Man, the amount of web spam I’m seeing lately is actually rivaling the levels of email spam we’ve all become so immune to. If this keeps up, and I can’t figure out a better automated way to deal with some of it, I’m looking at a new full-time and completely unprofitable job. If anything points out the weaknesses in Google’s algo, it’s this.

Spam works no matter who likes it or not

For as long as anyone can remember diverse backlinks from a wide range of IP address ranges will generally cause a page to rise in the rankings. This is certainly true now. Therefore, someone who can program massive spam attacks can easily land enough posts in forums and comments in blog posts with keyword rich and targeted URLs embedded in the messages to overwhelm Google and win the prize.

I checked results for many of the terms spammers have been targeting, and learned a simple fact. Their techniques are working. Just the way the U.S military loves cluster bombs because they work, spammers love spamming web forms and forums because those posts are the cluster bombs of the SERPs. They are plenty effective in moving sites from obscurity to the top positions.

Since this has always been the case with Google, it doesn’t look like the experimentation the company constantly does with their search has paid many dividends when it comes to link spam. Link spam remains the most effective way for people to rank, and for that reason alone will continue to be the number one issued faced by webmasters who already have top ranks. We’ll end up spending much of our day implementing patches and cleaning up after posting bots, all in an effort to stop spam and keep the conversations on our websites in tact.

To me the trend for such automated spam will continue because Google hasn’t really made that many fundamental changes to how they rank websites. Their rankings are still the online equivalent of popularity contests, and have all the same limitations as their offline counterparts.

I guess the bright side is: I’m only cleaning up so much spam because I’ve managed to hang onto my rankings, despite the constant changes in Google. We’ll see what the Summer months bring.