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September 29, 2005
My Very Own Search Engine Spam Page
By Eric Goldman
I know that aggressive marketers develop what's commonly referred to as "spam pages"--low-value-added web pages that are intended to be indexed by the search engines and receive a low amount of traffic. Even with a low amount of traffic, if the web page creation is automated, spam pages may still be profitable. Google does a pretty good job keeping spam pages off the first SERP page, but I've found plenty of spam pages in their index.
Acknowledging all this, nevertheless I'm totally scratching my head at this page (check out the title bar, the third level domain, and the content snippets 2/3 of the way down the page). Clearly, someone has aggregated up content from lots of websites (presumably by automatically cutting 'n' pasting search results)...but I cannot imagine that there are enough searchers searching for these keywords to justify the creation of this page.
Posted by Eric at September 29, 2005 04:09 PM | Search Engines
Comments
I think the aggregated content is supposed to boost the apparent legitimacy of the page, the same way spam email messages increasingly include non-spam content copied from the web. I'm sure Google employs various techniques, include a Bayesian filter, to attempt to flag pure spam pages, and having content that is "real" (e.g., from your blog and others) will throw off Google's filters.
Posted by: Adam Rosi-Kessel at September 30, 2005 08:14 AM
Check out this search: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22spydurmed.org%22&
Posted by: Chris Hoofnagle at September 30, 2005 02:28 PM