“As with any major event, criminals have been quick to take advantage of the online attention,” a Symantec representative tells WebProNews.

Among the threats is a spam email campaign, which advertises a replica of Princess Diana’s engagement ring. This has been going around since February.

“Furthermore, as we had anticipated, we have recently observed additional spam campaigns making use of this significant event to promote various products,” said Symatec’s Suyog Sainkar. “In one such recent spam campaign, email promoting a ‘limited edition Buckingham Mint Royal Wedding Commemorative Coin’ at a discounted rate is being observed.”

As noted, the threats don’t stop at email. All kinds of search terms related to Prince William, Kate Middleton, and the royal wedding are being searched for by interested Internet users. This has been quite clear, looking at Google Trends from day to day.

Fake pages are being set up to rank for terms that people are searching for. “At one point, a search for ‘william and kate movie imdb’ returned 61 malicious links in the first 100 search results,” said Sainkar. “Fifty-eight of the first 100 results for the search term ‘princess diana death photos’ and 45 of the first 100 results for the search term ‘royal wedding guest list kanye’ also led to malicious sites.”

Other search terms, Symantec says have been commonly turning up “poisoned links” include: “william and kate movie cast,” “prince charles age,” “princess diana death facts,” “prince harry last name,” “william and kate movie on lifetime,” “royal wedding guest list bush,” “royal wedding guest list snubs,” “prince charles siblings,” and “the royal wedding date and time”.

“We have seen over 500 compromised sites being used in this campaign over the past few days,” said Sainkar. “Attackers create multiple fake pages on each site and use unethical SEO techniques—such as keyword stuffing, cloaking, and link farming—to “game” the search engine algorithms to achieve high search engine rankings.”

According to a Norton survey, 62% of Americans are likely to follow the British Royal Wedding.

(Coverage of SES Chicago continues at WebProNews Videos.  Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)

The session kicked off with an attempt to define the term "black hat."  Rand Fishkin, the CEO of SEOmoz.org, believes the meaning constantly changes.  White hat is an approach that is definitely supported by search engines, he said.  Black hat is anything that isn’t favored by search engines.

Bruce Clay, the president of Bruce Clay, Inc., later added that black hat and spam are not the same.  And Todd Friesen, the vice president of search at Position Technologies, pointed out that black hat tactics still give users what they want: a good experience.  They just don’t follow Google’s rulebook.

This led to a discussion of Google’s style of oversight.  Fishkin compared the company to a parent that doesn’t provide feedback.  He, Clay, and Matt Bailey, who’s the founder and president of SiteLogic, criticized the way in which Google forces people to educate themselves about what is and isn’t allowed, too.

Later, the conversation turned to Google’s implementation of real-time search, and whether what SEOs can do with it is black hat.  The panel leaned towards "yes."  David Naylor, Bronco‘s SEO, said that Google’s under a lot of pressure, and that its introduction of this feature is risky, possibly leading to real-time spam (or worse – see Rae Hoffman’s post on the issue).

If Google screws up, Bing will win, Naylor then asserted, continuing, "The arrogance may be the thing that pushes them off the chair."

WebProNews Reporter/Anchor Abby Johnson contributed to this report.

Related Articles:

> Media Tactics For Ranking In Real-Time Search

> The Future Of Online PR

> Showtime For Real-Time Search With Google

Maybe it’s getting to be time they do so. The days of one reverse-deciphering the algorithm seem long gone – the best at Yahoo and MSN don’t seem to have done it in all this time – as are the days when Google could be easily gamed with mere keywords and links. At this point, what’s the harm in letting webmasters know exactly why their sites incur penalties, giving them ways to atone, and taking away their wild speculations?

Then again, what would they blog about?

Google is in an enviable position. First, they don’t have to tell webmasters squat as long as they’re clamoring and clawing each other just to get listed there. Secondly, Google only loses if searchers take off, not search engine optimizers. But it seems they could eliminate some headaches by being more forthcoming about how not to incur the rankings wrath.

Not that they don’t fire warning shots. Last fall, much like how the Boston Massacre was conducted, Google felled a few as a warning to others to abandon the hope of paid link schemes. The speculation about minus-whatever penalties suggest the gradual increase in ranking penalties are similar warnings.

The leading theory is that these penalties are enacted by humans, not algorithms. If so, Google should think about being more forthcoming about their reasoning. We know that penalties are not exclusively enforced by humans. Last December a glitch in the system caused many to see their rankings drop by six places. Google acknowledged the –6 penalty as an error.

Recently the –60 penalty has been the focus, not just because the number of webmasters reporting drops in that range, but also because Googlers sort of back-alley nodding the penalty in certain forums.

In a Google Groups thread, Swiss Googler John Mueller replies to the pining post of one who took a –60 penalty. While this penalty and others had been explained away by webmasters as having to do with bad linking practices, this one had more to do with the template used, and the hidden content/links popping up in the code.

I’m still seeing templates being distributed with them; not only that, the links are disguised in a way that the average webmaster cannot find them.

 Personally, I think having footer links are fine if they are relevant to the site or template and nofollow’ed. However, hiding them in this style is – in my opinion – not ok at all. Just this week I helped a friend with his template: it had a block of code similar to this in it. It turned out that not only was it hiding links, it was also spreading malware. It really upsets me to find code like this in a template: it shows that whoever made the template not only knew the contents were not ok, but also wanted to prevent the user from finding or editing it.

We learn a few things from that statement: 1.) Be careful with your templates; 2.) Footer links should be nofollow links; 3.) There is a bit of manual interpretation when it comes to ranking. Barry Schwartz says it also means Google admits a –60 penalty exists.

Mueller suggested the webmaster clean up the code and submit a reconsideration request. Others suggested, under their breaths, that Google stop dictating every last detail of their sites.

A –30 speculator mentioned the use of a similar footer as well as buying some links, which he doesn’t think helped. Another, who got hit with a 950 rank-busting, declares no black hat tactics while admitting non-perfection. It could be that a –950 penalty is the last warning shot before getting booted from the index altogether.

One explanation for getting the –950 penalty was the use of interlinked sites with content that was "too thin" or irrelevant. That has a simple solution, really, and an old one: provide great, valuable content and only link to sites or pages that do the same.

Until we get more clear-cut do’s and don’ts and explanations of penalties, we’ll be free to speculate. If that never happens, here’s what we know:

1.    Nofollow links that could be construed as spammy or are bought and sold
2.    Be careful with templates, and pay close attention to footers to make sure there’s nothing shady there like hidden content or links
3.    Content is still the most important thing
4.    Pay attention to the warning shots

Matt Cutts Provides More Cloaking Giggles

As the clich

New York Times Third Best At “Sex”?

That’s seems good, right?  At least for the New York Times.  But a number of people have pointed out some problems with the tactics that landed this paper at number three, and the first of them was johnon.com’s John Andrews.

“The King of Content is now dominating the Google SERPs across a wide swath of the keyword space, via the re-published, re-purposed, New York Times Archives,” he wrote.  “Each ‘article’ is re-purposed on a clean, CSS-driven text page, clearly dated TODAY and not-co-clearly labeled as ‘originally published’ back in 1997, 1998, or whatever all the way back to 1981.  Of course cross-referenced, categorized, sub-categorized, ad-infinitum.

“You can check for yourself on your own ‘current events’ topics of interest,” Andrews continued.  “Look for query.nytimes.com (search results) and topics.nytimes.com (archives) showing up in the #1 spot for search phrases, as if the re-published content was ‘fresh news’.  Via Google referral, many of them are full articles.  Via the New York Times archive search pages, my tests mostly returned pay-per-article results sets.  Yes, there are ads on the pages.”

You probably won’t, however, have much luck at duplicating Andrews’s results at this point – it seems that someone at Google has gone in and “fixed” the problem.  (The New York Times is no longer the number three result for “sex,” for example.)  Yet some experts have argued that this wasn’t a problem – or any sort of disreputable trick – at all.

Danny Sullivan is one of those individuals (Sullivan also managed to captured a screenshot of the odd-looking “sex” results).  “Back in March, Google warned that allowing your internal search results to be listed in Google might be considered spamming,” he began.

But, in reference to the New York Times’s doings, Sullivan added, “[I]t’s common for sites to have category pages for stories they’ve written.  It’s GOOD for them to have these, in most cases.  As for the [TODAY] header, it’s also common that sites don’t provide last modified dates or that they reports the current date as the document’s authored date.”

And so, “[t]hat’s why search engines typically depend on their own internal comparison processes to determine if a document has changed or other means to assign actual dates to them.  The visible date shown to human often means little.”

The debate over the New York Times’s tactics is sure to continue, however, perhaps with reference to an old cloaking uproar.