Does Google Finance open the doors to blog spam?
Google just launched their new Google Finance service. One of the unique features that differentiates it from Yahoo! Finance is the “blog posts” aggregation. The first symbol look-up I did, GOLD, listed this under their blog posts. Splog or not? You decide.
Blog spam aside, it is nice to see Google giving equal oppurtunity time to blogs. I am very curious to see what effect this could have on financial markets. On the other hand, it may open these bloggers to scrutiny (from the SEC) they would rather avoid.
I wonder if they learned anything from the release of Google Base… If Google’s builds it, they (spammers) will spam it.
Comment by Joe — March 21, 2006 @ 10:20 pm
How weird! I was just looking up the gold price on Google earlier, and I ran into that exact page by accident!
Comment by Chris — March 22, 2006 @ 6:13 pm
You make a great point about the SEC. When I signed in to my blog statistics on Tuesday, I was amazed at the traffic increase. Come to find out, several of my posts on specific stocks were clicked-through from Google Finance. My traffic has increased two-fold over the past several days. I don’t know if this will backfire in the future but I’m loving it right now! I will use Google Finance to my advantage as I did with my latest blog post today on SWN. We’ll see how it works out.
Comment by Chris — March 23, 2006 @ 12:21 pm
A little late getting in on this thread (just discovered your blog from a link to your plentyoffish interview)…
I also noticed a huge spike in one of my blogs that covers a product with the same name as its company - aqnd traced it to incoming traffic from Google Finance..
However that traffic crashed to a halt after a few days and then I noticed my blog had disappeared entirely from both the Google and Google Blog search engines!
However a very similar (and competing) product’s blog I have, hosted at that same site in a different subdomain, is still in the Google search index.
Actually those blogs of mine *are* autogenerated, like the spammy Gold one you linked to above, but my blogs are much cleaner with less intrusive ads and imo do have some value - in fact I see many repeat visitors coming in from my.msn and my.yahoo, indicating they’ve subscribed to those blogs’ RSS feeds…
However one good lesson learned is now I know that if a subdomain gets deindexed, it doesn’t appear to affect any of the other subdomains. That site’s home page is a PR 5 and all other (similarly autogenerated) blogs are still indexed with PR…
Dunno how mine got deleted and that Gold one is still around today - maybe someone “complained” or maybe Google is eventually sifting through the blog results that appear.
Since I always try to get good, non spammy results when harvesting blog posts for my aggregator sites, I know that Google is on an uphill battle if they hope to keep spam out of their Finance page blog sections. (and note my aggregator sites only publish other blog posts’ summaries, with links to the original post without a nofollow tag).
After seeing the traffic jump to that one blog, I was tempted to create a Finance-only farm of blogs. But decided that might not be such a great idea after having that one deindexed.
Just my 2 cents. Great post and blog here, btw. Am subscribing to your feed now.
Comment by Steve — March 30, 2006 @ 10:04 am