alt Hacker NewsSorry but how did 2 work before you fixed it? You saved the queries people did and displayed them?
Replies
chii • today at 8:35 AM
i imagine the search page echoed the search query. Then, a SEO bot automated search(s) on the site with crypto and spam keywords, which is echo'ed in the search results - said bot may have a site/page full of links to these search results to create fake pages for those keywords for SEO purposes (essentially, an exploit).
Google got smart and found out such exploits, and penalized sites that do this.
So the spammer would link to my search page with their query param:
On my website, I'll display "text scam.com text - search result" now google will see that link in my h1 tag and page title and say i am probably promoting scams.Also, the reason this appeared suddenly is because I added support for unicode in search. Before that, the page would fail if you added unicode. So the moment i fixed it, I allowed spammers to have their links displayed on my page.