Everfluxx.com

Update! (July 6, 2007 : 4pm)

After reading this post, Alice/Virgilio have patched their robots.txt file, a search engine rep announced at the GiorgioTave.it Forum today.

Here’s the updated version:

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /search/cgi/

Well done, Alice/Virgilio!

Note: I’m leaving the rest of this post unedited.

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The Italian search engine/portal Alice (a.k.a. Virgilio Ricerca), whose web search results are partly powered by Google (although that is not disclosed anymore), is spamming Google.

Take a look at this SERP:

http://www.google.it/search?q=site:search.alice.it+inurl:search.cgi&hl=it&filter=0

Voilà: Alice has a good 22,000 of her own SERPs in Google’s index. Chapeau!

This is intentional, since Alice’s robots.txt file explicitly allows all search engines:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

Alice’s SERPs are currently ranking quite high in Google Italia for fairly competitive queries. Take “voli grecia” (Greece flights), for example:

http://www.google.it/search?q=voli+grecia&hl=it&rls=GGGL,GGGL:2006-10,GGGL:it&start=10&sa=N

The funny thing is that, since Alice’s results come from Google’s index, Alice is also spamming herself recursively:

http://search.alice.it/search/cgi/search.cgi?qs=site%3Asearch.alice.it+inurl%3Asearch.cgi&filter=0

27 million results? Wow! Even if that result count were “order-of-magnitudes-off”, as Adam Lasnik would say, it’d still look like a whole lotta spam to me. Kinda like a mini-bad data push. <g>

I wonder what Google’s quality assurance team have to say about the phenomenon of cross-search engine spamming. After all, Alice’s sponsored links are also provided by Google… And if I were an AdWords advertiser I wouldn’t be too happy to see my ads on this sort of crap.

OK, now a personal little experiment: Everfluxx spamming Alice spamming Google. <- Check this SERP in a few days: as soon as Google indexes this post, it will probably show up as the #1 result on Alice. At which point, that’s right, Googlebot will follow my link and index Alice’s SERP.

Pretty neat, huh?