Google is engaged in a war. It is a war on spam. With new strategies and filters ready to put into place, the search engine is adding new firepower to its arsenal almost daily. Webmasters and SEO Consultants alike are terrified; fearing what the future holds for them. But for those of us that believe in the cause, the future isn't scary. In fact, the future looks very bright.
My ten year old son is fascinated with war. He has a dozen buckets full of army men, and makes everything a battlefield-the kitchen, my bedroom, and even the bathroom. He has a new bicycle helmet that's army green. For Halloween, when other kids were Spiderman and Batman, he was a soldier. He constantly plays computer games like Soldiers of WWII and Battlefield 1942; he even turns brooms and mops into weapons to combat the invisible enemy. War is all he talks about. He loves movies like Saving Private Ryan, Pearl Harbor, and Platoon. He knows more about both World Wars and Vietnam then I'll ever hope to, or care to, know. His obsession with war got me thinking about how it applied to what I do every day. What does SEO and war have in common? More to the point, how does Google implement strategies that declare war on spam?
SEO is a constant struggle to get our clients' websites to the top. We combat lousy SEO companies that give us a bad name, flagrant ads that claim they can do what we do for only $29 by submitting your site to a thousand search engines, and other little annoyances that pop up every day. Even still, my small battles are really nothing when you compare it to the war that Google is waging. Google's number one goal is to bring the visitor the most relevant results possible in a search engine. This means filtering and sorting through all the junk out there, so that you, the visitor, doesn't have to.
"It's an arms race," Steve Linford, director of the London-based SpamHaus Project, said. "The more we lock (spammers) down, the more techniques they try to get around us." The SpamHaus Project is a nonprofit organization that posts information about the groups behind the majority of unsolicited e-mail, and maintains a "black hole" list of domains from which spammers operate. Spam accounted for at least one in four email messages a Business received in 2002. The U.S. Attorney General's website has an entire page on the subject. "Almost 45 percent of all email is now spam and that number is growing each year. Nearly three trillion spam messages are sent each year - 13 times the total snail mail delivered by the U.S. Postal service. The average wired American is hit with nearly 2,200 spam messages annually - this after most ISPs have filtered 80-90 percent of the junk messages. Some reports indicate that these numbers could increase by five times in the near future."
Market research firm, Gartner Inc., estimates that their company of over 10,000 employees suffers more than $13 million worth of lost productivity because of internally generated spam. This is just email spam. Throw in the spam on the internet, and it's a huge productivity drain. It causes companies financial losses because they have to purchase more high tech software like spam blockers and spy-ware removers, and it's a strain on system servers and bandwidth.
Google defines Internet spam as any unwanted information or propaganda that may have been received through deceptive measures on the part of the sender. To a search engine, spam is hyperlinked pages that are intent on misleading the search engine. It is estimated that 80% of search results for any keyword phrases entered into a search engine are considered
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