SearchWiki is being spammed a lot – is this spam just for the minority of users who actually view SearchWiki comments or is there an SEO golden goose to be found in Google’s foray into social search?
Before you get too excited about this, let me start off by summarising things:
Spamming SearchWiki is not going to help your rankings.
To be brutally frank, there is not much more to say on the matter either. I covered SearchWiki in relative detail back when it was first launched and nothing much has changed since then, except for the spam.
There are plenty of examples available – do a simple search for[
The resulting page is awash with spam:
I think it is fair to suggest that at least one of those comments is spam. The question remains, is it doing any good?
Well, there is always the chance that a user will do what we have just done, and then will manually transcribe the link, but I think that is far from a low hanging fruit. More users might check to see how others have rated the site (so, for example, 13 people have promoted this result and 8 have deleted it), which could be both a brand protection and a marketing issue, but are the spammers affecting the index, outside of their own personal search SERPs?
As I said when we discussed the launch, we have started a rather simplistic test for this – a page with no links to it at all will be added to a set of SearchWiki personalised results and, if it appears in the main results pages, we will know that Google is looping this data back in. Well, we have done this and we have watched the traffic (us!) flow in with a referrer of Google, but a fortnight later the test subdomain is still not indexed in Google.
Obviously this could be for a variety of reasons and we cannot rule out a false negative, but I feel relatively confident that, if you are purely trying to improve your rankings, spamming SearchWiki is not the answer.
As an aside, I do not personally use Google whilst logged in as a rule, so I looked at a few different search terms whilst preparing this post. My favourites include TechCrunch’s porn spam and a smaller search agency who simply had the comment: "a company that we have used pervioulsy". Possibly one of the least telling recommendations of all time, unless the typo was deliberate?
Tags: Google, personalised search