Barry Schwartz has posted a great video on Cartoon Barry of Matt Cutts at the Web 2.0 Expo.

During this video, Matt explains to the audience his definition of “web spam.” He also explains that white hat SEO is not a form of spam, but gives several examples of spam on the net.

The first thing that I found interesting about his presentation is that all of the spam examples he shows are on-page related. He does not mention link building to boost rankings. You do not want to give the thief the combo to your safe I guess, but it also shows Google’s willingness to only educate in a way that benefits them. Google wants to educate on spam, but they also don’t want to build a new breed of spammer.

The second really interesting thing I took from the video was his definition of spam:

“Web spam is when someone tries to cheat, or take short cuts, or breaks the rules so that their website shows up higher than it deserves to show up.”

He also goes on to point out that the main purpose behind web spam is monetary.

With these concepts in mind I have to ask, “Is Google the king of the web spammers?”

Lets look at a page:

These are the first results I find when I type in computer. One can argue the searchers motive when searching this term, but more cases than not it will be to look for a computer to purchase. For an even more blatant ranking issue see the SERPs for “.”

I find my first listing, worth around 55% of the traffic for the term according to Aaron Wall, to be a Wikipedia entry.

Does this page deserve to be at the top of the rankings. Probably not. And as marketers we know that this is just one case where Wikipedia and other powerhouse domains rank for terms that they may not be the most relevant for.

Google’s current algo seems to support their ascension in the rankings, this puts Wikipedia’s dominance of the rankings in the area of “taking short cuts” to rank higher than they deserve.

Pages coming off of Wikipedia’s domain will rank higher, because they are coming off of Wikipedia’s domain.

But Wikipedia does not have any monetary benefit from these rankings, so does that make it less spammy?

No.

Because Google profits from these rankings.

The more informative domains that rank in the top 10 for major keywords, the more advertisers will need to look to Adwords as a means to gain search traffic.

I originally thought the “Dewey” update was Google attempting to purge the SERPs of overstuffed Wikipedia rankings and the like, but the current SERPs show that this is simply not true.

Now I am not a proponent of spam. I like a relevant, clean index as much as the next guy, but lets not label on thing as being dangerous and cheating, while letting something else slide.

Level the playing field.

Or is the Adwords revenue simply too tasty.