The name of the search game is relevancy. Spam is by definition irrelevant to whatever task you are trying to accomplish. A lot of people are not aware that search engines are subject to this type of abuse or they at least do not know what it is referred to as when they search for a topic and an unrelated (and often ad laden) website appears. Spamming is a popular term in the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) community these days. There are a plethora of ad-serving website, particularly ones made up completely of Google Adsense, that use what are called "black hat" SEO tactics to manipulate search results. You will occasionally find these websites on page one for search terms where they have no place being. For example if you search for "viagra" on Google ( http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=viagra) and look down the page you will see a link to http://eteamz.active.com/yosefina/files/viagra.html. That particularly website makes probably $5000-10000 a DAY by being on the first page of Google (also notice all the redirects you go through when you click that, also black hat SEO).

Another example comes from MSN.com where a search for "spyware" produces nothing but spammy pages that are stuffed with keywords and use other unethical SEO practices. Search engine algorithms attempt to pinpoint irrelevant websites but obviously do so with hit-or-miss success. I would venture to guess that spamming search engines using ad-serving websites if much more profitable than traditional e-mail spam these days. Google was recently sued for $90 million in a click-fraud lawsuit which they actually lost. Spam websites are partly to blame for the rampant click-fraud.

As an aspiring SEO professional, search engine spam is of particular interest to me. The basis premise of website optimization is developing a website in such a way that a search engine's spider crawls it more effectively so that the algorithm favors your website over your competitor's. There are more factors than simple on-page optimization, but this is the root of the science. Spammers have taken this a step further by unfairly manipulating Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for monetary gain. These black hat SEOs have given the Search Engine Marketing (SEM) field a proverbial black eye.

How are the major players (Google, Yahoo, MSN) dealing with the SERPs spam problem? The most predominate way is by updating their respective algorithms with more sophisticated variables. Google's website aging factors have put it at the forefront of this. Spammy domains are usually registered for only a year so Google checks that before it ranks your website. New websites are also subject to an age filtered referred to in the community as the "sandbox." Depending upon the amount and quality of links a website receives, a website can be sandboxed for up to a year before Google deems it relevant to its targeted keywords. Inbound links also do not carry full "power" in Google's eyes until it ages, or remains active, for months.

Yahoo and MSN have not quite jumped on the age filtering bandwagon yet, MSN in particular. The "life cycle" of a website's visibility begins with MSN, then travels to Yahoo and finally Google. For instance, the two websites I have running right now, http://www.3tailer.com and http://www.socks4life.com, are for all intensive purposes brand new. If you search MSN, Yahoo, and Google respectively for "Charlotte search engine optimization" and "cheap socks" you will see how the rankings deteriorate in accordance with each engine's age policy even though my websites are more relevant any others. It seems as though spammers will continue to ruin it for all of us as they develop more and more black hat techniques to keep them on top of our searches.