Monkeyfilter

From a Wired article on Splogs. The pay-per-click advertising that accounts for most of Google's income (and, increasingly, for the incomes of Yahoo and MSN Search, the two other big search engines) has become an irresistible magnet for hucksters, con artists, and chiselers. "The three main search engines are gateways to a huge percentage of the US and world economy," says Anil Dash, a vice president of the blog-hosting company Six Apart. "If your Web site appears high up on their results, thousands or millions of people will go to it." If even a small fraction of those people click on the ads on that site, "you're going to make a lot of money" – and sploggers are going after it. Because the ad money is effectively available only to Web sites that appear in the first page or two of search results, spammers devote enormous efforts to gaming Google, Yahoo, and their ilk. Search engines rank Web sites in large part by counting the number of other sites that link to them, assigning higher placement in results to sites popular enough to be referred to by many others. To mimic this popularity, spammers create bogus networks of interconnected sites called link farms. Blogs – most of which are in essence little more than collections of links with commentary – are particularly useful elements in them. The result, Dash says, "is what you'd expect: The blogosphere is increasingly polluted by spam."

posted by Zanshin 18 years ago

In "Curious George wants to play house."