Michael Martinez in Buy Viagra SERPs

Those who have been waiting for purely blackhat posts from me, brace yourselves cause this is as blackhat as it gets.

I was checking the “buy viagra” SERPs in Google today and came across something that entertained me a lot. Who did I see ranking at #1 for “buy Viagra” but… Michael Martinez!

Why would a well respected member of the SEO community, known to be as whitehat as they get want to spam his forum profile to the top of buy viagra SERPs? Something smelt fishy here and I decided to dig deeper. Heres’ what I’ve seen when I clicked through to see the actual page:

Upon further examination, it became clear that the well respected member of the SEO community has nothing to do with this profile and some spammer just used his name randomly (or not so randomly?). But what totally amazed me is how fast this profile reached the goal of its creation:

As you see, it’s been created only9 days ago – and already succeeded in making it to the top of such competitive SERPs!

Little wonder here, really. OpenX is a free, open source ad server that manages the selling and delivery of online advertising inventory. It is also a 2001 authority domain with over 6 million links as reported by Yahoo. The profile page itself has 485 links that Yahoo already knows of. Using the power of an authority domain at it best!

While the spammer made a great choice of his parasite hosting resource, he has, however, made one mistake. If not for such a renown name he chose to use, his trick would have probably gone unnoticed.

4 Comments.

  1. Interesting find. I could guess who might be using my name in vain. Very funny. Haha.

    I guess that comes with the territory. 🙂

    Thanks for the heads up. Looks like the listing is gone (or hasn’t yet made it to my data center).

  2. Hey IW,

    I didn’t see it and I still don’t see it.

    What I see at #1 is cheapestpills.easyfreeforum.com

    easyfreeforum.com is only PR4

    cheapestpills.easyfreeforum.com has only a few hundred links
    showing with Yahoo atm.

    One of which is peach.candybox.to. I have seen candybox.to around the pharma serps. .to TLD is The Kindom of Tonga. LOL
    Tonga is a small group of islands south of Australia.

    Anyways, I think this guy is Japanese; they are clever and totally resourceful.

    out.

  3. Indeed, very soon after I posted it that result has disappeared – I guess not without manual help of the Google folks, judging by my server logs hehe.

    @Michael – glad you got a good sense of humor to take it like that. What are you going to do to whoever did that?

    @Bompa – Japanese sounds interesting, but how come there are no Japanese blackhats in syndk8 – at least that I know of?

  4. I’m not feeling vindictive. This isn’t the first time my name has been used in vain. Probably won’t be the last.