Google and Blog Spam

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*** Disclaimer: This thread contains frank ideas and language. If you can handle it I encourage you to participate, if you can’t then please don’t read any further ***

If you write, or read blogs in any meaningful way chances are you’ve come across and had to deal with blog spam in one way or another. Now when I talk about blog spam , I mean your texas-hold-em comment on my Harry Potter thread, or your porn link on my Evan Williams leaving Google post. On the other hand if you wanted to come over and talk about swimsuits on my Leopard Print Bikini post, that’s not spam.

…typical of those quasi-intellectuals who think the web is some pristine bastion of information, not to be sullied up with commerce. Well get a clue people,commerce pays for technology and infrastructure advances…

Now that we have that out of the way. For those of you not into search engines in a big way, you should know the Google took steps to prevent blog spam yesterday. Yahoo, and MSN announced they were following suit, along with a host of other companies. Now before any of you lemmings go plunging off the cliff in a celebration dance, let’s look at the big picture. First remember Google had an IPO this year and became a publicly traded company. Being a public company you have to make sure your not being taken advantage of, or at least create that perception in the publics eyes. If you follow search trends you’ll know that ‘blog’ is one of the most popular dictionary search terms (news). So what better way to create create a lot of press and create some ‘free love’ in blog community than to say ‘WE INVENTED THE MAGIC BULLET TO KILL BLOG SPAM!’. Guess what folks you just cut off your nose to spite your face.

Lets get into some specific examples shall we. On one side we have guys like DaveN and on the other Russell Beatie. DaveN is self admitted search engine spammer (post). Russell on the other hand is a self-righteous hypocritical spam zealot. Now why I am so hard on the guy, lets take a look. Here’s his post from last night:

Implemented. Sorry to all my commenters who just lost some PageRank™. (post)

So Russell think you’re so much better than than a blog spammer? Lets open up the hood and see what we find …

I made $819 in ads in December. This is incredible to me as I didn’t even post for most of the month. The site just sat there attracting link love from other sites and more importantly getting hammered by referrers from the various Search Engines, most notably Google. I didn’t post a thing, yet the site just cranked in the dough. It makes me realize that there are massive opportunities out there for just public content repositories. Just sitting out there, getting referrer traffic and making money: Search Engine Honey Traps.

and

The first is very mercenary: If there was some way to find out the most expensive Keywords for a certain time frame - it’d probably be pretty easy to guess which ones were pretty in demand, actually - you could then have a blog which is dedicated to writing up summaries about only these most valuable topics and attracting lucrative search engine traffic as a result. I’m talking about real posts, not garbage, but not dedicated to a theme, but to whatever was the most expensive keyword that day or week or month was. There are keywords that cost $30 a click, right? If you attract a few dozen people your site a month, who read your summary then click on the ads? Well that could be some serious dough.

See Search Engine Honey Traps

Lets recap, he blatantly reveals his adsense earnings online, a direct violation of their terms of service

item 7 of https://www.google.com/adsense/terms , specifically “You agree not to disclose [..] click-through rates or other statistics relating to Site performance in the Program provided to You by Google”

He then floats the trial balloon of writing more content specifically to gain income, and gives a backhanded compliment to others with this business model. Now who’s not a blog spammer again? Oh and Russell you may want to think about this, if everyone who linked to you used the rel=”nofollow” tag you wouldn’t be sitting on top a PR7 blog and instead of a honey pot, you’d have an empty pot to pee in.

Now I’m not picking on Russell specifically, but he’s fairly typical of those quasi-intellectuals who think the web is some pristine bastion of information, not to be sullied up with commerce. Well get a clue people, commerce pays for technology and infrastructure advances. Want to hear something a little shocking, we wouldn’t have streaming internet video today if it wasn’t for porn. The porn vendors know people will pay top dollar to view movies. They tapped into a market of closeted porn watchers who were two embarrassed to go out in public to get a tape or DVD. For a premium price they streamed the porn right to their computers. As the market grew and developed it became cheaper to distribute and eventually dropped to price the average consumer was willing to pay for non porn content. So if you’ve ever watched streaming video, you have the porn industry to thank.

Back to spam, guess what folks, spammers actually like this new tag. Why? They can use to manipulate search engines much more efficiently than the average person. They can link to someone put the “no-follow” tag on the link, and the person thinks they have link but in reality have nothing. This can also be quite effective to use on your internal site navigation to force the spiders to follow some links but not others. You can also use it to trick link partners much more efficiently than other methods (Dark Side of Exchanging Links).

So if all of you bloggers out there, still want to celebrate, find some other ostriches and bury your heads in the sand, This is nothing more than a cheesy publicity stunt, and will actually make things much worse. In 6 months linking structures will be so artificallily manipuated and unnatural, it will grow more and more useless by the day.

Author’s disclaimer: I know ostriches don’t bury there heads in the sand, its a figure of speech ok.

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