Webspammers are creative people. They really are. They work really hard to circumvent Google’s algorithm changes aiming to block them, sometimes they don’t succeed, sometimes they do. But on the long term Google will take notice of their change in strategies and will change its search algorithms accordingly.

Apparently, webspammers have realized that their attempts to spam the search results are futile (on the long run), and they have decided to spam Google’s shopping results. As of today, this is still an issue and Google has not yet addressed it.

So, what are they doing?

Well, as mentioned above, they are spamming the shopping results. Apparently, they are submitting (through Google Base) a list of products that they don’t have at a very low price, just to lure visitors into visiting their sites and clicking on their ads. This happened to me yesterday. I was looking for a laptop called Vaio PRO 13 (which is a Sony Laptop, now discontinued), I searched on Google Shopping, and I found one that was very cheap, and apparently it was new. I clicked on the link and the moment I did that I realized what was going on. It was a half-baked WordPress website listing many laptops for very cheap. So, and just for fun, I added the product to my shopping cart and I proceeded to checkout, and, surprise surprise, the webspammer they claimed that they were having problems with their checkout process, and that I should try later. Of course, all the pages were filled with ads. So, the point of this whole thing is to get someone to click on an ad, and not to make him buy something.

I hope Google takes notice of this practice soon – because it’s very annoying and it’s affecting the integrity of their shopping results.

Google, by the way, is having an OK year so far. Its stock has increased 6% from January 1^st, not much by the industry standards, but better nothing.

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