Over-powerful domain authority in Google
Some interesting results for the query [airline tickets] in Google today - at numbers 3 & 4 there are 2 results from Bebo, the well-known airline ticket supplier.
Hang on, Bebo - isn’t that a social networking site rather than an airline ticketing company? As outlined by Trend Labs recently in a post entitled Spam Early Spam Often, fake Bebo profiles are being set up and used as a way to lure unsuspecting users into clicking on nefarious links within a profile.
This now appears to be affecting Google’s results too, at least for this query. This profile appears at #3 for the query:
Although these fake profiles have very low quality content and just link to an incredibly spammy domain, they have around 1,000 (spammy) backlinks according to Yahoo, and apparently that’s enough for Google to put them above the fold for a competitive query such as this.
Even though Bebo is a well known social networking site. Not anything to do with airline tickets. Simply being hosted on Bebo is enough to rank for this term.
Bring on the semantic web…
