Governments may be cracking down on deepfake porn and undress apps, but the official Indiana Department of Health website was recently caught showing instructions on how to make deepfake porn, complete with links to the ‘best nudify apps’ and so on. Indiana state officials have stressed that their website was not hacked, but rather their feedback forms exploited by bots. They also claim that most of the unwelcome documents have now been removed.
But what was the motive? Rather than a naughty 4Chan style prank, it seems very likely that it was an attempt by spammy affiliates to exploit what is known as ‘parasite SEO‘. Since Google introduced the ‘Helpful Content’ algorithm update in 2022, ‘high authority’ websites such as official government websites, along with popular forums such as Reddit, have seen their pages rise to the top of the search rankings. The ‘HCU’ update was intended to put a stop to content thin websites designed simplyto rank highly on Google and to make money from affiliate links – especially relevant with the rise of AI-written blog posts. However, not only were thousands of genuine hand-written knowledgeable websites like this one penalized (my website traffic is still a fraction of what it was before the HCU), but AI spammers simply moved on to forums such as Reddit, or paid for articles posted on high-authority news websites and such like, or even – as in this case – employed sneaky tactics to post their affiliate links on trusted government websites.
Because of the weight that the Google algorithm gives to trusted, high-authority websites such as official state government websites, any pages full of affiliate links can quickly rise to the top of Google search results for queries like ‘best NSFW AI generator’, or ‘best undress apps’. Not only does Google give a high ranking to such pages appearing on ‘authority’ sites, but it indexes those sites multiple times a day. Thus even if the pages are detected and taken down within a week, the perpetrators could have potentially earned hundreds of thousands of dollars in affiliate income from sales generated from the high-ranking positions.
I first became aware of this problem earlier in the year when typing “best NSFW AI generator” into Google and seeing a slew of results on the first page all from the same EU website devoted to information about GDPR (General Data Protection Law). I used the Google spam report submission form to report the pages, but weeks later they were still showing at the top of Google results. They appear to have finally been taken down. This week a similar porn affiliate spam problem affected an official business website of California’s state government. According to the LA Times, a researcher has found 38 government agencies across 18 states targeted by similar attacks in recent weeks, and that a common theme might be that many of the websites are hosted by the same company (Granicus).
