Black hat SEOs have managed to get malicious sites ranking for terms like “apple ipad rumor” and “apple tablet” across Google and other search engines. When users visit this site, they are prompted to download some software which can infect their machines.

Here’s a Google screenshot showing the malicious results from Symantec:

Black Hat spammers typically follow hot news items to try and get people clicking through to their sites. Google usually acts quickly to block these sites from appearing, but constant new attacks and domain changes by the spammers mean it’s tough to wipe out all together.

Symantec is warning users to look at “iPad” results carefully and only visit trusted news sites and know information sources.

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Just last week I reported on a major Google SPAM attack which saw over 1 million malware links appearing for automotive queries. The majority of these have since been removed but others are still reporting frequent SPAM issues in Google results. An example of my search results from last week can be seen below:

During the week, I also noticed some ‘ineedhits’ related queries showing malware results and I began reporting them all using the Google SPAM tool. To Google’s credit, the results began disappearing within a day or two, but it looks like they’ve decided to release an algorithm change to combat the wider SPAM issue.

According to WebProNews,

A Googler speaking on condition of anonymity told WebProNews a ranking change is pending that tackles spam of this kind. Once the change goes live, users shouldn’t see it “nearly as often.”

This is great news for legitimate site owners as it will prevent your site from being out-ranked by spammy blackhat results. There’s been no word if any other changes will be made with the algorithm update, but keep a close eye on your Google ranking over the next couple of weeks just to be sure.

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