Researchers track down a plague of fake Web pages
 

A technical paper published by the researchers says the links promoting such pages are generated by a small group of shadowy operators apparently with the acquiescence of some major advertisers, Web page hosts and advertising syndicators.

Surprisingly, the researchers noted that the vast bulk of the junk listings was created from just two Web hosting companies and that as many as 68 percent of the advertisements sampled were placed by just three advertising syndicators.
http://news.com.com/Researchers+trac...l?tag=nefd.top

Yeah, that's interesting. If they get better at detecting and blocking massive schemes like that it could at least slow down that trend (for massiveness and consolidation of se spam/marketing automated pagebuilding).

Which might mean more oppurtunity for us little content builders.

HQ & EST? :D

Near the end of the article.
"Phillip Rosenthal, chief technology officer of one of the companies, ISPrime, an Internet services company based in New York, said the activity had been traced to a single customer and violated the company's acceptable-use policy. He said the company's relationship with the customer, whom he would not identify, had been severed after the company was notified about the Microsoft paper by a reporter. "

The actual paper .PDF

I clicked on the pdf link on the page earlier & got a 404, so thanks for the new link.

Yeah, I had the same problem. Seems the news.com redirect ain't working, so I just stripped out the actual URL.

ps. Bill
There's some interesting tools mentioned in the PDF along with the links for them.