Tricking Search Engines and Climbing to the Top of Search Rankings
A few months back, researchers at eTraffic discovered just how far people would go to get to the top of online search rankings. A massive hacking scheme was uncovered in which links to a strange online gambling site were suddenly placed onto 76 university and foundation web pages. These web pages, which included ones from Stanford, NYU, and Carnegie Mellon, all began linking to the gambling site through linked keywords that were placed randomly on their pages. While it is unclear as to how this hacker was able to place these links onto such trusted pages, one thing we do know for sure was the hacker’s motivation. As said by eTraffic CEO Guy Regev, “There is so much money involved in the online gambling industry, people will always take the next step to bypass Google.”
But why exactly did this hacker’s site soar to the top of the search rankings? The answer lies within Google’s method of ranking pages. For search engines, links are critical to rankings— we can use them to determine the authority of a page on a particular subject, based on the amount of endorsements it gets through other pages linking back to it. In addition, pages achieve high ranking by also having more trusted and better hubs, or sites that provide links back to those pages. As such, it makes sense that the gambling site hacker brought his site to such a high ranking. Not only were a massive amount of links to his site placed all over the web, but they were placed onto highly trusted and acclaimed pages. In this way, Google was tricked into helping a sketchy, money-hungry site reach the top.
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