Favicon display seems rife for abuse. I wonder what happens if you put a favicon that looks like googles’ or that says “ad”. All sorts of fun to encourage clicks onto a malicious site because it looks safe.
Correct. There could be quite a bit of fun. This more than likely could work for sites not in the top spot. If you borrow the credibility of another brand you could get a boost. This click thru boost could then translate into higher rankings over time as you outperform your spot.
I have already seen seen some ascii stars in the URLs of Googles ads. There is always abuse.
I would hope they've put thought into that and might even blacklist sites that try to steal other more popular sites favicons. I guess it would catch a lot of false positives with companies making new sites on new tlds that might share favicons.
