Does Google LOVE.COM Spam?

The bigger you are the harder you can spam. AOL recently soft-launched Love.com

The site has a home directory at love.com, and topic sites are organized under subdomains. Current content on literally anything you can think of (or at least that I could think of) is there: dogs, The Beatles, sex, money, rock and roll. Hamsters. Barack Obama. You get the picture. Search engines love this stuff.

Love.com is a mashup of remixed twitter posts, youtube videos, aggressive 3rd party content snippets, automated cross linking, frame-jacked 3rd party content, pop-ups, automated subdomain spam, all pushed on a purchased domain name that had existing links.

Love.com is so bad that it inspired this quote from noted SEO expert Jeremy Luebke, “This stuff make Mahalo look like the best site on the net.”

What did Eric Schmidt say? “brands are how you sort out the cesspool.” As soon as Google started dialing up on brand, brand owners got the message, and have reacted quickly.

Counter to Eric Schmidt’s claims, any objective viewer of search would note that brands are creating the cesspool.

This is the driving corporate SEO strategy across MANY verticals today is aiming to make up for ad declines by polluting Google with recycled garbage:

recycle/steal content
grab from enough sources that it almost looks unique
automate it
cross link from the network of other sites (as needed)
repeat again and again until it no longer increases profits

Most of these companies are typically far spammier than even the SEOs would suggest being, but that is not surprising given the lack of risk.

Google’s original strategy with the authority-centric algorithm was a false belief that the emphasis on authority would make the web a deeper and richer experience. New content would need to be better than older established content to outrank it. But as media companies face sharp losses Google is quickly finding out that their authority emphasis is creating a shallower web, where most of the big networks have 2 primary roles: create garbage and recycle garbage.

I hope after Google eats about 50 more crappy sites like Love.com they see the flaw of their ways. Regular searchers (who don’t give a damn about brand) already notice it.

Image source: Matt Cutts