It’s a wonderful Memorial Day weekend in New York (see the photo at the bottom of my post to figure out where i am as i write this) and something curious came up today that highlights an issue with web content and search engines.

Publishers are enabling their sites to include social media (you see it everywhere now, from the New York Times and Washington Post to People Magazine, Us Magazine and pretty much any publication I go to has a “share” button on most pages, at the very least). However, as someone pointed out to me, today, the web is filled with “trolling” individuals leaving spammy content, ESP on magazine websites.

In enabling Social Media are we also enabling, to some extent, spam?

The reason I bring it up – Search Engines surpress spammy content it crawls, because it leads to a poor search experience. However websites are adding social media, at the same time, because their audiences want it and it can and does drive traffic to the site.

To me, that puts publishers, and Search Engines, Google in particular, in an already conflicted relationship by what Google News is doing to some Newspaper publishers.Incidently, earlier this week Eric Schmidt, who runs Google, admitted Google had toyed with the idea buying a major Newspaper (New York Times?).