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How Spammers Can Abuse Google Pages  (View post)

Jon Henshaw [PersonRank 4]

Friday, February 24, 2006
18 years ago

It's a good point, but like you said, they probably have several things in place to catch that type of activity. And I can't imagine any spammer being able to harness any real results, especially since it would have to take many pages to even have a slight affect on their SERPs.

Niraj Sanghvi [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

I fall into that category of tending not to put up my email address. For getting site feedback, I setup a form which emails questions to me, so I can still avoid disclosing it. However, like you mentioned I am not as worried about the googlepage harvesting, as anyone that gets my email address that way likely also got hundreds of others, making it easy work for the spam filter. No legitimate email is going to send exactly the same thing to hundreds of people.

However I wonder how well Gmail's spam filter works, as someone could program it so each email they send has some small variation to throw it off.

ChicagoSage [PersonRank 1]

18 years ago #

I think it's funny that a Google search for site:googlepages.com has almost no results, but the same search at Yahoo already has over 80 results:
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=site%3Agooglepages.com&sm=Yahoo%21+Search&fr=FP-tab-web-t&toggle=1&cop=&ei=UTF-8

Caleb E [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Why is this just becoming an issue now? what about geocities? why is it only bad when *google* does it? geocities has the same "flaw" because its geocities.com/you

Billy [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

Caleb,
Because your email address is not you[put at-character here]geocities.com.
Billy

Caleb E [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

that's right billy, its also not you[put at-character here]googlepages.com, its you[put at-character here]gmail.com and you[put at-character here]yahoo.com respectively

Billy [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

Caleb,
The point is that if there is a you.googlepages.com there is definately a you[put at-character here]gmail.com for which to send spam.
Billy

Caleb E [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Billy, ditto for geocities. you have to have a yahoo account to get geocities.com/blah

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Caleb, then what Yahoo is doing is just as bad. I don't know which Yahoo blogger covered this (or ignored this) in the past, Yahoo of course is not covered as in-depth as Google here. Well, it's good you point it out.

Martin [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

Which spammer cares for that? It is not worth the efford. When I registered for gmail, I got spam within the day (caught by the filter). Spammers just do a carthesian product of their already extensive local-part list with their target domain list.

Caleb E [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

I don't see a really direct alternative to what yahoo/google are doing. letting you pick your site's name is just inviting spammers in.

Angie Livingstone [PersonRank 1]

18 years ago #

also, spammers will be able to create pages on google that link back to their pages to boost rank. Or perhaps goodle page rank won't work on googlepages?

Tiffany M. [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

I fall in the middle when it comes to revealing my email address. I was buried in Spam at both my Hotmail & Yahoo! accounts, and switched to gmail in an effort to rid myself of Spam. In recent months I have been posting my email address online more often, and I have been very impressed with gmail's Spam filters so far. On an average, only about 2 pieces of Spam make it into my inbox each month. So, in this case, I don't think the fact that using googlepages would reveal my email address will make me avoid using it. I already have a website, but googlepages looks like it would be great for hosting large downloads as well as images for my livejournal, etc.

Caleb E [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

I don't think spamming on google pages will be that much of a problem. There's no really easy way to automate link publishing yet that i can see, and if you're acting up, they just delete your page.

Jeff [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

no matter how careful you are (hide your email address from others), the spammers still can find ways to retrieve your emails from Google servers. That's why i received spam almost everyday. :(

Martin [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

Jeff,

they do not retrieve gmail addresses from some list at google. They have a collection like

joe[put at-character here]gmail.com
jeff[put at-character here]yahoo.com

Now, they permute them:

joe[put at-character here]gmail.com
jeff[put at-character here]yahoo.com
jeff[put at-character here]gmail.com
joe[put at-character here]yahoo.com

and send the mails. It does not matter that they send to many unknown local parts this way, as sending email is cheap and fast and can be distributed through bot-nets.

Jeff [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:googlepages.com&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&start=0&sa=N&X=1

all the emails are there...:(

Justin [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

I don't mind if I receive spam from using googlepages. I trust Google spam filter.

I wonder how spammers can get my gmail address from me.googlepages.com. If they do not and cannot know me[put at-character here]gmail.com then how are they going to know me.googlepages.com? And, who is publishing his/her pages to the world--to all those who he/she doesn't know at all.

Justin [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

I did a search like site:me.googlepages.com but I didn't find my site. :P

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

> If they do not and cannot know me[put at-character here]gmail.com then
> how are they going to know me.googlepages.com?

For example, they can use the Google API to query for site:googlepages.com and analyze the result URLs.
But you're right, I also trust the Gmail spam filter (and publish my unscrambled email on this blog).

Scott Price [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

Google Pages is really nice because they are one of the few(if not only) who do not place banner ads on your free site. However, it is a shame that you must display your e-mail address like that.

I recomend using a free no ads url masking service. Http://v2w.org will let you mask any web site to Http://WhatEverYouWant.v2w.org.

So for instance, if your gmail is johndoe[put at-character here]gmail.com and your google page is johndoe.googlepages.com you can sign up for free with V2W and basically change the address of your google page to http://JohnsPlace.v2w.org, for example. And you still won't have to display any banners or ads.

w4w toronto [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

Google Pages is a great idea if you just want to promote, promote, promote.

As well if you are having a garage sale, bbq, fund raiser, or other temporary set up, and just want to get the word out there quickly and fast, it is an excellent tool.

It's also and an excellent tool to lambast, and slander people, and remain fairly anonymous.

Whatever it's use, no one has provided a free service that is as effective in advertisement as Google Pages.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

> I recomend using a free no ads url masking service

But then whenever that services changes their behavior (i.e. introduces ads along the way, or is acquired by a spammer) then you're in trouble. Too much risk, I'd say.

Arun Kumar [PersonRank 1]

17 years ago #

What about Google Groups, you can get many email addresses by searching author:gmail.com / author:aol.com / author:hotmail.com / author:yahoo.com

This way, anyone can get all the recently used email addresses Sorted by date. There are thousands of email addresses available for spammers.

When I emailed it to Google last year, they said they are working on it.

How can they provide with such a search feature in groups.

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