How I Became a Spam Vector

What I didn't take into account was that now that my search page was working, when you entered a spammy search term, it was prominently displayed on the page and in the page title.

What I failed to see was that this was a vector for spammers to post links to my website. Even if those weren't actual anchor tags on the page, they were still URLs to spam websites. Looking through my logs, I can trace the sharp decline of traffic to this blog back to when I fixed the search page by adding support for Unicode.

I'm not an SEO expert but I'm highly skeptical of this explanation.

It's such a common pattern for a search term in the URL to appear as text in the page that I'd be extremely surprised if Google doesn't control for this.

I could understand if the author was doing something unusual or stupid like HTML-encoding links from search terms but they just render them as plaintext. The URL is even recognizable as a common search pattern of /search/?q=<query>.

I feel like the fact that their search rankings went up and down around this change is more likely to be coincidence.

I wonder if any LLM-feeding scapers that ignore noindex still give any kind of boost to the spam for being found on a diversity of long-living domains.