Yahoo! Helping Splogs and Google Earn Money?
Marcia posted a thread at Search Engine Watch forums named Plagiarism, Splogs and Search Engine Spam where she quoted a blog entry at Plagiarism Today named Why Sploggers Splog The snippet Marcia selected was ironic, to say the least.
One of the interesting things that came out of my discussion with the reformed splogger is that Google is not the target of splogs. As odd as it may seem, Yahoo indexes entire sites much more quickly than Google and is even faster at picking up Blogspot blogs because it considers it such an important domain. Thus, even though the service is wholly owned by Google itself, Yahoo is the first to snatch up links contained with it….
The desired end result is that Yahoo searchers will be directed to the junk domains where they will then click on the Google Adsense ads. This arrangement is not only very profitable for the splogger, since they get a sizeable chunk of the revenue from each ad click, but is very beneficial to Google as they are getting money directly from Yahoo’s visitors.
Now I am not sure if there is a study done that shows that:
(1) “Yahoo indexes entire sites much more quickly than Google”, I hear that not to be true. That Google is quicker, but there has never been a wide study done on this. I am basing that on forum chatter for the past four years or so.
(2) [Yahoo] “is even faster at picking up Blogspot blogs because it considers it such an important domain.” Again, not sure where this is from but I won’t argue.
But if those two statements above are true, which I do not think they are a 100% true, then it is funny.
Yahoo! ranks blogspot splogs high, Yahoo users click through, yahoo users are more likely to click on an AdSense ad, Google makes money, sploggers make money.
Of course this can be applied to any search engine, even Google. And it can be applied to any advertising program that is easy to sign up with and pays on a cpc basis, even Yahoo!.
Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.
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Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Roundtable Search Forum Coverage – Barry Schwartz is the Editor of Search Engine Roundtable and President of RustyBrick, Inc., a Web services firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales.
