An offensive picture depicting Michelle Obama as an ape has proven the Streisand Theory again over the last week, but in all the coverage little to nothing has been said about the splogs hosting the image.

For those who missed the story, Google came under fire when the offensive image appeared as the top result in Google Images when searching for Michelle Obama. This happened not once, but twice. The first time, Google banned the site hosting the image on the basis that it was hosting malware, even though (as Search Engine Land pointed out) it apparently wasn’t.

The second time (and seemingly one day later) another site hosting the image took first position. That site has since removed the image, saying (per Google Translate):

“I am very sorry for this article, and that this is the program automatically issued a document from the article. Do not the subject of race and politics make the discussion too radical and sincere hope that the world is very peaceful.”

The emphasis is mine, but it’s a key point: the second site, like the site before it (both hosted on Google’s Blogger) are automated splogs. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes or a statement like this to prove the point either: visiting either site clearly shows that both are splogs.

So how does Google reconcile its statements about the image?

After removing the first image:

“Google views the integrity of our search results as an extremely important priority. Accordingly, we do not remove a page from our search results, or images from our Google Images results, simply because the content is in very poor taste or because we receive complaints concerning it.”

and on a landing page for an ad apologizing when it reappeared on the second site:

Search engines are a reflection of the content and information that is available on the Internet. A site’s ranking in Google’s search results relies heavily on computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page’s relevance to a given query

It’s more than a bit rich to cite the integrity of Google’s search results when in both cases the image was hosted on splogs that were not only hosted on Google’s Blogger, but also showing Google Adsense Ads.

But it gets worse, because at least one of the two sites has undertaken a massive amount of link spamming that led to the top result in Google Images to begin with.

Here’s the incoming links count for the second site (453,000 incoming links)

I don’t believe that for one minute that Google should be censoring images such as this in Google Images; once you start censoring some, it sets a dangerous precedent. But likewise it’s not censorship when you ban a site for splogging, one that in this case is also supporting itself with link spamming.

Google’s Blogger Content Policy:

Spam: Spam takes several forms in Blogger, all of which can result in deletion of your account or blog. Some examples include creating blogs designed to drive traffic to your site or to move it up in search listings and posting comments on other people’s blogs just to promote your site or product.

Supporting Blogger’s Terms of Use:

Violation of any of the foregoing, including the Blogger Content Policy (http://www.blogger.com/content.g), may result in immediate termination of this Agreement

Or how about Google’s Quality Guidelines for Webmasters?

* Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.”

* Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”

* Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

Blogger has long been a hot bed for splogging and yet as the years have passed, Google has done seemingly very little to nothing about the issue. Surely the embarrassment caused by these splogs should be used a wake up call for Google to finally take some sort of action.

The Michelle Obama Offensive Image Story: Why Isn’t Anyone Talking About The Splogs Hosting The Image? is a post from: The Inquisitr

The whole thing started when Jody Rosen over at Slate discovered an article of his reproduced nearly verbatim in a weekly newspaper from Montgomery County, Texas. The Bulletin, he explains, made some minor modifications — but largely just lifted his copy and put it under its own staff member’s byline.

Rosen investigated further and found chunks of content from two other publications within the same story — and it didn’t stop there. Some creative Googling uncovered article after article in the Bulletin matching previously published stories, almost word-for-word.

The ordeal gets more interesting as it goes on. Rosen ended up having a couple of conversations with the publisher, but never got a real answer. The publisher, he says, stopped returning his calls — and now, the Bulletin‘s web site has mysteriously disappeared.

In his engaging, funny, and well-written account, Rosen takes us through his mixed emotions: Could this have been a big joke? Could such a paper — one purporting to have been around since 1969 — actually have built itself on such journalism practices? Or are those practices, Rosen suggests, perhaps not as evil as they seem? Maybe, he suggests, the Bulletin is “bringing guerilla-style 21st-century content aggregation to 20th-century print media.”

The Inquisitr has certainly seen its share of discussions about the line between 2.0-style blogging and good old-fashioned splogging. This is the first time, though, I’ve seen the same kind of argument come up in the world of print. Sure, at a glance, any journalist would label the Bulletin as a plagiarist based on Rosen’s discoveries — but could it, in fact, be doing the same thing sometimes argued as acceptable within web publishing? Maybe it’s just a step ahead of the rest of the newspaper publishing industry. Where does one draw the line?

The case does raise some interesting questions. In the end, though, I think most would agree to call it content theft. The Web may have loosened some rules and opened some opportunities for sharing, but there’s a difference between excerpting with due credit and downright ripping off. Lifting someone else’s words and passing them off as your own is plain ol’ plagiarism, no matter how you spin it — or how many different sources you combine.

That’s my take, and you can quote me on it…though you’d better properly attribute the words.

Aggregation vs. Plagiarism: A Modern Problem Hits an Old Medium is a post from: The Inquisitr

The blog at seriouslytech.com (no hard links from me) republishes content in full from the following sites: All Things D, arstechnica, BoomTown, Carnage4Life, Futuristic Play, Jemima Kiss, Lifehacker, Louis Gray, Mashable, Om Malik, readwriteweb, Robert Scoble, Ryan Spoon, TechCrunch, Techdirt and The Inquisitr. There are also other sites ripping even more content as well: seriouslymedia.com, seriouslymac.com, seriouslypolitics.com and seriouslywallstreet.com.

Until yesterday the SeriouslyTech site republished posts with no link back to the original site, and it was only after I mentioned this privately were links implemented to the sites featured, but even then it was only links to Feedburner feed entries, not the site itself. Notably linking to a site doesn’t grant full reprint rights to a blog despite what some in the spam blogging community like to claim.

Teare has explained to me privately the current status of the “project” and what it aims to achieve, but asked that the whole discussion remain off the record, so I cant actually print his defense (not that there could ever be a strong defense for splogging). This is not a Feedreading product like Feedly or a meme service like Onespot: at the moment it’s a WordPress blog ripping content from other people without permission and not even giving due credit back. It’s a number of blogs that are being fed into FriendFeed, that offer commenting on other people’s full content, and even goes as far as offering buttons for the splog entries to be submitted to social voting sites.

I’ve met Keith before and he’s always struck me as being a smart guy, so who ever convinced him that doing this is a good thing (he’s not doing this alone, but it’s all in his name) needs to be quickly purged. I’m sorry Keith, but I’ve gone after companies and people for far less than this (Shyftr comes to mind). What ever this site aims to be in the future, it needs to die now before you start getting the lawyer letters from the very annoyed people you are currently stealing from.

Why Has Keith Teare Gone Into Spam Blogging? Seriously Dumb is a post from: The Inquisitr