Search Engines Should Ignore Links from Blogs

The spammers are ruining search engine results

[superclown2]

A huge proportion of the spam in not only Y! but the other search engines too is blog spam. Whilst these are supposed to be online journals, and not commercial sites, a lot of spammers have cottoned on to the fact that spamming them can increase their sites' relevancy in the search engines, just as the guestbook spammers used to do in the old days. The result is poor quality sites getting to the top for major search prases which means less business for genuine sites, a poorer search experience for surfers and a dilution of relevancy for the search engines. I believe that the time has come for the SEs to ignore any links from blogs for commercial search terms, or indeed any links at all unless the term 'blog' is actually searched in by a searcher. Can anyone see a flaw in my logic?

[martinibuster]

One glaring flaw is that many blogs have legitimate information that searchers are looking for. Your solution is like lopping an arm to cure itchy mosquitoe bites. ;)

[superclown2]

If you try searching for a commercial term the only thing you'll find in blogs is spam, at least on the first couple of pages, which are the ones that really matter. Sometimes when a limb is poisoned by a mosquito bite you have to chop it off to save the rest of the body.

[abates]

You're going about that backwards. If search engines devalue links from blogs, spammers will just switch to other tactics to achieve the same ends.

Perhaps search engines could identify web hosts which habitually harbour spam sites, and lower the rank of all sites on that web host until they clean up their act and give the spammers the boot. Eventually the spammers will run out of sympathetic web hosts to run to.

[superclown2]

Web hosts generally haven't a clue whether or not their new clients will start spamming and most of them have scores or hundreds of sites on a server so hitting the host with a ban would throw the baby out with the bathwater. The spammer would move on, the ban would remain, hundreds of sites would mysteriously disappear from the SERPs .....

I agree that the spammers would move onto something new but it will take time and in the meanwhile blog spam is strangling relevancy now.

[abates]

And banning blogs *isn't* throwing the baby out with the bathwater?

[mack]

you get good blogs, you get bad blogs, you get good sites you get bad sites.

Not all blogs are bad so de-grading all of them seams like strange logic to me.

Mack.

[superclown2]

I didn't say degrade all of them, I said ignore any links from blogs for commercial search terms. I'm looking on Y!.com from the UK at a very, very popular and lucrative search term and the first site in the SERPs is a rubbish blog, the next three are free websites with blog spam links and redirects. If people want to find information on blogs there's nothing to stop them from including the word in the search terms they type in and it shouldn't be difficult for an engineer to set a filter on commercial terms, G has been doing that since Florida at least.