Google's losing war with spam and SEO

richardcadler's picture
Submitted by richardcadler on Wed, 01/05/2011 - 12:54
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http://broadstuff.com/archives/2370-On-the-increasing-uselessness-of-Goo...

Alan Patrick offers a dismal perspective on what he considers Google's losing war with spam and SEO:

"...[T]his year it really hit home just how badly Google's systems have been spammed, as typically anything on Page 1 of the search results was some form of SEO spam - most typically a site that doesn't actually sell you anything, just points to other sites (often doing the same thing) while slipping you some Ads (no doubt sold as "relevant"). The other main scamsite type is one that copies part of the relevant Wikipedia entry and throws lots of Ads at you. It wasn't just me who found this - Paul Kedrosky found the same...."

"Frankly, I don't believe that it is not possible to reduce this sort of spam, I think Google's problem is more that it is trying to navigate a line between income (systemically the more spam there is, the more Ad money it makes) and usefulness (how much spam can you run before the user walks away) and has veered too far to the spamside...."

Tim O'Reilly, Anil Dash, Slashdot, and Bruce Sterling have all weighed on this piece and offered comments. See the page for links to all of them.

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