Abusing Google Trends

This is a little stale, but still bothers me. Michael Arrington wrote a post about big name sites that are using their general relevance and Google Trends to snag some extra traffic by posting hastily about the trend words regardless of the relevance to the general content of the site. I have been looking for the last few days and no major sites (that I read anyway) have been showing up in the trends that they don't belong in, but I will most definitely keep an eye out for odd posts from blogs I read.

One site that has consistently been in the top of the blogs that appears to be specifically gaming the system is http://aliaffiliate.com/. I don't want to help their Google juice, but man splogs like this and http://pictures.smashits.com/ seem to be abusing this system extensively. You would think that smarties at Google would have away of trending how often your site posts a trended search as a post.

The algorithm isn't completely broken though. Greenbaglady.blogspot.com is the blog of the actual Green Bag lady, and is the number 2 result for blogs on that story.

Any where there is a buck to be made I suppose, but still just fills the internet with crap that links to other crap with no value added, no thought, and it only serves to get shady individuals more ill gotten gains. I imagine bonnet operators also engaged in splogging as a hobby between writing quick attacks for newly published vulnerabilities, and crushing baby kittens.