I am often looking up manuals and reviews for music equipment, some of it pretty esoteric.
Without fail, particularly on the more uncommon/unpopular things, there are tons of links that show up to blog posts, user-manual downloads, and such.
However, visiting one of these links gives absolutely no content. They are usually filled with spam links with sort-of-related titles.
My question is, did people actually spend the time to build static urls for these pages, or are they somehow generated dynamically by my search parameters? I’m sure it’s the first option and not the second, but I’m baffled at how these 100% content-free pages always end up near the top of my search results.
The kinds of things you are probably referring to are either content farms or autoblogs/automatically generated sites. The former are typically made up of cheaply sourced (often stolen) articles - either by paying for bundles of existing articles, hiring sweatshop workers to write them, or just scraping them from article directories and blogs. The latter use algorithms to generate gibberish, or crank out many permutations of a small number of original texts. In both cases the pages and sites themselves are created by the thousands using purpose-built software.
Merely creating sites full of (vacuous) content doesn’t get them in your search results though.They use various spam and black-hat “marketing” techniques to bump the bogus sites up towards the top of the search results - forum and blog spam, roping the gullible into various convoluted schemes. Usually that’s ineffective (Google is generally pretty good at detecting and rejecting it) but the sheer number of idiots doing this kind of thing means a few of them make it through. What you’re seeing in the results are the few that Google missed.
If you want to PM me a link or two I’ll take a look and give you a more specific answer. Please don’t post links here, spam attracts spam.