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These aren't new, but I've been scratching my head over them for a while: Trackback and Pingback spam for Google searches, e.g.
http://www.google.com/search?q=epwefnsr
http://www.google.com/search?q=pvarioxu
http://www.google.com/search?q=qfceusgw
http://www.google.com/search?q=mwryzvew
The search phrase is always complete gibberish (never a real word) and it's never the same twice, as far as I can see. And at least today, they seem to come in pairs: A single Trackback and a single Pingback from the same IP address.
What are those about? It's clearly someone experimenting, but what are they trying to accomplish? Well, here's a thought: Most blogs that accept Trackbacks will check the URL in the Trackback to see if it's valid. For Pingbacks, this is even the required bevahiour (according to the Pingback specification).
So you start pinging a few sites which in turn then all send a query to Google. Which means that you could easily create a lot of Google searches for a specific term.
What could you do with this? You could make this search term show up in the stats for popular search terms. Which could be used in advertising - create a hype or something. But I guess that's not what our friend here is after. Spammers are in it for the money, and unless they want to sell this method, there's not much money to be made here - at least not directly.
My guess is that this has to do with Google Ads. All those websites doing the Google searches won't display Google Ads, obviously, due to the lack of JavaScript support in the requests. But they could drive up the value of certain keywords. And since the requests would come from various IP addresses (of all the websites that received the Trackbacks), it could look to Google like increased interest in certain search terms. Or at least that could be what the spammer thinks.
In practice, though, I think it would be easy for Google to filter those kinds of requests out of their statistics (if they aren't doing that already). All those blogs will usually send a user agent string that easily identifies them as such, not human visitors.
Well, I will keep an eye on these Trackbacks. I guess once they start using proper words or at least repeating things, it will become clearer what this is really about ...
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