Characterizing Long-tail SEO Spam on Cloud Web Hosting Services
Xiaojing Liao, Chang Liu, Damon McCoy, Elaine Shi, Shuang Hao, Raheem Beyah · 2016
The popularity of long-tail search engine optimization (SEO) brings with new security challenges: incidents of long-tail keyword poisoning to lower competition and increase revenue have been reported. The emergence of cloud web hosting services provides a new and effective platform for long-tail SEO spam attacks. There is growing evidence that large-scale long-tail SEO campaigns are being carried out on cloud hosting platforms because they offer low-cost, high-speed hosting services. In this paper, we take the first step toward understanding how long-tail SEO spam is implemented on cloud hosting platforms. After identifying 3,186 cloud directories and 318,470 doorway pages on the leading cloud platforms for long-tail SEO spam, we characterize their abusive behavior. One highlight of our findings is the effectiveness of the cloud-based long-tail SEO spam, with 6% of the doorway pages successfully appearing in the top 10 search results of the poisoned long-tail keywords.