Google’s SPAM Filter Missed This One

Sunday, May 20th, 2012

As we all know, Google has been doing it’s best to crack down on Web Spam. They’ve lauched Panda, Penguin and various other nuanced algorithm updates to improve the quality of its search results. So that naturally means that Spammers and black-hat SEOs have to adopt more sophisticated techniques, right? Not necessarily.

Here comes the geeky part of my personal life that I try to not to broadcast too loudly to the public: I am an avid WWE fan and have been since I was a kid. And tonight is one of WWE’s most popular Pay-Per-Views, “Over The Limit.” Before placing my order, I wanted to check out the final match list for tonight’s show . So, I turned to my friend Google and searched for “WWE Over The Limit”.
WWE, "Over The Limit" search

In the above image, you can see that Google has indexed roughly 11.5 MM Web pages that are relevant in one way or another to term “wwe over the limit”.

Furthermore, Google Trends shows that term “wwe over the limit” has been trending upwards, which means that people are most likely discussing it online.

In fact, so much conversation that it’s one of the top trending topics on Twitter:

So, given that Over The Limit is a legitimate current event with significant Web gravitas, you would think that the first Google result for term “wwe over the limit” would be a highly valuable page. Check out the search results below. You’ll notice that Google returns News results first, because Google recognizes that OTL is a popular current event.

WWE "Over The Limit" screenshot

However, upon click-thru of the first news result, http://www.soompi.com/news/wwe-over-the-limit-2012-live-stream-ppv-wrestling-may-20-2012, you’re taken to a page that employs the most obvious case of Web SPAM I’ve seen in quite some time. Are you kidding me? The author of this article didn’t even try to trick Google in to returning it as a search result. Folks, this is as flagrant as they come.

"Over The Limit" spam

This type of search result leads me to wonder:

How much revenue will this Web SPAM generate for the rogue SEO that wrote it?
How does a Website’s communication policy allow random writers to publish articles without any type of quality check?
How in the world did this page make its way to the #1 search result within Google News results?
Are News results ripe for black-hats and spammers to take advantage of?
How did this get past Google’s SPAM triggers?
Does Google identify SPAM as it indexes pages or is quality assesed post-crawl?