I was going through my Google Alerts the other day looking to see if there were any hot topics that might be worth reading or writing about when I spotted them. 4 blog posts and 2 or 3 related articles at the bottom of a particular alert on a particular topic. What caught my eye was that all of them were blogspot.com domains. Really? There are dozens of good quality blogs about the topic that post regularly and I couldn’t believe that only blogger sites made the cut for the alert, though it was a Google Alert so they might be a little biased. Maybe it was a slow day in the blogging community.
Immediately after looking at the first one, the red flags went up. Spam Blog! Built entirely for AdSense, there were ads all around the content, but not in the content of the postings so I decided to read. After reading the first sentence, I could tell that this was one of those blogs that was pieced together by some spam bot, but overall it was somewhat readable and kind of made sense. Still, I knew it to not be 100% genuine and I closed that tab in Firefox. On to the next.
Lo and behold, the next one looked almost exactly like the first. Same site design, same topics, nearly the same ads in the same places. Great! 2 for 2 on spam. On to the next. Wow, 3 for 3 on spam blogs! Again, almost the same exact blog with different pieced together content about the same topic. I clicked on the fourth and I wasn’t surprised to find that this one was just like the previous three. All four of them had different sub-domains hosted on blogspot.com, with very similar content existed and then I noticed that this one linked to one of the previous 3 that I had seen.
I decided to take a closer look at this last one. At the bottom of every posting was a series of three links. They weren’t tags or categories, just text links to other blogs that looked exactly like the previous four, with slightly different, but similar content. I started going through the links, opening up different tabs for each site and grew more disgusted every time I clicked on a link. All in all I discovered nearly 50 blogs that looked exactly alike in design, layout, and footer text and all of them were cross-linked to each other. The topics varied somewhat, but it was clear when reading the posts that the content was pieced together or stolen with missing words in sentences and odd words in strange places.
How could Google allow this on their own platform? They claim to approve websites that get accepted into the AdSense program based on their Quality Guidelines, before that site can place their first ad. I’ve seen spam sites built for AdSense before and have seen my share of spammy blogs on Blogger, but this was different. To have so many sites linked to each other, clearly built for nothing more than manipulating the blog alerts and generating advertising revenue. Yet, Google turns a blind eye to this type of behavior, why? Because they are profiting from the advertising being generated. I guess Blogger gets a free pass on ignoring the webmaster guidelines.
What does this tell us about Google? That’s it’s not OK to spam and manipulate our search results, unless it makes us money too. It makes you wonder what else they might allow into the SERPS, or how their algorithm actually works. Do those websites that pump the most money into AdWords get a bonus in the organic SERPS too? How much of a bump do AdSense sites get in the SERPS? I’m wondering how many other spam-blog-networks are out there just like this one. My guess is there are more than many of us realize.
To say the least I was very disappointed when I found this, particularly when I use Google’s services all the time. Tools like Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Google Alerts and AdSense. They build great tools and services that help people and website owners make the most out of the web and I have no problem with them making money, but it is bothersome to see these spammy sites so blatantly ignored so they can make a little more money.
