Google, please stop giving Valentine’s Day love to parasitic marketers!
Here are some examples of people who are ranking their SPAM by posting it on crowd sourcing sites like NowPublic.com or free classifieds in Topix. Try a search for Valentine Lingerie and you will find the #4 position taken by A Splog Post on NowPublic.com and the #8 and #9 spots taken by two free classified listings from 2 different domains with essentially identical content on Topix.
It is really hard to make a coherent argument why these pages deserve to rank for Valentine Lingerie more than another costume & lingerie site. Topix and NowPublic have no incentive to fight this garbage unless the engines make them suffer for all of their content, because they get paid on the impressions.
For the “marketer” whose Splog post is on NowPublic, the 699 visits on the page to date might be worth the effort, but it definitely doesn’t mean they deserve the eye balls. NowPublic also doesn’t NoFollow links, even ones that seem to clearly be less than editorially controlled, so there may be (NOT) some PR flowing to the Spammer as well.
I am not sure if MSNBC and Foxnews deserve the love their getting from Valentine’s Lingerie more than NowPublic, but at least these articles aren’t spam, they are “news stories about fashion”.
Google, please stop ranking the SPAM. It encourages blackhats and causes blight in the index!
we police our classifieds pretty diligently — we have a 500k set of spam URL’s that we’re constantly adding to…so we’ll definitely see what we can do about these.
Fighting SPAM is a constant issue – but with the captcha, and our current tool set we try and do a good job here…
-Chris Tolles
Chris
I appreciate your response and your efforts, especially in light of the fact that this type of SPAM can drive short term revenue for you. I am sorry to have called Topix out.
Would you be interested in being interviewed about your efforts to keep SPAM out of your site?
Jonah