The New York Times is running an interesting article this morning that talks about a couple of Microsoft researchers who think they've figured out the search engine spam problem.  According to the article:

Tens of thousands of junk Web pages, created only to lure search-engine users to advertisements, are proliferating like billboards strung along freeways. Now Microsoft researchers say they have traced the companies and techniques behind them.

A technical paper published by the researchers says the links promoting such pages are generated by a small group of shadowy operators apparently with the acquiescence of some major advertisers, Web page hosts and advertising syndicators.  Source:  The New York Times

The report, which is available in PDF format, makes some pretty broad claims according to The Times.  The majority of these spammy websites are generated by a few people?  And two hosting companies handle most of them?

If that's the case, we can end search engine spam right now!

But unfortunately, we all know that's not the case.  Sure… this is some interesting information and I bet the information in the report will be used to shut down a hefty chunk of spam sites.  So in that regard it's great news.

But here's the thing about those spammy sites:  For every one that you shut down, a new one will probably spring up.  And even shutting down the thousands of sites uncovered by the report won't stop these folks from coming up with new ways to do the same thing.  So while it's a step in the right direction, I wouldn't go as far as to say this report is the cure-all for spam websites.

A couple of other interesting things to note:

• The Microsoft researchers made a point of mentioning that Google's Blogger platform was used by more of these spam sites than any other.  That may be true.  Heaven knows there are a lot of spammy blogspot.com sites.  But I'm willing to bet there's another reason that point got pulled out of the report.  Haha.
• The New York Times article says, and I quote:
• "The practice [of search engine spamming] has proved to be a vexing problem for the major search companies, which struggle to prevent both spammers and companies specializing in improving legitimate clients’ Web traffic — a field known as search-engine optimization — from undermining their page-ranking systems."

Is that what we're doing now?  Undermining search engine page-ranking systems?  Hmmm.  I have this whole SEO thing all wrong then.  I'm going to have to go back to school and learn this stuff all over again.

I wonder if I can find a good blog or two on the subject…