False Net doorways lead to spam
p2pnet.net news:- Net ‘billboards,’ meant to catch the metaphorical eyes of search engine spiders, but which lead the unwary to unsavoury spam instead of genuine content, have been pin-pointed by four researchers.
A technical paper says links promoting such pages are, ” generated by a small group of shadowy operators apparently with the acquiescence of some major advertisers, Web page hosts and advertising syndicators,” says The New York Times, noting the paper, “hints at the possibility of curbing the practice”.
The the study, from Yuan Niu and Hao Chen, from the University of California, Davis, and Yi-Min Wang, Ming Ma, from Microsoft, “uncovered a complex scheme in which a small group, creating false doorway pages, works with operators of Web-based computers who profit by redirecting traffic passed from search engines in one direction and then sending advertisements acquired from syndicators in the opposite direction,” says the NYT.
And, “Ultimately, it is advertisers’ money that is funding the search spam industry, which is increasingly cluttering the web with low quality content and reducing web users’ productivity,” say the researchers.
‘Drugs’ and ‘ringtone’ were the two most-spammed categories, says Spam Double-Funnel: Connecting Web Spammers with Advertisers.
Click here for a .pdf, and for now, say the conclusions:
We have presented redirection-spam analyses using the Strider Search Ranger system, which detects spam pages by monitoring their redirection traffic to known-spammer domains. Using a benchmark of spammer-targeted keywords, we showed that ‘drugs’ and ‘ringtone’ were the two most-spammed categories with an average search-result spam density as high as 30.8% and 27.5%, respectively. We have also constructed a second benchmark of advertiser-targeted keywords in order to study the similar and different spam characteristics between the two benchmarks.
We have presented a five-layer double-funnel model for analyzing redirection spam, in which ads from merchant advertisers are funneled through a number of syndicators, aggregators, and redirection domains to get displayed on spam doorway pages, whereas click-through traffic from these spam ads is funneled, in the reverse direction, through the aggregators and syndicators to reach the advertisers. Domains in the middle layers provide the critical infrastructure for converting spam traffic to money, but they have mostly been hiding behind the scenes. We used systematic and quantitative traffic-analysis techniques to identify the major players and to reveal their broad and deep involvement in the end-to-end spam activities.
For Layer #1 – doorway domains, we showed that the free blog-hosting site blogspot.com had an-order-of-magnitude higher spam appearances in top search results than other hosting domains in both benchmarks, and was responsible for about one in every four spam appearances (22% and 29% in the two benchmarksunique blogspot URLs that appeared in top-50 results for commercial queries were spam (77% and 75%). We also showed that over 60% of unique .info URLs in our search results were spam, which was an-order-of-magnitude higher than the spam percentage number for .com URLs.
For Layer #2 – redirection domains, we showed that the spammer domain topsearch10.com was behind over 1,000 spam appearances in both benchmarks, and the 209.8.25.150~209.8.25.159 IP block where it resided hosted multiple major redirection domains that collectively were responsible for 22-25% of all spam appearances. We also observed that the majority of the top redirection domains were syndication-based, serving text-based ads-portal pages.
For Layer #3 – aggregators, we presented the surprising finding that two IP blocks 66.230.128.0~66.230.191.255 and 64.111.192.0~64.111.223.255 appeared to be responsible for funneling an overwhelmingly large percentage of spam-ads clickthrough traffic. In our study, we easily collected over 100,000 spam ads that were associated with these two IP blocks, including many ads served by non-redirection spammers as well. These two IP blocks occupy the ‘bottleneck’ of the spam double-funnel and may prove to be the best layer for attacking the search spam problem.
For Layer #4 – syndicators, we discovered that a handful of ads syndicators appeared to serve as the middlemen for connecting advertisers with the majority of the spammers. In particular, the top-3 syndicators were involved in 59-68% of the spam-ads clickthrough redirection chains that we sampled. By serving ads on a large number of low-quality spam pages at potentially lower prices, these syndicators could become major competitors to main-stream advertising companies who serve some of the same advertisers’ ads on search-result pages and other high-quality, non-spam pages.
For Layer #5 – advertisers, we showed that even well-known websites’ ads had significance presence on spam pages. Ultimately, it is advertisers’ money that is funding the search spam industry, which is increasingly cluttering the web with lowquality content and reducing web users’ productivity. By exposing the end-to-end search spamming activities, we hope to educate users not to click spam links and spam ads, and to encourage advertisers to scrutinize those syndicators and traffic affiliates who are profiting from spam traffic at the expense of the long-term health of the web.
Also See:
The New York Times – Researchers Track Down a Plague of Fake Web Pages, March 19, 2007
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March 27th, 2007 at 11:01 am
Thanks for posting these – will use them for proxy filters.