and using Googlebot's user agent.
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Labels: spamdexing, sulit.com.ph
I was using the search term "scholarship for Filipinos" when I noticed that one of the top hits (no. 5, in fact), is this web page from Sulit.com.ph. However, if you visit that page, you will realize that nothing is related to scholarship for Filipinos except the following:
- the page is titled "scholarships abroad for filipinos Philippines"
- in the breadcrumb of the page, the phrase above is repeated: "scholarships abroad for filipinos"
- then at the bottom, there is again the title, now made into a completely out-of-place text at the bottom: "scholarships abroad for filipinos Philippines"
The actual page returned by sulit.com.ph does not serve the user at all, and only wastes the user's time and network resources. Nothing on it has something to do with scholarship for Filipinos. It is a clear case of spamming Google's index to increase the chances that it (sulit.com.ph) will have a share of the traffic from search engines. If you do an index (site:) search for sulit.com.ph to check how many pages it has in Google's index, you get a very high number: 11,200,000 (for comparison, the English Wikipedia has about 11,600,000).
(P.S. And yes, I have my own sulit.com.ph website.)
UPDATE: Another spamdexing page, this time for the search term "Philippine historical documents". This is personal, since I intended a year ago to be the number 1 Google result for such search term.
Also, sulit.com.ph uses cloaking such that for Google, the short link provided in the page (e.g. http://sulit.com.ph/philippine+historical+documents) redirects to the front page (http://www.sulit.com.ph). To test that, download the User Agent Switcher plugin for Firefox and visit the previous link using the default user agent and using Googlebot's user agent.
Like this post? Please help me pay for my Internet access.
Labels: spamdexing, sulit.com.ph
