Why people spam search engines and why it won’t stop soon

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Because it works and they get paid. And you thought this would be a complicated question to answer. As long as there’s big money in breaking the rules, and they can get away with it, they’ll continue to do so. Can I understand why someone would be motivated by money? Of course. We all are to certain degrees, and depending on your living conditions, easy money from search engines may be the biggest paycheck you ever saw. For this reason, people will never quit.

It’s up to the search engines to stop it. There’s no way around this simple fact. People get up in arms about all the “cheating” going on, but the only reason it’s done is because technical loopholes exist that allow it to happen. If the search engines really were spam-proof, as they’d love us all to believe, no special measures would be necessary. If they close the loopholes, the spam stops.

Search engines make a lot of money pretending to be infallible, when in reality they’re “wrong” or only “slightly right” most of the time. Search engine “spam” is not illegal. Webmasters who engage in it are taking a calculated risk concerning whether their domain will be banned or not, but they aren’t risking jail time. For this reason alone, many people will try it.

The search engines make money from the spam. Whether they want to admit it or not, they always profit from “long tail” search, which is what most spammers (or even SEOs in general) target.

Whether it’s complicity or complacency, I can’t say for sure, but most search engine spammers these days are clearly monetized by Google Adsense or YPN. It’s easier than ever to place a single javascript code on an auto-generated dynamic template and let Google place the ads. It gives people more of a chance than ever to monetize DB-driven pages, and they’re doing so merrily. There are no reasons this trend will slow down soon.

One man’s spam is another man’s chopped ham.

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