phil ringnalda

I go back and forth about agreeing with the belief, common in SEO circles, that the entire splog and comment spam problem is Google’s fault, and that they should bear the complete responsibility for fixing it, but I absolutely love graywolf’s comment on ThreadWatch about the explosion of splogs on Google’s Blog*Spot which make money (for both the splogger and Google) from Google’s AdSense, even though Google’s, um, Google now generally sandboxes new sites so that they aren’t going to come up in Google’s own search results:

Now of course if you run a search engine with a time/quality delay ranking function built in you can say how “much better” your index is because you don’t rank the drivel that Yahoo and MSN do. Here’s where it gets priceless, Google has found a way to monetize the other search engines that do rank the drivel.

The more AdSense-bearing spam blogs there are on Blog*Spot, the more money Google makes. That seems like the sort of situation where being not-evil would be not-easy.