tigertom - 12:41 pm on Jan 19, 2007 (gmt 0)

I disagree.

Put yourself in a search engine's shoes. Spammers put millions of dud pages on the SE's hard disks. You can define quality by certain criteria, and spam by other.

You'd be happy to set a filter that deletes most spam, with some collateral damage. So some webmasters whine, so what? If your SE is tanking, like MSN and Yahoo, that's not a priority.

I wonder what the ratio of spam and junk pages is to human-generated content at the moment?

If they're being overwhelmed, it may be simpler, now, for them first to define what junk is, and bury it, than define what quality is.

If the average Joe can buy software like Traffic Equalizer, goodness knows what black hat progammers can come up with e.g.

I searched on my site name with a keyword I hadn't focussed on yet. Up cames lots of mentions on dud blogspot.com sites, which in turn immediately redirected to something like a simple Adsense block on a bare white page.

Good quality backlinks with unique content on every page is the way to go, I think. Be wary of what CMS systems output, in that regard i.e.

- A directory, with
- 20,000 pages of the same header, footer and sidebars,
- with 100 words of (unique?) text in the middle,
- In a highly competitive market (travel, hotels)
- topped off with link-exchange backlinks to the index page only.

"It's a useful resource!" screeches the de-indexed webbie.
"Yawn" says the SE algorithm, and dumps the lot.