Friday, December 5, 2008

Google SearchWiKi Comment Spam Express

It has been quite some time since I've updated this SEO blog. To be honest, I totally forgot about this one! Not good at all. I'm aiming to stick with it this time.

I suppose the latest news which has the SEO world in a bit of an uproar are the changes that Google has made regarding the comment system.

Can't see what the big deal is?

First off, you can't see the comments on a regular Google response unless you are signed into your Google account. Once signed in, you will notice a little comment icon next to the search results. This is a place for users to leave a comment about a webpage returned in the listing. Navigate to the bottom of the page and you will notice some user options such as Add a Result, See all my SearchWiki notes and others.

So far, so good.

Or is it?

I've heard this will lead to the end of SEO as we know it.

People, of all things, are leaving comments about Google listings! How could this be good? Well, to those website designers and SEO web designers that always lived by the rule of Content is King, there shouldn't be a problem. To those that didn't, well, don't worry too much just yet.

Take a look at some hardcore SEO terms such as, well "SEO" is a good one.

First a little rant:

SEO is a term fought over by most SEO specialists. They all dream of getting top listings and work their tails off in an attempt to beat out the dominant link spammers of years gone by.

Good luck trying to backlink your way ahead of spammers that got in while the getting was good. In other words, most of those guys you see at the top of such keywords got there in the early days; before Google started punishing link farms, spam bots, comment bots, etc..

Now they love pretending like they got there with current white hat SEO techniques. Those of us quiet types that have been in the SEO related businesses before "SEO" was even used, know better.

You can quickly get an idea of how they pulled this off by looking at all the cross linking they did/do with each other. A few crafty individuals were able to create a linking network around SEO and build each other into SEO gods with very little to no actual results proven besides their own.

I think this rant is done for now. Only for now, though.

So, what does this have to do with the commenting on Google listings? Sign into your google account. Search for SEO. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click "see all notes for SearchWiki." Scroll back up and start reading the comments under each listing. There you will see a very familiar old friend. Comment spamming by our favorite old link spammers. Good luck.

The hope and/or fear is that Google will incorporate this human factor into the rankings for everyone. I really don't think that will happen. The main reason being, Google knows very well that SEO specialists will be way too tempted to spam the hell out of them from various accounts from various proxies. I think the G has enough spam to worry about and really doesn't need the extra headache of filtering out comments and ratings from users. There are plenty of other engines that go the crowdsourcing route and I don't think G is too worried about them. They simply wanted to add a bit of stickiness to their website. Much like any other website owner tries to do. They didn't invest tons of money into A.I. programmers to leave it to the best spammers in the world to ruin. At least I hope not.

If you really believe that these comments and personal rankings will figure into rankings, then by all means jump on the Comment Spam Express. I'm not buying a ticket just yet.

1 comment:

Matt said...

Thanks yusufyusuf.

I'm very impressed with your photos at flickr. They are extremely gritty and really bring the viewer right into that setting.

It is always great to see someone try to draw emotions other than sweetness, happiness and love out of a viewer.

Great work and I look forward to seeing more when available.

Thanks again and take care.