Yeah. That’s how they get you, isn’t it? The spammers… they suck you in with these headlines like “Free Porn!”, “Free Viagra”, “Free Men’s Enhancements” and more. They litter our inboxes with this crap and put banner ads in places they don’t even belong. Well, I’m pleased to tell you that one of the biggest spammers in the universe was shut down yesterday.

The iEEE Spectrum most accurately reported:

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was able to persuade a federal court in Chicago to freeze the assets and order the shut down of HerbalKing, reputed to be one of the largest spam e-mailers, for violating the Can-Spam Act of 2003, the New York Times reports this week.

The Times story reported that SpamHaus, a nonprofit antispam research group, estimated that HerbalKing was responsible for sending out one-third of all spam at one point, which included everything from replica watches to (naturally) herbal pills.

The FTC said that HerbalKing was able to send out billions of spam e-mails through the use of botnets. One botnet was made up of 35,000 computers and was able to send 10 billion e-mail messages a day.

The story quotes a senior technology consultant at Sophos, a spam-fighting security firm as saying, “It wouldn’t be a surprise if people don’t notice any difference in their in-box tomorrow morning.”

But the Times of London wrote a much spicier version… even if they did get the facts off a bit:
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I bet that headline got everyone’s attention! No, I’m not starting up an illicit internet drug trade, but I am testing out a search engine theory. (By the way, if you want to help test this theory please link to this article.)

Aaron Wall proposed the question, “How Easily do Authoritative Sites Rank for New Keywords?” over on SEOBook.com, and he pointed out that Matt Cutts managed to rank pretty high by just using the words Buy Cheap Viagra in one post. His postulate is that the relative authority of Matt’s site (a Google PR7 rank) drove his rankings towards the top of the Google results for a search for the terms “buy cheap viagra”.

Well, I figured I’d throw a little weight in the ring and help test this theory. If Aaron’s postulate is correct, I would think that this article should eventually even outrank Matt’s post given that OMB has a Google PR8. Plus I have noticed what seems to be this effect quite often. After I write an article it seems to appear high for searches with the key words.
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