Michael Jackson News Affects Web Traffic

The announcement of Michael Jackson’s death has caused immediate effects on the Web 2.0 world. The impact ranged from the interruption on Facebook of coverage of Farrah Fawcett’s death to a surge experienced by Twitter. The Web 2.0 world is definitely abuzz with traffic regarding his passing.

Within hours the percentage of “long-tail” URL traffic associated with Michael Jackson was growing. It peaked around 1 p.m. Eastern time today and now seems to be dropping. These URLs contained mostly generic information about Jackson–blogs, posts, tributes, photos, and collections of his entertainment past. And, yes, some even contained links to malware or rogue anti-virus software.

How do people find these URLs? We’ve seen spam, tweets, blog postings, group postings, and even mobile phone alerts. In addition, as predicted by Avert Labs, we’ve seen search-engine optimization (SEO) in action. There were several attempts to capitalize on redirecting users to known malware-serving sites associated with other SEO campaigns. We found it interesting during our research to see how fast some of the search engines seemed to respond to this. One popular keyword search done around 9 p.m. yesterday showed seven of the top 10 links going to some of these well-known malicious servers. That same search done an hour later showed only one of the top 10 involved.

As the entertainment industry continues to pay tribute and homage to Jackson, we expect that spam and SEO efforts will grow over the weekend. Eventually a new piece of news will replace this event, and there will be a new story–with much the same results.