TY - GEN
T1 - Characterizing long-Tail SEO spam on cloud web hosting services
AU - Liao, Xiaojing
AU - Liu, Chang
AU - McCoy, Damon
AU - Shi, Elaine
AU - Hao, Shuang
AU - Beyah, Raheem
N1 - Funding Information:
National Science Foundation (grants CNS-1619620, CNS-1314857, CNS-1453634, CNS-1518765, CNS-1514261)
PY - 2016
Y1 - 2016
N2 - 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 rev-enue have been reported. The emergence of cloud web host-ing 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 direc-tories and 318,470 doorway pages on the leading cloud plat-forms 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.
AB - 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 rev-enue have been reported. The emergence of cloud web host-ing 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 direc-tories and 318,470 doorway pages on the leading cloud plat-forms 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.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84995508417&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84995508417&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/2872427.2883008
DO - 10.1145/2872427.2883008
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84995508417
T3 - 25th International World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2016
SP - 321
EP - 332
BT - 25th International World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2016
PB - International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee
T2 - 25th International World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2016
Y2 - 11 April 2016 through 15 April 2016
ER -