Google Blog Search helps make spam blogs earn money
August 30th, 2007 by Jeremy ToemanI was writing a new blog post for Bug Labs this morning, and wanted to take a quick scan for any new links to the company. The first page of results is basically a-ok, until I sorted by date. On this page, here is a summary of the results I saw:
Bug Labs fleshes out BUGbase, BUGmodule details
Open Source: Bug Labs Website BUGbase and Module Hardware Details
Bug Labs fleshes out BUGbase, BUGmodule details
Bug Labs fleshes out BUGbase, BUGmodule details
Of the above list, only three are original sources of content (shown italicized). The three references to the “fleshes out..” article all stem from an Engadget post, which did not make the page. The other repurposed story links either reference MAKE magazine or Gizmodo.
Google may have improved search and found a killer revenue model with AdSense. But my hunch is they have singlehandedly enabled more spammers than any other company. The part that bothers me the most is I have no doubt that they could kill off all the spam blogs from their search results (they are fairly smart people over there). So why do they choose not to do it? My guess is it would affect their bottom line.
I guess I’m starting to feel like the Potter Stewart on this. I don’t exactly know how to define evil, but I know it when I see it.
August 30th, 2007 at 12:30 pm
It’s lame that spammers so often use Blogger to build sites with scraped content monetized through AdSense. Google has two ways of shutting that situation down without changing a single ranking factor.
January 5th, 2008 at 6:17 pm
There is currently a live discussion going on right now about this subject Jeremy. http://www.blogcatalog.com/discuss/entry/blogs-that-repost-entire-article-from-other-sites
We as bloggers are getting more and more theft of our stories on a daily basis.. I did not know how to contact you via email. I wont have any hard feelings if you remove this link