You probably have not heard if it especially if you are a Google fan but there is a search engine called Blekko. The company has long had a goal of providing better search results compared to its competitors. Blekko only gathers results from 3 billion trusted webpages and does not include information from content farms and others.
It has recently announced that it has blocked more than a million websites from search results through the use of “AdSpam”. New sites will also not be added to Blekko’s trusted sites unless it has passed the engine’s guidelines.
According to the company’s press release, the AdSpam algorithm will change search the way people know it. It is an algorithm especially created to search for spam rather than rank results. It has the ability to determine if the page is spam or not. Pages found to be spam will be immediately eliminated so they do not have a chance of appearing in search results.
Interesting idea
Blekko’s idea of blocking spam and preventing it from appearing in search results is only surely unheard of until now. Well, it may have been attempted before but it has not been successful or perhaps not remarkable enough to be recalled by people who use the Web. Yes, keeping spam out from search results will help but it might also bring with it effects which people do not look forward to.
According to experts, Blekko’s latest move will not give them any benefits. Google and Blekko’s other competitor’s will actually be benefitting more from the company’s decision. Why is this? Because Google and other engines have far more advanced algorithms than Blekko. Although these search engines allow spam on their search results, they keep spam away from the top results.
Furthermore, Google and Bing also have huge resources and have the ability to index up to a billion sites. They have also possess thousands of servers. Suffice it to say that for search giants storage is not an issue but for Blekko it can be very costly just to even index every page of spam.
Banned sites
Just recently Blekko released a list of some of the sites which they blocked for allegedly having spam content. The sites on the list are hardly what people call spam. The results even included ehow.com, chacha.com and encyclopedia.com.
Spam for search engines
From Blekko’s result, you would conclude that what other sites consider as spa is perfectly okay with others. Search engines cannot seem to agree on what should be considered as spam. Sites which have been blocked by Blekko is considered okay by Google or Bing. Although some sites did lose their rankings after Google’s Panda update, they were not considered spam.
The takeaway from this is even if the content is not of very high quality; it still cannot be labeled as spam. At least, this is what Bing and Google believes. The only downside to lo quality content is that they will not be ranked high by the new algorithm.