Don't just talk the talk. Share & spread the Spam Word.   Victimized by Search engines? Let's unite and REPORT HERE.   Comment on the Blogs to Unveil Search Engine's Spam.   Get in to discover the predicted future of search engine's spam.

» Spamdexing » History of Spam » Search Engine Spam in news

The origin of Spamdexing dates back to mid 1990s, making the then leading search engines less useful.

The history of the search engine spam can be traced back to the emergence of the paid inclusion. Paid inclusion is a fee-based model for submitting website listings to the search engines.

Historically, search engines have allowed webmasters, as well as SEOs and the general public, to freely submit their sites for consideration. However, a pattern of abuse began to develop among less-reputable SEO firms, who flooded the engines with non-stop submissions of pages. Analysis of these submissions strained the search engines' capacity, necessitating the creation of artificial limits, including fees. The fee structure is used by search engines as a filter against superfluous submissions, and also as a revenue generator.

There are many firms who can not afford paid listings so they started manipulating and exploiting the free listings in order to rank well in the SERPS.

So, this extensive SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION became what we call now SPAMDEXING - the promotion of irrelevant, chiefly commercial pages through taking advantage of the search algorithms.

At this point of time, it was Search engines' duty to combat Spamdexing, but in place of combating Spam in SERPS and dealing with it strictly, search engines indirectly started supporting Spam for its own benefits. They don't filter the irrelevant results, continued to display these and forced the surfers and searchers to click their sponsored listings, Adsense - their source of revenue.

We can cite various examples showing how search engines support Spam:

• in SERPS
• in sponsored listings
• in languages other than English

Ex- 1 Spam in SERPs
Google has a major spam problem. What are filling up the results with garbage lately are search results. The pages all contain the term you are looking for, but mostly within search results, or the fake introduction.
URL: http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2004_01_13_index.html

What irritated the users was the presence of Adsense ads. Why Google sales rep allowed these ads to be displayed on substandard Web sites? Do Google ad reps monitor the sites that display these ads? Google invites search engine spam because it doesn't filter or monitor these Adsense magnets.

Originally, Google has launched adsense to replace Amazon's affiliate program, by generating crap content sites and providing "How to make millions through Adsense guides". Internet is flooded with "ready for adsense" sites. It becomes really astonishing to see web pages with the same content fighting for rankings.

In this way search engines are fuelling crap. Can't they filter the crap and be a little more selective. Can't they target more on sites providing content rather than on those created for adsense only?

Ex - 2 Spam in Sponsored Listings:

A new study by McAfee's Site Advisor Web ratings finds that sponsored results from some of the biggest names in the search engine business contain spy ware, spam, scams and other Internet menaces.

The study, found that all the major search engines-Google, Yahoo, Microsoft's MSN, AOL and Ask.com-returned risky sites in results for popular keywords. Even worse, sponsored results contained two to four times as many dangerous sites as organic results

Overall, across all keywords and search engines, 8.5 percent of sponsored results were "red" or "yellow," suggesting those sites were hosting drive-by exploits, bundling ad ware /spy ware with downloads or hammering in-boxes with spam. By comparison, only 3.1 percent of organic results were considered unsafe.

The survey found there was little correlation between search result placement and safety. Page 1 search results were only "moderately safer" than results for pages 2 through 5, and dangerous sites soared to as much as 72 percent of results for certain risky keywords.

The most dangerous keywords include "free screensavers," "bear share," "Kazaa," "download music" and "free games."

Based on the findings, the researchers estimate that Web surfers in the United States make 285 million clicks to hostile sites every month as a result of search engine results.
URL: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1961510,00.asp

It is really shameful that how search engines have become so self oriented that they are not in any way concerned about the relevancy of the search results or say their supporting advertisements; what they are targeting on is just their monetary benefits, which they earn from advertising impressions. What a pity.

Ex - 2 Spam in languages other than English

The more astonishing fact was that this practice was more prevalent in more competitive industries like porn, gambling, pharmacy, real estate. These industries drive more traffic and hence a source of extended benefits. More examples of spam can be viewed in other languages also you can take example of Germany and Italy you will never find relevant website on these search engines

Matt in his post has stated that:
url: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-mistakes-spam-in-other-languages/

"In 2006, I expect Google to pay a lot more attention to spam in other languages, whether it is German, French, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, or any other language. For example, I have no patience for keyword-stuffed doorway pages that do JavaScript redirects, no matter what the language."

With reference to the Google's statement - that these are technical faults, why such kind of results are not encountered in less competitive industries?

They define spam in their own words:

URL: http://websearch.about.com/od/seononos/a/spamming_engine.htm

Google defines spam as "trying to deceive (spam) our web crawler by means of hidden text, deceptive cloaking or doorway pages." You can report sites you suspect of spam at Google's Report A Spam Result page.

Yahoo defines spam as "pages (that) are created deliberately to trick the search engine into offering inappropriate, redundant or poor-quality search results." They have a pretty extensive list of what techniques they consider spam at their Yahoo Search Technology Content Quality Guidelines page.

MSN Search gives a few spamming techniques "discouraged" by MSN Search; among them are keyword stuffing, invisible text, or false links.

Ask defines spam as "the practice of purposely deceiving a search engine into returning a result that is unrelated to a user's query, or that is ranked artificially high in the result set.

But, to keep the mouth shut, Search engines have formulated so called rules and guidelines to be followed by the site owners to be indexed in the search engine (SEARCH ENGINE POLICING), which are basically, a source of inspiration for the spammers in disguise. Below is a list of the major search engines, their editorial content guidelines, and contact information to settle-up any possible abuse issues.