I recently discovered that
www.urbanlegends.com had been transformed in to a shopping web site. If you visit the site, you will find a decoy paragraph of garbage urban legend information, and a bunch of links to web sites offering items for sale.
I have been finding more and more web sites like this recently. Typically, they are well established web sites that come up high on a Google search. Google still displayes a short sample of the page's original contents, but when you click the link, you find shopping links.
The previous owners of
www.urbanlegends.com say tat they sold the domain to get money to found a new charitable organization.
What I think is happening is that the owners of large retail-catalog sites are finding web sights that are heavily linked-to, and that appear high in search engine results. Then they are either buying the domains, or highjacking domains when they expire.
And, in the case of
www.urbanlegends.com, they provide a decoy paragraph so that the search engine results still look like a real web site.
So when you got to look for information on the internet, the top results are a bunch of garbage pages with links to shopping.
Has this phenomena been documented anywhere else?
