SEO Spam - Sapping Search Results

If you're like me, you'd be sick of false websites appearing in your search results.  You know what I mean, those sites that just contain nothing but ads.  These websites are like leeches on the Internet.  Many a minute has been spent sifting through these useless sites.  Mistype or follow the wrong link and you're lost in a world of ads with nothing good to gain.  It is becoming ever clearer that the effectiveness of the Internet search engines as a tool for finding information.  

As a search engine marketer, you have to know where to draw the lines. We've been preaching SEO for many years, but the sort of blatant SEO spam is a completely different beast and I'll attempt to explain how and why.

Email was blown away by spam many years ago, so it was inevitable thatspamming of search engines would eventually become the next battle tobe fought to keep the Internet a useful tool.  Search engines conquered wave after wave of hidden text and keywords stuffing with new algorithsms and blacklisting until it became stable.  But these days the web is a much bigger place and ironically the biggest culprit of this new plague is the kings of search - Google. Through promoting context advertising services like Adsense and having so many eyes scrutinise their search methods, they have given unscrupulous publishers the motivation to spam their search engine to make money for themselves.  Since then the growing proliferation of "Made for Adsense" (MFA) websites has helped tarnish the Internet.  There are now sophisticated templates used to create doorway pages to roll out by the thousand.

These publishers were even buying advertising for their sites to generate more clicks, effectively making advertising on Google a nasty experience for legitimate advertisers.  They also "scrape" content from other sites using RSS feeds.  Early last year a site began outranking mine in Google.  Not long afterward I discovered that they had spent minutes copying and pasting all of the content which I had spent days creating.  This person had just profited greatly on information which I had been creating for free.  The whole experience forced me to do a major diligent search engine optimisation campaign just to redeem my site and made me rethink the value of the content I was providing.  But this is something I should never have had to do.

So now search engines, torn between their primary revenue stream (advertising) and their reason for existence (making searching the Internet easy) are having to come up with new ways to tackle the issue.