“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.

If you’re unfamiliar with Blekko, it launched late last year as a human-curated approach to search aimed at eliminating spam from search results by way of human editing. With the new app, users can also "slash in" what they want and "slash out" what they don’t want. 

"In a world where people want the most relevant answers on the go, mobile search is becoming increasingly more significant," said Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta. "With our iPhone and Android application, users can utilize personalized slashtags, friends, experts and the community to get the most relevant results all from the mobile device.

See an interview WebProNews recently conducted with Skrenta here.  

With the mobile apps, users can also access a website’s SEO data on the fly (like the desktop version). 

According to Blekko, they already have 100,000 slashtag vertical search terms that have been created by thousands of human editors. These cover topics such as health, money, and autos, as long as narrower topics, such as: gluten-free, college football, and the Grateful Dead. 

The new apps are free in the iTunes store and Android Market. Blekko is available for all versions of Android, and a spokesperson for the company tells us they’ll be rolling out the app across all mobile platforms, but iPhone and Android were good places to start. 

“At SES Chris interviewed one search spammer who asked to remain nameless while providing some interesting details about the inner workings of the search spamming world. On one hand the interview reveals some of the motivations for spamming the search engines. More interesting are the search spamming tactics these black hat marketers won’t employ because even they are annoyed by the end result.”

Chris asks what kind of search spam? The search spammer responds by describing massive generated content, as in auto-generated content. How? The spammer explains: Take a dictionary and put in a database and run some application on that to output content according to a certain topic. The words are random with a certain percentage of the target keyword along with quotations, commas and periods thrown in, which fools Google into thinking they are sentences. He runs Google AdSense ads on these content sites and that’s how me makes money.

Chris makes a good point, “So Google enables search spammers by allowing AdSense ads on these types of sites?” Chris then says the same thing with eBay. Big companies tolerate a certain amount of spam because it makes them money.

Chris asks if users are negatively affected by all this search spam. Mr Search Spammer responds that because there is such a high clickthrough rate on the ads being run on the auto generated content sites, that users must be finding what they’re looking for (in the ads).

Search spamming is all about the money. Yet there’s a funny moral justifaction in the interview that is worth hearing. Very amusing and concerning at the same time.

Chris also has a good interview with Danny Sullivan and another with Google’s Matt Cutts during SES NYC worth checking out.

Tags:

Lee Odden is President and Founder of
TopRank Online Marketing, specializing in organic SEO, blog
marketing and online public relations. He’s been cited as a search
marketing expert by publications including U.S. News & World Report and
The Economist and has implemented successful search marketing programs
with top BtoB companies of all sizes. Odden shares his marketing
expertise at Online Marketing Blog offering
daily news, interviews and best practices.