When I do a google search for my full name (not chelsea grand – it’s actually quite uncommon), I get over 3600 results with my full name followed by meetup on seemingly unrelated sites that just list strings of nonsense text and nothing else. About 4 years ago, an exboyfriend created a meetup.com group in my name that was absolutely slanderous, and it was removed within 24 hours. But for some reason, it was linked to loads of other meetup groups, and when my name was googled, there were about 50 links listing the meetup group in my name and these other meetup groups. I contacted google abuse, and the links were all removed in about a week, and my name hasn’t been associated with meetup since.
So, I have a couple of questions. First, what’s up with all these nonsense sites? They don’t seem to perform any function other than driving traffic to them. Is there some sort of money to be made in just generating website clicks?
And how is my name still associated with meetup four years later? I didn’t start seeing my name and meetup listed on these nonsense sites until a couple of years ago. And yes, I google my name a lot because of my stupid internet stalker ex.
Does google sell information about search terms? Could my ex have put my name and meetup into a database in the hopes of having lots of people see his scandalous site, and the database has only now gotten around to dispersing the info?
It’ll be easier if I take each of your questions one at a time.
Yes. Definitely. These types of sites have many functions. They can run plenty of ads that some people will click on (as odd as that seems). They can refer to other sites, and, if they are popular, Google will index those other sites as popular, too. They also can host malware, which can get information from you and send it elsewhere. Finally, it’s possible thanks to a security flaw that’s only now being fixed, to get a lot of information on what sites you visit–information that is valuable to many Internet sites.
Various ways. Google and other sites essentially surf the net and save what they find. While Google is usually good at removing things within at least a couple weeks, if some other site indexed it, Google will pick up on that, too. It’s also possible that your meetup site was one of those that was hacked, and the information was stolen.
Google claims they don’t, and I tend to believe them. Yes, your ex could have put your name in a database, but not directly into Google. But Google is a machine, and it can be fooled.
Heck, there’s a whole class of this sort of stuff called search engine optimization (SEO). There are legitimate ways to do SEO, but there are also ways based on tricking the system.
BigT – you are da bomb. Thanks for the info! I’m usually pretty good at figuring stuff out for myself, but I’ve found that when doing online searches, if I don’t use the right terminology then I end up paging through loads of unhelpful results.
BTW, you wouldn’t happen to know how hard (or easy) it is to install a script on a social networking site – livejournal, to be exact – that would allow someone to steal cookies and remotely hack into another person’s journal? I recently had something very strange happen to me on LJ, and I either have a RAT installed or someone installed a script that allowed my site to be hacked. I know this has happened to LJ before, and the Firesheep plug-in for facebook is downright scary. I have a feeling that since LJ lets its users manipulate the code of their journals, that someone with script writing know-how could install a cookie stealer.