First SPAM Tried To Take Over Email. Now SPAM Sites Are Invading The Web And Hurting Our Health.

Anyone with an email account has sadly had to learn to deal with email SPAM messages infesting their in box.  Each year the amount of SPAM, or Junk Mail, continues to rise.  But for the most part, we've learned to deal with these unwanted messages.  New software and filters are helping and people have become much more savvy these days about how to distinguish between legitimate and phony email.

But a more corrosive threat is starting to take over the Web: SPAM Sites, optimized by so-called "Black Hat" search engine optimizers, are gaming search engines like Google by building fake web sites and blogs.  They are spamdexing the Web. And many of them are targeting health search terms.

This is a particularly dangerous trend now that 8 out of 10 people are searching the Web to find health information.  That's because when you do a search on any of the major search engines that pride themselves on indexing the Web (ALL OF IT), chances are you will have to wade through lots of Web sites to find what you actually want.  It's the nature of the best with so many Web sites today, with millions more being added all of the time, and new software that makes it easy for anyone to create a site in seconds.  But it's also because many of the results being returned are junk, SPAM, or just trying to sell something.

It's demoralizing enough to see that there are 18,800,000 results when I search for hair loss on Google. (As if having to search for hair loss wasn't bad enough!).  But it is not helpful that so many of the results are returning links to Web sites created for the purpose of getting clicks or selling a product. What's more concerning is all this SPAM makes health seekers wonder: How do I know which sites/links I can trust?  Which ones are credible?  And which ones have been created by spammers.

Perhaps no topics get spammed more on the Web than searches related to sex and health.  There are now so many fake and phony health related Web sites it can be hard for anyone to find quality Web sites or know if they should trust the information from the site they are on. 

All this clutter and SPAM is creating an erosion of credibility. This is a real challenge to the rest of the legitimate and credible Web sites working so hard to offer legitimate content, quality resources and valuable services.  The good news is that there are also so many great health Web sites, and often times these legitimate sites will rank well on the first few listings for any given search query. The bad news is it is becoming increasingly difficult to know who the good guys are.

Squidoo Gets Banned
Thankfully there are continued attempts by companies like Google to tweak their process and algorithms to ban and block these types of Web sites.  For example, just this week there have been reports that Google is finally blocking Squidoo lenses from its search listings because so many of the pages on the site are created by spammers and search engine optimizers. (Here is one of thousands of examples on Squidoo).

If the news about Google is true, then this is a step in the right direction. But can technology really solve this problem alone?   With so many spammers and black hatters out there, can technology really protect us? Or are other approaches needed to help protect the Web from SPAM and guide us to quality content again. Are there collaborative solutions to help combat this challenge?

We'll be writing a lot more about this SPAM issue as much more progress needs to be made to protect the Web, especially from spam sites that target health topics.  In my next post I'll be writing some lessons learned about How To Spot A Spam Site.