March 20, 2007 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — A team of Microsoft researchers say they have discovered tens of thousands of fraudulent Web pages, created to lead search-engine users to advertisements. According to a technical report (cs.ucdavis.edu/~hchen/paper/www07.pdf) published by the researchers, the links promoting the fake pages are made by a small group of operators with the consent of some major advertisers, Web hosts and advertising syndicators.
The researchers revealed that the group employed search-engine spamming techniques to falsely improve the rankings of Web sites. By creating false doorway pages, the group worked with Web-based computers operators who profit by redirecting traffic coming from search engines in one direction, only to send advertisements acquired from syndicators in the other direction.
Other key findings in the report included that the majority of the junk listings was created from two Web hosts and that as many as 68 percent of the advertisements sampled were placed by three advertising syndicators. Additionally, the average spam density was 11 percent for 1,000 keywords the researchers used in their studies, blaming large advertisers for a significant share of the spam problem.
The Microsoft paper was distributed by Microsoft cybersecurity research investigators Yi-Min Wang and Ming Ma, in collaboration with University of California computer scientists Yuan Niu and Hao Chen.
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