Today's Crikey asks if perhaps Google knows something about Quadrant magazine. It seems Google is flagging the site as a crapware site.
I also noticed this when searching for the Good Vibrations Festival a couple of weeks ago. It looks to me like Quadrant is hitting these filters for pretty much the same reasons. There's a bunch of very suspicious Javascript linked from their home pages. URLs like one hosted on the web servers 47.db.51.la, happy81.9966.org, www.777seo.com.
When you look at the actual Javascript files, it's all URL- and Unicode-encoded crap trying to obfuscate what it's really doing. To me, that looks like a reasonable judgement by Google that they're probably up to no good.
What I suspect is happening is that Quadrant is calling "http://happy81.9966.org/hxw/f.js", probably for some perceived search engine optimising benefit. That's then selling all the people who load their Javascript to various crapware installing companies.
Interestingly, Good Vibrations' site now seems to be clean of all this kind of crap, though they're still in Google's blacklist. Did they perhaps share the same search engine optimising company as Quadrant are using? They were certainly linking to the same variety of shonky Javascript.
Anyone know any background to this stuff?
Update: looks like Google know exactly what they're doing here. I wonder if these sites are compromised or using dodgy SEO techniques?