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How the U. of Kentucky Web Team Spent Its Summer Vacation
July 25, 2007
I really don't consider myself a spam cop, but this is too good to pass up. Just one more, then I'm done; I promise.
A few days ago when I was working on a previous post about how small sites are using big, well established sites to "vouch" for them, I showed some examples of SERPs for [cialis]. One thing I didn't get a chance to explore is how the University of Kentucky shows up on page 3 at Google:
When you click over with JavaScript disabled, you get the typical UK search page:
When you click over with JavaScript turned on, you're almost immediately redirected to the Cialis landing page at extra-drug.com:
At first I thought maybe there was some hijacking going on, but a cursory look at the UK Search page shows it was an inside job. Here's the smoking gun:
So we know how the page ranks for the terms. And also note that when you click over to the UK Search page from another UK page -- even with JavaScript enabled -- you don't redirect. So there's some referrer-based server-side magic going on here too. The real nagging question here is, who is making the money? A single guy in the UK CS department, or is it shared among many of them? Surely code like this doesn't go unnoticed for long.
Like the techniques I described in the earlier post, pill sites hooking up with the college web site crowd is nothing new. Danny Sullivan blogged about it over two years ago, after Search Engine Watch users found the Stanford Daily selling text links.
The Stanford editors pleaded ignorance, but that excuse doesn't cut it in the Big 10. These Kentucky guys know what they're doing.
So what's the most interesting angle of this whole mess? The fact that it takes place on the Search page on the University of Kentucky web site. How could this be anything BUT an Oedipal glove-slap to UK's biggest search-focused alumnus?
All posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at July 25, 2007 02:21 AM
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Comments
Standford tried doing it again and actually had a company reselling internal pages for them.... guess the edu sites get forgiven quicker as the engines know about "college pranks and the short term nature of students.
Posted by: AussieWebmaster at July 25, 2007 11:10 AM