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For me the key property that defines spam is that it is unsolicited. I'm the one going to Google to receive a dose of that "scraped content with ads", they don'

For me the key property that defines spam is that it is unsolicited. I'm the one going to Google to receive a dose of that "scraped content with ads", they don't come and bug me with it. For the same reason, all the content this guy is ranting against is not spam either. I'm free to ignore all those eHow pages (actually some of them are not that bad) and referral sites and quirky apps that people write. It only turns into spam when so much dark SEO has been applied to it that it turns up in search-engine results for which it should have been irrelevant.

Psyonic 17y ago
But applying all that dark SEO is basically the point. Why else would a crappy $5 article written by an English-challenged Indian show up on the front page of any search result? It's all about gaming Google, Yahoo, and/or Bing. As has been described by others, since it's all about making ad-revenue, the article is SUPPOSED to be bad enough that they'll click on the ads to find what they are actually looking for.