One of the biggest threats to Google’s dominance will doubtfully be a competing search engine, at least for the time being… No, if you had to narrow it down, the biggest threat will probably come in the form of search result spam – the main reason Google’s engineers have paid so much lip-service to cleaning up their organic results.
However, is Google addressing the spam issues about their blog search engine with the same fervor they do their primary search? Not according to Danny Sullivan and Steve Rubel.
Both of these prominent bloggers have produced great posts detailing the spam redirect problem that appears to be plaguing Google’s blog search function.
According to these two, a large amount of blogs that redirect users to another site have been appearing in the Google Blog Search results – a trait no quality search engine wants.
Not only does Google Blog Search have a redirect spam issue going for it – as if to rub salt in the wounds, it seems like the preferred blog service of choice to implement these spam pages is none other than Google-owned Blogger.com – a fact that’s sure to please the folks at Mountain View.
As indicated by Sullivan and Rubel, the biggest offender of the redirect spam phenomenon is a couple of people search companies bound and determined to get your attention (isn’t the concept of using the Internet to find friends a little old to try and capitalize on know?).
In two separate posts, Sullivan produced a list of about 40 blogs (these blogs appeared in his newsreader) taking part in this redirect scheme, while Rubel generated a search that produced “hundreds” of these offending blogs.
In order to show up in Google Blog Search rankings, the blogs in question are actively scraping topical content.
Once the link is clicked, the unsuspecting user is taken to a people search service, courtesy of an iframe redirect.
The question becomes how long will it take for Google to address this issue, especially when you consider it takes advantage of two Google services – Google Blog Search and Google’s blogger service?
Of course, they could ban these sites from their index, but what’s to prevent another enterprising spammer to recreate this attack?
No, instead of just banning someone, Google needs to fix the problem so no one else can reproduce it.
Of course, this means Google would have to make alterations to the Blogger service as well as their blog search algorithm, but in this case, such changes are necessary.
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Chris Richardson is a search engine writer and editor for Murdok. Visit Murdok for the latest search news.
