Anyone else notice the amount of junk you find on search engines these days?  Do you know how to get a web page up to the top in the search engines?  If you have a product on a page and you want to sell it, but there is already a lot of competition out there, do you know how to compete with them?

Unfortunately a lot of people do know how to compete with an already entrenched product on the web, create web pages about that product, and lots of them.  Right at this moment, tens of thousands of web designers are creating hundreds of thousands of web pages about some product they're supposed to help sell in the hopes that by introducing a thousand web pages about the same subject, at least a few of them will do well in the search engines.  Further, by having them link back and forth, they are creating their own web of pages that may give themselves link popularity.

So imagine that there are 1,000,000 different products looking to be sold on the web.  Imagine company B wants his products to be above company A.  Company B sees that Company A has 100 links from people who like his product and about 35 pages on Company A's website.  Company B decides that he'll create 100 pages about his product, then pay a web designer to create 300 websites giving 300 links to his product's web page.

Six months or so goes by, now Company B is above Company A.  Company A knows he has a better product, but now hes doing less sales and doesn't understand why hes on page 2 and a bunch of gibberish pages are now on page 1 selling company B's product.  Company A hires a new, less scrupulous web designer (unfortunately like myself :() who explains the system.  Now Company A, through outsourcing to Thai web developers who work for pennies on the hour, has 600 websites giving 600 more links on top of his original valid 100 links.

Of course, now Company B has to compete, and launches more websites.  Oh, Google devalues multiple links from the same subnet? (that means if you use the same or similar IP address Google will reduce and reduce the amount of link popularity those sites give you) Thats easy, you just buy several of those 10 bucks a year web hosting companies and spread them out.  Oh, Google doesn't like duplicate content?  A savvy programmer can write a program that searches the search engines for the keywords they want to succeed, grabs the most successful pages, and pulls pieces of their content to create gibberish that does very well on the search engines.

Its disgusting, and I think its ruining the internet.  At one point in time, before I really knew better, I programmatically created over 7 million pages, launching several thousand websites simultaneously.  I didn't really think that I was creating junk for the search engines, they were meant to be placeholders as our business model took off and our content developers wrote valid, interesting content to fill the pages.  It proved to be successful, but I had to take it down because I came the realization I could never come up with the amount of content to fill all the pages.  The business model itself wasn't necessarily bad, but the pre-creation of pages that would be there after it became successful probably was.

Look at a site like travelnice.com, its created dozens of websites that are primarily selling the same product, essentially making it so that many searches for Las Vegas travel related things will end up not giving you multiple choices, no, rather it gives you multiple ways of "how do you want to buy from travel nice today?"  I mention travelnice because its a company I'm expected to outdo.  But where will it stop?  Is there an alternate way to outdo someone besides creating mass amounts of junk?  More relevant links on existing real sites would do well to help, but not enough IMO.  Too bad DMOZ never quite took off the way in the way Google did, a human edited search engine might be just the ticket.

How can it be solved?  I don't know.  IMO, google with its immense resoruces needs to hire a team of about 10-20 people, and put 90 day bans on any website that participates in such a way.  Use a computer algorithm to monitor competitive keyword areas, the strike team begins doing searches in that category, banning each and every site (just the 90 day bans) that uses this despicable practice  until the returned results end up clean.  Check back again in 90 days, if they haven't removed themselves from the network of junk, give the site the Google kiss of death, permaban.

Make it very clear via press releases what is going on, any website that values its internet business will close down their network of sites, and, I believe, the net will be much cleaner for it.