The new(to some) .edu spam

[Marval]

This has been around for a while but I see that some industries are getting into this game quite well in Google in the last two months.
It involves a flaw in the bbs/message software that a lot of universities use (MIT, Harvard etc are included in this batch) where you post a message with certain keywords - the board spews out a keyword rich html page based on that message and Google falls in love with it when they bot.
The first issue with it is that some have found that you can insert redirect code in the messages - so that is being used quite considerably by some "spammers"
The second is that because it is on an .edu domain, it gets picked up quickly and ranked extremely well (an example would be appropriate but unfortunately I dont think it would meet the guidelines here)
Suffice to say that basically if you can think of a two word phrase that would normally give you sites in the "adult" industry - you will find that at least half of the top 30 listings will be these .edu pages
A number of people have reported this over the last two months but it seems that being in a less interesting area of the Serps, its probably reaching the circular inbox
Just wondering if anyone sees this in their specific industry and if anyone has been able to get Google to look at it?

[evilgreenmonkey]

The highest people in Google's search quality team know about this, although there's been little done to counter-act it. It's still possible to gain a foothold in many markets by compromising a Uni's CMS and uploading cloaked doorway pages.

[Marval]

Id like to think that the people at Google know about it - but you dont have to compromise the CMS to do this- anyone can do it from their browser through the standard message system the Univ'.s use - they are nice BBS systems as they write standard html pages for you for every message you post :)

[infonote]

This is a chicken-egg scenario.

Did authority come because it is a .edu, or because it is an aged domain with good content?

I believe it is the latter, however I have no data to confirm this.