Just a quick guide to the basic social media sites, we found on the internet recently.

At Gravitate Media we love Google. Most of the traffic to our clients’ sites comes from the world’s favourite search engine - over 70% in fact. But we’ve noticed a worrying trend in recent weeks - the spammers appear to be winning!

Deteriorating search results
In the course of the day I tend to use the internet for fair amount of research, learning new techniques and getting answers to various technical related issues. Recently I’ve noticed a rise in the performance of websites that scrape content from a third party (they steal content, place adds around the stolen copy and then redistribute it on a new domain). Such sites appear to be often out ranking the original content creator. It’s not just me who has noticed this trend. Take a look at Trouble In the House of Google for more detail.

When most users don't get relevant search results, they tend to just change the search terms and try again. But recently we’ve found that both Bing and Yahoo's results sets are better (less spam and more relevant). Now I’m not going to change my search habits just yet - I’ve been using Google for 7 years and it takes a while to kick that kind of addiction.  But there’s more...

Out of place
Now with the introduction of Google Places for local search, the results sets just appear massively out. There are sites which are well constructed, using modern coding standards, being out ranked by a single page site with a massive graphic and no content, or listing which is blatantly SPAM.

To view the scale of the problem which Google Places just search for "garage doors danbury ct".

This  returns multiple results for a single company who have just spammed the index with multiple locations along the same road which don't exist.

For a full report on how this black hat SEO was done see: http://www.sitetruth.com/doc/placesspam10.pdf

In my view Google should be helping the internet improve and get better and not reward poor design and poor implementation and SPAM.

If they don't fix this people users will start to question their search engine of choice, I know I will.