Berkeley.edu webspam abuse by raph.us

Posted by: Marketing Guy Date posted: January 5th, 2007 Published in: Search Engine Optimisation, Spam

A quick check of indexed pages shows a load of custom poker / casino text files uploaded to the Berkeley.edu server which then subsequently redirect to a list of casino sites.  Same works for viagra, and I’m sure a range of other terms.

The pages redirect to random spam pages on the domain raph.us (no link! :P), which has been banned from Google itself.  There are also reports that the person behind the domain uses various sleeper accounts to post comment spam (drugs) and some spyware apps are forcing visits to the domain.

Checking a few other searches for “raph.us” there are numerous other reports of the domain being used to register sleeper accounts on forums and blogs, so worth wildcard banning the domain.

I emailed Berkeley about it - assuming they don’t know about it and someone slipped the content onto their servers.  A good example of why folks should check their referal logs and keep an eye on new content uploaded to their servers.

MG

ADDED - got a reply from Berkeley (kudos for the quick response - almost within 5 minutes!) and they’re already dealing with the problem.

Just a thought, but if someone was so inclined what sort of counter measures could be put in place to combat this kind of stuff?  Preventing uploads isn’t an option (they are user only anyway) - what other stuff could you do?  I’m sure all you SEO folks know a few tricks! ;)

I already suggested blocking spiders from uploaded content to prevent indexing (thereby removing any SEO benefit) but there may still be some traffic benefit to it.  What else could be done?

C’mon SEOs - our industry is creating this problem (and similar ones) for loads of people - it’s about time we did what we can to help sort it out! :)

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Comments

  1. Posted by: JohnMu Date posted: 6th January, 2007 at 1:10 am

    Since you seem to have a magical ability at writing emails that actually get responded to … perhaps you could kick UNESCO into fixing their site and removing the hidden / hacked links? See http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2006-12-06-n11.html for some of them. Their site is peppered with hidden links like that. I can’t get any response at all from them.

  2. Posted by: Marketing Guy Date posted: 6th January, 2007 at 1:46 am

    Sent them an email, but that’s a more serious issue because whoever added it would need to have had admin access to the forums to add it (or as was mentioned on the thread you pointed out, it could have come from an out of the box forum package).

    Will post back if there’s any feedback.

    Cheers for the heads up! :)
    Scott

  3. Posted by: Marketing Guy Date posted: 12th January, 2007 at 9:31 pm

    UPDATE: It seems Google has removed the spammy pages now. That was pretty quick - probably a hand job.