9th April 2007

The Poster Child for Web Spam

posted in Google, Webmastering |

I look at a lot of sites trying to answer peoples questions. Usually there are subtle problems with a site that can be fixed relatively easily. Then every once and a while I run into one that just blows my mind.

Google currently Google has 234 274, let me repeat that: 234! 274!pages of this crap spam in their index.

Let’s take a look at the home page, as viewed normally: Home Page

Then use the ultra sophisticated spam detection tool at your disposal, and hit CTRL-A: Spam Exposed

All I can say is, “wow.” To get the tone of my voice I’ve included a video for your amusement. In this case, substitute Sponge-Bob NoPants, with the spam website.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRIOy5byAd0

I would think that with all of the quality sites being dumped at an alarming rate daily, that all of this junk would be easily be spotted. I guess I’m wrong. They say they don’t want to take part in hand-to-hand combat, but when quality gets deindexed and spam like this makes it through I wonder if they aren’t just using the shotgon approach and just shooting everything out of the water, some good, some bad.

Just disgusting.

And, no, I didn’t report it in the “spam reporting” tool, I’ve fallen for that little placebo for the last time.

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 9th, 2007 at 6:07 pm and is filed under Google, Webmastering. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. All comments are subject to my NoFollow policy. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

There are currently 6 responses to “The Poster Child for Web Spam”

Why not let me know what you think by adding your own comment! All the cool kids are doing it.

  1. 1 MyAvatars 0.2 On April 11th, 2007, Craig said:

    The biggest problem I think exists is that some people who do that kind of spamming don’t actually know it is wrong.

    Sure, they of course should know but you wouldn’t believe the number of clients I have had asking for me to do something like that for their site because they heard that was the way to do things.

    I explain exactly what it is they are asking me to do and they are at the same time shocked and embarrassed.

    That’s not to say everyone who does it is innocent but I have run into this sort of thing with too many people that I know personally and know they wouldn’t knowingly try to game anyone, let alone a search engine.

    On the other hand, look at all the smoke and mirrors that some “SEO Experts” try to foist on others. They are attempting to be “Whitehat” in that what they suggest is not necessarily bad, other than more often than not being a waste of time.

    Other than the true cheats out there, I think one of the biggest problems is a lack of education and a wealth of misinformation.

  2. 2 MyAvatars 0.2 On April 11th, 2007, JLH said:
    Craig, I agree. The real pros at spamming have moved on to bigger an better things. This is actually quite amateurish, but still amazing that it exists.

    Granted, Google may have just discounted this hidden junk like they do with meta keywords.

    I’m also pretty sure there are a fair amount of sites that do this because they think its what the search engines want, not even considering it spam.

  3. 3 MyAvatars 0.2 On April 11th, 2007, Craig said:

    Amazing that it still exists, very true. What is even more amazing, if not down right comical is just how amateurish it was done.

    On this Web Spam Poster Child’s site, the hidden spam takes up 4 times as much as the actual content and no one thought anyone might notice? :-()

    Even more hilarious is the link to a link exchange site at the very bottom, even below all the hidden spam! Ya gotta love that!

    I also agree that some sites do it not considering it as spam but I would go once step further and suggest that maybe they don’t even know what web spam is.

    It may seem obvious to most people with experience but there are so many people out there throwing together websites with no experience at all that it seems those with any real experience are in a very small minority.

    Or well, at least the web is never dull or boring. :-)

  4. 4 MyAvatars 0.2 On April 13th, 2007, JLH said:
    OMG! Their index total has gone up!
  5. 5 MyAvatars 0.2 On April 15th, 2007, JLH said:
    Looks like the webmaster of the site wised up and cleaned it up, glad I took screen shots. There are a lot more examples out there, perhaps I should start pointing it out?
  6. 6 MyAvatars 0.2 On April 19th, 2007, Hidden Links » JLH Design Blog said:

    [...] the bow of website owners everywhere with his post regarding hidden links, different in nature than hidden text. His post sends a clear indication that hidden links is something that the spam team is aware of, [...]

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