"word salad" to fool Google/search engines

Spam blogs are a well-known problem.

 

Those are sites that rank high on Google's pages.

They are auto generated by bots or programs to be semi-coherent. It seems to farm other sites for content and splices it randomly into a seemingly valid website. Close inspection of the text and content will reveal major flaws which show that it is auto-generated. It can sometimes be good enough to fool humans initially, and also Google's search algorithms.

 

I frequently run into them.

 

I've never run into one of those. What is their purpose? Are they just trying to generate ad revenue by getting a lot of hits? Or is there a more nefarious intent?

 

It's all about [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization"]Search engine optimization - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame].

Lots of bogus pages = lots of links to the page(s) = higher ranking on Google = profit!

 

They are used to increase the ranking of another site. One of Google's ranking criteria counts how many times a site is linked by other sites. By artificially creating back links, a site can improve its rank score.

In the old days before Google, I used to create pages like this by hand. They would repeat the target words as often as possible, but still appear to make sense. Each of these "reflector" pages contained a link the the real web page being optimized.

Tom