Search Engine Optimization News Blog

Celebrities are always good for one or more of the above, and there are many webmaster who will take advantage of that fact to hook people to their site with a cleverly placed piece of link bait.

Unfortunately, you might end up driving traffic away, as word is getting around about cyber criminals who use people’s interest in such personalities to release ugly viruses and hack into user mainframes.

A search for Brad Pitt online nets you an 18% chance that you are exposing your computer to adware , spy ware and potential viruses. That’s higher than Paris Hilton - Brad recently passed her in popularity, probably because of his new movie.

Over half the ‘Brad Pitt screensaver’ search results lead to sites with malicious downloads. The other deadliest male online is Justin Timberlake, so do NOT accept any free downloads of his music. “Digital music” returns the highest percentage of risky sites at 19.1 percent at any rate. Both the actor and the musician are the subject of thousands of searches per day.

For the girls, it’s a close race between Beyonce and Heidi Montag, with several Beyonce results leading to that promote misleading offers in order to collect users’ personal information.

Jeff Green, Senior Vice President of McAfee’s Product Development, stated:

“Cyber-criminals employ numerous methods, yet one of the simplest but most effective ways is to trick consumers into infecting themselves by capitalizing on Americans’ interest in celebrity gossip. Tapping into current events, pop culture or commonly browsed sites is an easy way to achieve this. And because of Americans’ obsession with following celebrities’ lifestyles, they are an obvious target. We have to take precautions in casually navigating the Web since many subtle sites may be rife with malware for consumers’ computers.”

For the time being, it might be wise to try and find alternative methods of hooking your customers - even the taint of such types of problems could divert traffic away from you so drop the celebrities for a while and search for safer more trusted ways of getting your target audience’s attention!

Both Google and Yahoo are searching for better ways to warn against potentially infected sites.