.edu webspam

[PTC]

I've noticed several different personal webpages from .edu addresses ranking well for some big poker terms on google. I saw this a week or two ago and a few days later the sites had been removed from their servers. Today I noticed some new webpages ranking well again. They are always from different universities and the name in the URL is different (and hard to fake I believe because this is issued by the university). None of the pages I have seen have any incoming links showing up when I looked. Anyone else seen this or care to comment?

[Michael Martinez]

Some SEO firms make arrangements with college students to use their personal accounts for Web promotion. It's possible that some people in this highly competitive Poker Affiliates industry are doing the same thing.

The practice is considered unethical and many if not all universities forbid students to sell access to their accounts or use of their accounts. Usually, there is a way around those guidelines, although quid pro quo is still quid pro quo.

I do not endorse this method of Website promotion but you may find you're running up against it.

[321]

Originally Posted by PTC

I've noticed several different personal webpages from .edu addresses ranking well for some big poker terms on google. I saw this a week or two ago and a few days later the sites had been removed from their servers. Today I noticed some new webpages ranking well again. They are always from different universities and the name in the URL is different (and hard to fake I believe because this is issued by the university). None of the pages I have seen have any incoming links showing up when I looked. Anyone else seen this or care to comment?

This is old style hijacked domain/redirect spam. It worked for awhile some years back, but then Google dealt with it (and to a lesser degree the other engines handled it okay) and flushed the shit out of the results. They are doing major algorithm tinkering and the results reflect that. As usual, when they churn things up, some shit rises to the top.

This edu hijacks will get filtered out again when the changes settle down.