On September 20, 2007 the impossible happened; Google's index was hacked. What was discovered was that very specific phrases searched for would return results from Google's SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) with large numbers of .cn (Chinese) sites. The content from these sites was often an exact duplicate found from legitimate US sites. The original sites would have a lower ranking and position than the fake Chinese sites. If that was not enough, it gets better.

When clicking on the Google SERPs link to the .cn site the visitor would be redirected to a different page and sometimes a different website that would attempt to install malware on the visitor's own personal computer. If the visitor did not have virus protection in place they were then infected. Many of the .cn sites were not even real sites; they were not hosted on a web server. When visited by manually typing their URL they would redirect to another site.

Google's spider, the googlebot, travels to sites and analyzes them on a page by page basis. If the site does not exist it will not be added to Google's index no matter how much backlinking exists. Something is very wrong on Google's end.

It has been suggested that the faked sites redirected the googlebot to a location where the content could be spidered and then redirect human visitors to an entirely different location, a location that contained the malware. This would go against Google's guidelines and should not have happened, but is possible. We will never know for sure what happened as Google has not said anything of the issue.

This was not a small event as millions of .cn sites were shown on Google's SERPs. This would have to have been initiated with an automated process to have made such a large impact so quickly.

 

Since the Ugliness

Equally interesting is what has happened since September 20, 2007. Within the week we found that searches for "seattle cosmetic dentist", "jacksonville cosmetic dentist", among many others, returned merely a few thousand results instead of the millions we were seeing just days earlier. As is common with any Google Dance, others were still seeing millions of results for these same phrases while we were seeing a fraction of a percent of their number.

During October we have found that the Google SERPs have been uncommonly volatile. Couple this with the fact that the toolbar pagerank did not see its quarterly update in August there are many of us in the industry wondering just how broken Google has become.

 

Google has seen issues before and we should expect this. After all, do not all computers have problems at some point? It is only fair to expect Google to have issues also, and they have from time to time. Unlike past hiccups though, these recent difficulties feel as if there is something greater going on, or rather, not going on. I for one am hoping that Google figures this out and soon.