Google Attempts to Crush Spam Sites
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I first learned about SEO 6 years ago and since then have been implementing it in my web design projects. Although it’s been around longer, SEO has largely been unknown to the most web site owner until recently.
Starting about 2 years ago, SEO began seeping into the common vernacular of web site owners, business owners, and the digital media. News organizations like the NY Times or Huffington Post have learn to take advantage of SEO to get traffic to their online newspapers. Professionals such as lawyers, doctors, and contractors have all realized the potential of optimizing their site. Even small time bloggers and small e-commerce sites have been able to reap the monetary rewards SEO has to been.
Scammers and Spammers
Unfortunately it also gave scammers and spammers a new way to cheat the system. The Scammers trick business owners to pay them in hopes of getting more traffic and leads, but just like a shady contractor, they start the job, make it look good on the surface, take your money and then disappear. Initially your site may do well, but once search engines catch on, your site will get penalized and that can severely harm your business.
The spammers create many low quality sites designed to trick search engines in giving them high rankings quickly. This way they get traffic to their site where they sell advertisements. They want you to click on paid links or ads, trick you to go to another site, or collect your information so they can spam you more.
As more and more people learn about SEO and technology makes working with websites easier the Internet is increasing becoming filled with low quality or spam websites that clog the search results.
Are search engines less useful today?
How useful are search engines if when you search for something that the entire first page of search results are just junk websites where you can’t find what you’re looking for? Google prides itself on being able to deliver relevant search results, but they also make a lot of money because of these spam sites. So what should Google do?
As an SEO person, I see tons of spam sites everyday and realize how much time and bandwidth is wasted because of them. If humans can quickly recognize a spam site, then Google should be able to.
Combating spammers
A few days ago Google has announce a change to its algorithm to help clean up its search results. Here’s an except from The Official Google Blog.
“Many of the changes we make are so subtle that very few people notice them. But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking… This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”
Google’s fight against spammers
This is a good start but Google needs to continue to fight against spam websites and they still need to do a better job. There needs to be an SEO standard for the entire industry and people who try to cheat the system should be recognized quickly and penalized to deter them from this underhanded practice. If Google doesn’t work harder to stay in front of this then they will risk losing the trust they have built with consumers.
