Scraper Sites and Spam in SERPs

[freelistfool]

I'm seeing a lot of scraper and spam sites for one competitive keword I track. Three of the top ten sites are domains that start with numbers and redirect to a MFA pages with nothing but adsense links on them.

One site in the top 5 actually reads, "This is under construction" with one other sentence and not a single mention of the keyword in the page.

My site has dropped down about 5 places.

A new Google "feature" I'm noticing at the bottom of the page is "Searches related to: keyword". Could this have anything to do with it? Is it a new Google feature?

The SERPs are so unbelievably bad that I'm running spyware, malware, and virus scan on my computer...just in case.

[gehrlekrona]

I see this also. In my niche I see edu spam sites and guestbook spam, poker sites and good knows what.
This is a *great* update and Google has outdone themselves this time.
I have also seen the relates Search thing and it could have something to do with this update. Maybe they are testing new stuff to see if people actually are interested in the related searches.
Not sure why goole want to show that anyway. If I go there to find something, then I don't need any related stuff do I? Maybe if I want to buy a book or something......

[aliszka]

This index is so bad it could only mean one thing, they need to sell more PPC IMO.

[crobb305]

I was just about to post on this. I started a thread [webmasterworld.com] back in November about how quickly these junk urls rise to the top of the serps. It seems to happen more frequently on weekends and holidays when I assume fewer Google staff are available to manually combat this junk.

It does seem, however, that for the junk urls that redirect to spammy directory-style urls, Google quickly removes them after I report them through the Webmaster Tools interface. Unfortunately, that doesn't stop them from appearing. So, it is a daily thing now to see junk/redirecting urls rise to the top and then get removed.

In my niche I see edu spam sites and guestbook spam

I even see a .gov subdomain ranking in the top 3 for a competitive phrase. This subdomain quickly redirects to some junk-style directory.

I applaud Google for taking action on the spam reports. I just hope they can figure out a way to stop them from ranking to begin with. I know it isn't an easy task.

[steveb]

This has been going on in competitive sectors since the end of June.

The high rankings are a combination of three things. First, the old TrustSpam patent/algo that misplaces trust on domains that don't deserve it (freehosts, hacked sites...), then two newer things, Google's screwed up crawl priorities (lots of rotten links get you crawled a smaller number of higher PR quality links gets you crawled less often or even have the pages dropped), plus the high value placed on blog comment links.

The Google algo of 2007: the trifecta of dumbness.

==

Oh, and yes much of this spam is removed nearly immediately (replaced by other similar spam the same day). This isn't so much a spam problem, but a bad indexing /bad algo problem.

[freelistfool]

I'm only seeing it on the most competitive keywords in my industry. Out of about 20 I track only 3 or 4 are impacted.

[crobb305]

Man, the junk is sticking around longer than normal this week. I have seen about 5 more junky/redirect urls rise to the top 20. They occupy about 10 out of the top 20 spots.

[tictoc]

Google seems to be getting sluggish like MSN lately. What is going on with the search engines and temporary spam sites...