Loading ...Web spam has been making headlines of late, especially regarding its negative impact on Google. It’s no secret that Web spam is growing, but the reality of it appears to be making a clearer impression on people.
One reason for this is Blekko’s recent introduction of the Spam Clock, which tracks the number of new spam pages created since January 1. As you might remember, Blekko is the search engine that launched last November with the intent of eliminating spam with its slashtag technology. It released the Spam Clock earlier this month in hopes of raising awareness about the growing dangers of spam.
WebProNews spoke with Rich Skrenta, the CEO of Blekko, who told us that there are entities that are producing hundreds of thousands of spam pages simply because they can attract search traffic and make money.
“What we’re finding with the Web is that the amount of spam is just proliferating… It’s gotten to the point where the amount of good content on the Web is a small fraction of the total,” he said.
As this information has surfaced, many reports have come out that indicate how much of a problem spam is for Google. Andrew Goodman of Page Zero Media, who also wrote about the issue, told WPN that Web spam is actually part of a much greater problem that involves society’s reliance on Google for search.
He explained that Google uses a comprehensive model for search that factors in the user’s keywords, intent, personalization, and more, which he believes is “too difficult a task.”
“Where we get, I think, tighter relevance, is in curated results, is in directories, is in finding that one step down where someone has made the universe smaller,” he said.
Goodman went on to say that if Google were truly an “unbiased participant in this effort to reach a relevant stage,” it would do a better job of incorporating the tools that do curate and mediate content.
So, as spam continues to grow, what impact will it have on the future of the Web? Is it taking over the Web and taking Google out on its way? Or, do search engines need to adjust their search model?
Dear Google,
I’ve used your services for many years and the only spam that I would remove would be outright fraudulent material from the web and just as one of the Ceo’s on you video said “Everyone has a narrow focus on what they want. So you have to please the customer but some of the porn content as much as I love internet porn has to be reduced! I also have a question for your experts. I’ve used Google products to make companies like SFI, Easy Cashsites, Revup31 and others money using your products and I wonder if you can help me recover money from commissions owed to me by tracking my links I used from Google Groups to sue these companies for what they owe me!
As long as Google profits from AdSense laden spam blogs – what incentive do they have to truly clean up the internet and their results? Answer: None.
All it takes is a good SEO program like Market Samurai to see that for all of Google’s metrics and algos – they aren’t NEARLY as sophisticated as we’re led to believe. The only real metrics they can truly rely on are: 1. Domain age 2. On-Page Keyword optimizations 3. Authority of backlinks 4. The joke that is DMOZ, the Bribery that is Yahoo Directory – and 5. The sheer number of backlinks of varying quality.
Ultimately Google relies mostly on only a handful of Highest Common Denominator metrics. And all their other ‘signals’ are largely just an ever-changing game to fit the internet neatly into the tiny box they want to define for us.
Face it: Google is DROWNING in a sea of data, frantically paddling, struggling to keep it’s sites fixed on known landmarks on the horizon. For most web-masters to think Goog “is watching them” like some kind of eagle-eyed omnipresent god is a joke.
Google doen’t care and won’t untill they stop making money on the spam.
I have contacted the maps info department because a competior has 15 reviews about how great his company is that are not even his. He moved in to a building of a bankrupt company and got thier revievs. I have contacted google and they tell me they can’t fix it because it is not their content. Duh them why are you creaming my competitive advantage. they don’t care…..
Totally agree with all the points mentioned by Russell above. As the number of urls in the population grows the most important variables in the search algo become more important…
Andrew goodman makes a very good point about lower level directories -“Where we get, I think, tighter relevance, is in curated results, is in directories, is in finding that one step down where someone has made the universe smaller,” he said.”
Small world networks and longtail searches cut out most of the crap!
Spam is impacting on Google?
From my experience, it is GOOGLE themselves who are causing problems on the web.
On a fast net connection & browser you don’t see half of the bandwith being sucked up by Google. Try slowing the browser down and you see it all.
Click on a link and watch how many other Google related/linked sites appear in the address bar before you get the content you actually want.
Adwords, Adsense, DoubleClick, tracker sites etc. They all grab bandwidth without being of any use to the site’s visitor, only to Google and the Host site.
That is MY bandwidth Google – get your greedy hands off it.
Web spam has increased mostly due to the recent interest in email marketing.The need to capture an email address to have someone’s permission to market to has made it easier to spam a person’s email.Without it of course filters could block most of the spam out there.Email marketing is a billion dollar a year industry and any means an advertiser has to tap into that they will use.Search engines such as Google,Yahoo, & Bing all offer disposable email addresses which are mostly used for spamming email addresses.If they monitor the ip’s that are signing up for thousands of theses email addresses they could identify where the spam is coming from and ban the user from using the addresses for spam.
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I think if you analyzed all the pages on the web and removed every page which had adwords dead center in the middle of the page, you could eliminate 50% of it.
It’s not that difficult to identify spam on the web. The way to do it is to find the business behind the web site, and do some automated due diligence on the business. We do that at SiteTruth.com.
We check out businesses using sources ranging from Securities and Exchange Commission files to Dun and Bradstreet. We take the hard-line position that if a site has “commercial intent”, which includes having ads, and it doesn’t have an identifiable real-world business behind it, its pages should be moved down in web search.
To fix this problem, it takes some better technology, access to some business databases that aren’t on the web, and a tough attitude. The tough attitude is the hard part. Until Google admits, or is forced to admit, that they have a problem, it won’t get fixed.
Bing has potential in this area. Google has a huge number of made-for-Adwords sites which bring in revenue, and thus has a business model problem with getting tough on spam. Bing doesn’t. Bing could take a tougher line, but so far, they haven’t.
Blekko takes a tougher line, but their tagging system is itself spammable. If Blekko ever gets any significant market share, they’ll be spammed heavily with phony recommendations, like Yelp. “Curation” by tagging from unidentified random users isn’t going to work. Trying to filter out phony users is very tough. Craigslist has tried email verification, phone verification, CAPCHAs, and manual filtering. All failed, and many categories of Craigslist are mostly machine-generated spam. Blekko is vulnerable in the same way.