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brysonmeunier
- FB Fan -
USA
44 Posts |
 Posted - 05/05/2006 : 14:12:00
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Anyone else notice that the official unofficial Pixies site is spamming MSN and Yahoo?:
http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=get.pixiesmusic.com&sourceid=Mozilla-search
Yesterday I did a search in Google for "allegra goodyear tires" and a spam listing for allegra related affiliate links came up instead. Since I'm a professional SEO, I get upset when black hat SEOs use doorway pages to get ranked in Google, as it makes us all look bad and potentially threatens my livelihood if Google decides not to work with SEOs. But as a Pixies fan I was pissed. I think if the Pixies community understood what this site was doing, then they would be too...
They're called doorway pages. When you do a search on keywords related to prescription drugs or pornography you'll see a lot of them. Certain unscrupulous advertisers are willing to pay as much as $40 a lead to affiliates for bringing visitors to their sites. One of the techniques for bringing in a lot of traffic is using a site with a high PageRank to appear higher in the rankings for competitive keywords. I don't want to get into how PageRank works, but essentially Google rewards sites who have quality inbound links with better rankings in search results. So every time someone with a web page links to pixiesmusic.com, Google sees that as a vote for its content and pushes that content higher in the results. Pixiesmusic.com had a PR of 7/10, so they were able to rank better than frankblack.net even, which has a 6/10.
I say "had" because I reported the spam yesterday through Sitemaps and had those affiliate links (thousands of them) removed from Google's index. Google also decreased their PageRank to 6.
I don't really think this is enough. This web site used the Pixies to put drug and porn spam in your search results and make themselves a lot of money off of it. If you think that's okay, then fine, keep visiting their site. Personally I'm done with it. If you hate spam and love the Pixies, please join the boycott.
Thanks,
Bryson
ODP Editor, Pixies
MusicMoz Editor, Pixies
SEO Strategist
http://www.resolutionmedia.com |
Edited by - brysonmeunier on 05/05/2006 14:13:43 |
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Cult_Of_Frank
= Black Noise Maker =
Canada
11687 Posts |
Posted - 05/05/2006 : 14:55:58
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Really? Most of those links (get.pixiesmusic.com) don't turn up anything although that would clearly be a subdomain in possession of PM. I wonder if there was a backdoor involved (they use PHP-BB which is about as insecure as it gets), since I doubt that Sean would actually do that, he's a pretty honest guy. But I do agree with you on people using portals. Was happy to see Mercedes get their comeuppance.
We don't do anything for search engines, though I've started trying to add alt-tags to some of our menu links to help increase the relevance of subsections of our site a little. As long as we're number one when people search FB, I'm happy - and we are for the moment. :)
Anyway, an interesting heads up, thanks. I may contact Sean on that.
 "If we hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate." |
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brysonmeunier
- FB Fan -
USA
44 Posts |
Posted - 05/05/2006 : 15:44:48
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Backdoor is certainly possible. Though it's a bit fishy that the redirects aren't working since this post went up. They were working yesterday. Doorway pages seem to have been removed from the server. Somebody got wise, though possibly after Google pulled the plug and not after this post.
If you find out that the owners of the site aren't responsible, please let me know so I can stop the personal boycott. I like the site, I just hate spam, and don't like to support anything that supports it.
Thanks,
Bryson
ODP Editor, Pixies
MusicMoz Editor, Pixies
SEO Strategist
http://www.resolutionmedia.com
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madtempest
- FB Fan -
USA
225 Posts |
Posted - 05/05/2006 : 23:24:07
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I congratulate and thank those people who've contacted me this week in regards to this issue, as the ok.pixiesmusic.com and get.pixiesmusic.com subdomains were spamming google, unbeknownst to me.
The issue was with pixiesmusic.com's hosting provider, IPowerWeb, and was something that affected several of that company's customers.
I am the owner of the site, and only 1 of 2 people outside the host company with any kind of legal access to the site. I would hope the majority of Pixies fans who knew of this issue (and for the record, not many did) would realize that I would never reduce or expose the site to something like this. To further clarify, I will state this: Neither myself, nor my pixiesmusic web partner had any knowledge of this, nor did we benefit monetarily or in any way as a result of it. We were a victim of circumstance in this, and had no involvement whatsoever, other than to notice the problem, inquire with the hosting company, and take the necessary measures to correct the issue.
Again, I thank those people who notified me of the issue, which I had already been working on. Sadly, you thought not to inquire with me about this (my contact info is readily available on the site) but instead assume the worst and report this.
Well done, fellow Pixies fan. Thank you for your support. |
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brysonmeunier
- FB Fan -
USA
44 Posts |
Posted - 05/07/2006 : 15:20:55
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Inquiring with you about this, sir, might have been tantamount to tipping you off. Which, honestly, I'm still not entirely convinced I would not have been doing. You may, indeed, have been a victim of circumstance, but the minute you realized you were taken advantage of you should have notified Google, MSN, and Yahoo of the problem yourself. They would have removed the listings from their index immediately, thereby correcting the problem and
absolving you of all wrongdoing. The fact that you did not do this either makes you suspect or naive, but either way it's pretty strange. Best of luck to you and your partner in avoiding this problem in the future. A more secure hosting company and a perusal of the Webmaster guidelines at Google may help:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/
Best,
Bryson
ODP Editor, Pixies
MusicMoz Editor, Pixies
SEO Strategist
http://www.resolutionmedia.com |
Edited by - brysonmeunier on 05/07/2006 15:21:37 |
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PixieSteve
> Teenager of the Year <
Poland
4698 Posts |
Posted - 05/07/2006 : 15:58:56
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anyway
FAST_MAN RAIDER_MAN - June 19th |
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Pixiesmusic.com spamming search engines
