A spam site is, by definition, a page which only purpose is to get a high position on the so called SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages). That is made by using certain methods of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Not every SEO method is created to develop spam sites, since SEO originally primes for the optimization of the page in order to boost the number of visits (primarily, focusing on the quality of the content), but some of these methods (such as site spamming) are not considered a 100% honest by a great part of the internet community. Spam sites generally are pages with no or little content but an encrypted list of keywords that the search engine robots read, considering it a good page. This evidently would result in a weakening in the quality of searches, since spam sites may generate a lot of results but actually holding a very poor content.

By Google's standpoint, there would be no advantages in starting a witch-hunt against spam sites, not to mention that it would be worthless. Any spammer webmaster could replace a banned spam site by another 10 in a question of hours, while Google would take a lot longer to tell apart spam sites from real, content-based websites. Truth is that Google is not interested in cleaning the SERPS results to deliver more accurate, specific results. That's not Google's real business. Otherwise, Google's technology would present at least a dozen of good solutions to ignore spam sites (since banning would be a bad option, as Google politics of being always the "nice guy" of the internet would not allow this). By just ignoring spam sites on SERPS, Google would keep its reputation while ignored sites would be defenseless, with no space for claiming any rights, beside new spammers (or re-spammers) would be discouraged.

Contrariwise, Google isn't interested in good and clean search results. Perhaps it started as a plain search engine, Google took a different route from its competitors (such as Yahoo, AltaVista, or Microsoft) by developing the Adsense-Adwords program. Advertising is today what really matters for Google. Clicks, visits and numbers, no matter the quality of the content.

So, if there were more and more spam sites and the so called spam comments, and such sites were included in the Adsense-Adwords program, the only consequence (besides a content that would be increasingly weaker) would be more and more clicks for advertising. More than generating such clicks, this situation wouldn't characterize any faults by Google, since the responsible for the low quality content in the eyes of the users would be the spammers, and not Google. Low quality websites populated by spammers that consequently are also populated by more spammers create a chain effect that fits exactly to what Google really intents.

Other search engines feel defenseless against this situation. Today, Google rankings influence directly on nearly any other search engines such as MSN and Yahoo, forcing them to adopt structures and functioning very similar to Google's, while they are oppressed by the methods of the giant website.

Comment spam is another common strategy that webmasters use to inflate their visits. Comment spam is done with text (or sometimes just a sentence) published on the site (most likely manually) to ask for a link back.

Rumors around the internet say that Google would be planning to adopt a new method in order to fight comment spam, by omitting pages with the anchor tags used to allow comment spam from Page Rank calculations. It may seem a controversial idea, but it also may be only a bluff from Google, since the Page Rank system is about to be replaced by a new one, called Trust Rank. Google in fact doesn't care if people are being satisfied with the results of their searches. Once they reach a page where there's an Adsense-Adword program affiliated, that's fair enough. Google has little to worry about some kind of threat to its plans, since the status of biggest search engine of the internet (and one step to dictate parameters for other search engines to follow) gives it full credit to the million of users.

Google incomes in 2004 were from $ 399 million, 278% more than the previous year.

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