SURF: Detecting and Measuring Search Poisoning

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques are often abused to promote websites among search results. This is a practice known as blackhat SEO. In this paper, the authors tackle a newly emerging and especially aggressive class of blackhat SEO, namely search poisoning. Unlike other blackhat SEO techniques, which typically attempt to promote a website's ranking only under a limited set of search keywords relevant to the website's content, search poisoning techniques disregard any term relevance constraint and are employed to poison popular search keywords with the sole purpose of diverting large numbers of users to short-lived traffic-hungry websites for malicious purposes.