on search engines and trust certification authorities
First, Didier Stevens has posted an update on the bogus SERP pages serving badware (Didier calls this method spamdexing). In this update, he reveals the overall number of spamdexing sites and analyzes the AOL search data and finds that roughly 1% of AOL users clicked on these spamdexing sites.
Previous cleverhack posts about these sites can be found here and here.
Not too long ago, Ben Edelman posted an article examining the trustworthiness of sites certified by site certification authorities - most notably TRUSTe. His methodology included cross-referencing TRUSTe’s ratings with the findings of SiteAdvisor - and finding that TRUSTe certified some sites that SiteAdvisor did not rate as trustworthy. These findings should be considered when thinking about purchasing a site certification seal for your site or using a site with a certification seal. (And yes, I will admit my bias - of being on the Web for so long to dislike anything trying to show “trust” - against these seals…)
Technorati Tags: SERPS, Google, search engines, traffic, spyware, adware, badware, viruses, trojan, dialers, spamdexing, site certification, site trustworthiness, TRUSTe, SiteAdvisor
Subscribe to Cleverhack 
