Comments on: Who Put the Viagra In My Google? https://www.bitsbook.com/2009/12/who-put-the-viagra-in-my-google/ Your Life, Liberty and Happiness After the Digital Explosion Thu, 30 Sep 2010 12:42:35 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.8.13 By: kwiaciarnia krakow https://www.bitsbook.com/2009/12/who-put-the-viagra-in-my-google/comment-page-1/#comment-10251 Thu, 30 Sep 2010 12:42:35 +0000 http://www.bitsbook.com/?p=503#comment-10251 and i learned a lot!

]]> By: Harry Lewis https://www.bitsbook.com/2009/12/who-put-the-viagra-in-my-google/comment-page-1/#comment-4045 Thu, 07 Jan 2010 16:48:25 +0000 http://www.bitsbook.com/?p=503#comment-4045 Yup, same problem. We are working on it. Ugh. They aren’t even paying us a commission.

]]> By: Luciano Fuentes https://www.bitsbook.com/2009/12/who-put-the-viagra-in-my-google/comment-page-1/#comment-4023 Thu, 07 Jan 2010 03:10:55 +0000 http://www.bitsbook.com/?p=503#comment-4023 When I search for “Blown To Bits” in Google I see “We always have the cheapest offers in our online..” aswell as “Zoloft sale” above the correct address (in green) to the bitsbook.com url. The real page title, (and presumably any sub-title text) is not being presented in the search results.

You’re also ranked third for this quite narrow search. Third?? I’m amazed that you aren’t ranked first given the popularity of the book, the status of it’s authors, the active blog, and the online Bits course.

Do Evans or Wurster deal in online prescriptions??

]]> By: Harry Lewis https://www.bitsbook.com/2009/12/who-put-the-viagra-in-my-google/comment-page-1/#comment-3781 Fri, 01 Jan 2010 22:05:19 +0000 http://www.bitsbook.com/?p=503#comment-3781 A further comment after an independent diagnosis by Tyler Moore. If you do an ordinary Google search for certain of these pharmaceutical terms, links that appear to point to our site will be returned. But when you click on them, they don’t take you where you expect, they take you to an online drug store. So fooling the Googlebot is not just a matter of increasing visibility, but about riding the coattails of the high Google ranking of this site to get searches for, ahem, performance enhancing drugs directed to this particular drugstore. If you do a search for “Viagra drugstore”, you will find that this hack has been visited on many sites; on the second page of returned results are links apparently to the Berklee School of Music and to Greenpeace Canada, except that when you click on them they go to a drugstore instead.

]]> By: Harry Lewis https://www.bitsbook.com/2009/12/who-put-the-viagra-in-my-google/comment-page-1/#comment-3775 Fri, 01 Jan 2010 20:09:06 +0000 http://www.bitsbook.com/?p=503#comment-3775 Thanks to Russ Cox, we now know what is going on. Our site has been hacked in a very limited and specific way: it returns different HTML just in case the party requesting it is the Googlebot (the spider Google uses to index and analyze the web). The purpose of the hack is to make Google think that our site contains lots of references to the drugstore site, and thereby fool Google’s ranking and relevance algorithms into thinking the drugstore site is more legitimate than it is. No harm to you who visit the site, and the effect on the Google alerts is just collateral damage. We’ll have to get in touch with our web site host to see if they can fix this.

Thanks, Russ, for taking some of your holiday time to figure this out for us! Below is the way our site looks to the Googlebot.
Hacked B2B Site

]]> By: Josh https://www.bitsbook.com/2009/12/who-put-the-viagra-in-my-google/comment-page-1/#comment-3771 Fri, 01 Jan 2010 19:36:15 +0000 http://www.bitsbook.com/?p=503#comment-3771 I don’t know anything about the internal workings of Google Alerts, but my first guess would be that a spammer sent that email, pretending to be Google Alerts.

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