With thanks once again going to Andy Beal, Murdok has discovered a bad case of spam on Teoma’s search engine results. A search for the keywords “company names” finds that one site has several mirrored listings in the resources section.
For those who may be confused, site mirroring, as defined by Webopedia, is, “a Web site that is a replica of an already existing site, used to reduce network traffic (hits on a server) or improve the availability of the original site. Mirror sites are useful when the original site generates too much traffic for a single server to support.”
Steve Manning, webmaster at Snark Hunting, and finder of Teoma’s bug, defines mirroring as: “A mirror site is a duplicate of a website, hosted at a different domain. Sometimes a number of mirror sites are linked together in an attempt to aggregate duplicate content and appear more relevant.”
This practice is frowned upon by most search engines. Google will penalize a site’s PageRank if it discovers a site is mirroring itself.
On Teoma, the keywords “company names” finds that a company called A Hundred Monkeys, which offers company naming services, has mirrored itself a number of times. The company and its 7 mirrors can be found on the right-hand side of the SERP, under the heading “Resources”.
Chris Richardson is a search engine writer and editor for Murdok. Visit Murdok for the latest search news.
