If it’s Useful is it still Spam?
Google’s Adsense program has probably spawned more search engine spam than any other single creation in the history of the Internet. For a while the SERPs in almost any vertical were chock full of MFA sites that had little if any content other than Adsense ads or scraped excerpts from other sites. We’ve all seen this, and it’s been a real nuisance. Google seems to have taken effective steps to neutralize this particular technique and it’s really improved.
Once however I ran across a case where content consisting entirely of Adsense ads was extremely helpful, and actually led me straight to what I was looking for when the search engine results were not - and probably earned the spammer a decent income while it lasted.
I wanted to blog about this as soon as I found it, but I really hate to spoil someone else’s well crafted scheme. Anyway the circumstances have changed for this particular niche so here it goes.
I was shopping for a construction contractors bond (as in “licensed and bonded”) and really not having any luck with the search engines. This kind of bond is basically a third party guaranty that a contractor will do the contracted work within the terms of the contract agreement - kind of like a specialized insurance policy, but not exactly. Most government and commercial (EI most profitable) jobs require the contractor to supply a bond.
Anyway, the organic search engine results just didn’t contain what I was looking for at that time, so I clicked on an Adsense ad - something I don’t usually do. However, in this case I was taken to a whole page of Adsense ads that were all completely relevant to what I was looking for, and I ended up clicking on several of them and even bookmarked the MFA site.
Here’s what the Adsense Arbitrager knew that the bond vendors didn’t: Their potential customers call their product “bond”, “performance bond”, “construction bond”, or “bid bond” while the companies that sell the things call them “surety”. This terminology was so ingrained into the industry that they hardly used the term “bond” at all on their web sites, so they just simply didn’t show up in the search engines at the time. Once I realized that and started searching for “surety” I found tons of vendors who were in competition for my business.
I got two points of information from this experience:
- It’s not spam if it’s what you’re looking for.
- Know thy keywords - more to the point, know thy customer’s keywords.
It was also the most outstanding example of Adsense Arbitrage that I ever saw. But now when you search for “construction bond” those companies that were formerly sequestered behind “surety” pop right up.
I’ve notice the same kind of keyword disconnect on other sites as well like where the website uses the term air bed and miss out on traffic from searchers looking for airbed or air mattress, but the surety industry a year ago was really out of touch with what their customers were looking for.
I once commented on SEOmoz that the Baltimore Sun website writes a regular “recent property sale” column that is nothing more than some sales prices, property info and some dates.
So I asked - since I have access to literally tens of thousands of unique and exportable records that contain the same info - if I was to make a site of nothing but these records - would it be considered spam? How about if I added these records to one of my already existing real estate sites?
I thought it might be spam because I thought the definition of spam was something that was automated and produced only to increase rankings or traffic.
Certainly my approach would be that - but on a page-by-page basis it would be similar to the BaltimoreSun.com feature. So why should it have any less value?
Someone responded to my comment by saying “if its not useful - then its spam”.
Well - golly gee. That is an awful high threshold to reach. I mean - useful to whom?
For instance nearly half of the political commentary on the web is probably not of much use to the other half of the population that doesn’t share those views.
And what about things like SEOmoz - is that really useful to most people? It has been my experience that 99% of people I encounter have no idea what SEO even is. If they were to stumble upon a random SEOmoz article - how useful would it be to them?
Do we always need to be directed to something useful when we click on the top search result? I think that is an awful tall order for the search engines and for site owners - we can’t really control what long tail searches we rank for.
(with the last name of Goldsmith I routinely rank for long tail search terms where people are looking for someone to make a wedding ring or something - but I’m not spamming the term goldsmith - and no I don’t make jewelry).
Furthermore, just because a site is “Made for Adsense” and is full of ezine articles and other standard content - doesn’t mean it isn’t useful.
If I go to one of these sites and get my question answered by one of the ezine articles - then its useful and shouldn’t be considered spam.
I used to make this argument a lot - but I’ve backed down from it because no one wants to agree with me - even though their only argument to counter it was basically akin to “MFA sites are spam - everyone knows that”.
To them, if it isn’t unique content handwritten for that particular website (or one of their syndicated partners) - then it is spam.
Useful or not - that would make the non-spam web a very small place indeed.
I don’t agree that just because a site is “Made For Advertising” (I know that’s usually Adsense) that it’s spam. Most of the media that is produced is Made For Advertising.
Personally I think that it’s spam if it’s pushed out with the intent of getting it in front of as many random eyeballs as possible with the hope that a hapless few will convert. Movie previews force fed to video renters is often spam.
If the content is crafted with an attempt to appeal to as many targeted eyeballs as possible then I don’t think that really is spam - no matter what the content is. In the arbitrage example I cited you would probably not click on the Adwords link if you weren’t looking for a bond, so I don’t think that is spam.
I imagine it’s really hard for a program to make that distinction though.