Search engine results manipulated
Search Engine results
Using the correct keywords or phrases for your website is an important factor when trying to achieve good search engine rankings. It takes time and a bit of research to find what best suits your website theme. Research involves looking at search engine results to find hot topics and top search keywords. Unfortunately, it is not only marketers who are interested in keyword search these days.
Panda Labs,[Pandasecurity - antivirus protection] have released this latest warning:
“Cyber-crooks manipulate Internet searches to sell fake antivirus products.
Cyber-criminals are manipulating search engine results to distribute malware, in particular, fake antivirus products. The reasons are simple: the criminals need to attract users to malicious sites in order to infect them, what’s new however, is the way they are drawing users to these Web pages. In the past, users were lured to compromised websites by means of massive sending of spam. Targeted users read emails, clicked on the links they included and were unwittingly directed to a malicious Web page. Now however, due to the fact that users are more wary of messages received from unknown senders, criminals are using more effective ways of ensnaring new victims. They are using a Google tool called Google Trends (http://www.google.com/trends) which, among other things, lists the most popular searches of the day (anything from Obama’s inaugural address to the Oscar nominations).
Once they know the top searches and hot topics of the day, they create a blog full of the most searched for words (e.g. Obama, Penelope Cruz, etc.) and videos supposedly related to these topics. This way, they increase the blog’s ranking to place it among users’ first search results.
“Users who trust these results will end up on a Web page where they will be asked to download a codec or plug-in, etc. in order to watch the video. If they do so, they will be downloading malware, generally a fake antivirus”, explains Luis Corrons, Technical Director of PandaLabs.”
Using the free Google keyword tool is perhaps a better than using the Trends. However there are also many keyword tools out there that will help you uncover the keywords to advertise your business and products.
As long as honest marketers are aware of tricks and deceptions used by criminals, they can avoid some of the dangers and pitfalls when doing search engine searches themselves.
