Jason Calacanis, as he is prone to do, gave an interesting and controversial keynote address at Affiliate Summit this week. Calacanis who owns the human search engine Mahola railed against the spam from affiliate marketers and how that spam sites are clogging up the search engine results pages.
While the majority of affiliate marketers were affronted by Calacanis’s comments I must say that I agreed with him on this. Some verticals like hotels, mortgages, insurances are awash with spammed sites and a search engine results are full of duplicate, thin, affiliate or MAFA (made for adsense) sites. It is a bad user experience and it will impact how the average user conducts searches.
Now I don’t put all the blame on the affiliate marketers. Nothing has contributed more to online spam than Google Adsense. It’s Google’s dirty little secret, but if Google wanted to clean up its search engine results all it needs to do is remove MAFA sites. That will clean up web spam quicker than any speech by Jason Calacanis.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
David – this is an interesting post, but there is one thing I struggle with, with respect to Calcanis – are search results pages really ‘clogged’ with spam sites?
Is there spam on search results pages? Absolutely. But isn’t it a severe overstatement to claim that spam is clogging search results? If that was really the case, wouldn’t the search engines be in a lot worse shape than they are if that were true?
How much of this is spam, and how much is Calcanis trying to pump up his search engine?
I don’t think that every vertical is full of spam,. but the Google pages for anything financial (loans, credit, insurance) or travel related (hotels, etc) I think are overrun with very thin affiliate or MAFA sites.
Yes Calacanis has a vested interested in his “partner” Google continuing to be filled with Spam as it will possible drive users to his site.
David