Plagiarism, Splogs and Search Engine Spam

[Marcia]

Very interesting blog post at Plagiarism Today:

Why Sploggers Splog

One of the interesting things that came out of my discussion with the reformed splogger is that Google is not the target of splogs. As odd as it may seem, Yahoo indexes entire sites much more quickly than Google and is even faster at picking up Blogspot blogs because it considers it such an important domain. Thus, even though the service is wholly owned by Google itself, Yahoo is the first to snatch up links contained with it.

And for MFA critics, he goes on to explain the motivation:

The desired end result is that Yahoo searchers will be directed to the junk domains where they will then click on the Google Adsense ads. This arrangement is not only very profitable for the splogger, since they get a sizeable chunk of the revenue from each ad click, but is very beneficial to Google as they are getting money directly from Yahoo’s visitors.

[Carlos Chacón]

Thanks Marcia. Good article, no doubt.
Last SES Conference celebrated on May; I asked Tomi Poutanen (One of the guys on the panel from Yahoo!) about this particular situation. It was a shame how the search engine user experience turns to be worried and without quality.

Thanks God the situation doesn’t come across to Google I think, because it will be a chaos. Too many people do spamming with hundreds and thousands of BLOGS.

Now, for some keywords I’ve seen Yahoo! search results decreasing showing SPLOGS.. Let’s see how it is going to be in the future.

[Chris Boggs]

Marcia thanks for posting this link last month. I wanted to point out that the article doesn't really give any good examples of splogs. Would this be considered "outing" or do you think we can offer up some examples in here? I may have already done-so in this post. I just want to make sure I know the difference between Splogs and Blog spam.

I am maybe a little confused if blog spam is limited only to comments, and if the content of the blog posts themselves are spam it is then considered a splog? or perhaps it has to do with the level of automation?

[rustybrick]

Not sure where he got his numbers from.

Does Yahoo! index sites quicker then Google? and even so, does it rank blogger sites higher? I do not think this is the common case.

And doesn't Yahoo have the YPN program? So can't they be feeding themselves and sploggers.

Anyway, funny read.

[Elisabeth]

Originally Posted by Chris Boggs

I am maybe a little confused if blog spam is limited only to comments,

Exactly.

and if the content of the blog posts themselves are spam it is then considered a splog? or perhaps it has to do with the level of automation?

you've got it exactly right. Blogspot in particular looks for automated postings containing aff links, and adsense heavy sites.

[v9designbuild]

I have recently done a test for a property company in Bangkok and registered around 25 blogspots, linked them all together with a links into the main site. We are 1 & 2 on both Google and Yahoo! but, somewhat astonishingly, except for CBRE the blogs dominate positions 1-19 on MSN: see 'tenancy management bangkok'.

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

Rusty, another question to ask is: How well do the various engines fight this outside the english language? I guess we both know that answer ... not at all