Using Bebo profiles and comment spam to rank for “Cheap Airlines”

It looks like it’s quite easy to get a Bebo profile indexed and ranking in Google.co.uk for reasonably competitive terms like “Cheap Airlines” – even after all the talk from Google on comment and forum spam!

Check out these results:



http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&rlz=1B3GGGL_enGB268GB271&q=cheap+airlines&btnG=Search&meta=

Clearly position 4 in the organic rankings is unlikely to deliver information on cheap airlines. In fact, the profile links to a made for adsense site promoting adult dating and all kinds of other junk.

How have they done this? Over 1500 forum and blog spam links! Here’s the link to Yahoo’s site explorer results:

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/advsearch;_ylt=AvolUUK9DMoEUBsVyLMCm4nbl8kF?p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bebo.com%2FCheapA45&bwm=i&bwmo=

Here’s my favourite example of a comment spammed blog:

http://www.lionking.org/~zirascar/book.html

I’m actually rather impressed that this spam has got onto page 1 of Google.co.uk using one of the oldest tricks in the book!

Over to you, Google spam team!

Update: The “cheap airlines” result has now been removed, as of 13/08/08 16:00 hours. Thanks! That said, I was checking for “last minute flights” and look what I found:



Yes, folks! Those airline industry bebo spammers are at it again! Let’s see (from the date / time of this post being updated) how long it takes for the spam to be removed from the serps..