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Google Blocks 'Optimized' Pages
Rhett Creighton writes "For the past few years, webmasters have found tricks that bring their page higher for a given keyphrase search. Google recently implemented a filter to block sites that appeared to be tricking it into gaining a higher ranking. This NYTimes article reports of angry retailers who are losing their businesses, while this article gives more technical conspiracy theories of what google is actually doing."
If the purpose of a search engine is to help us find the products/content we're looking for then why are they trying to filter out worthwhile search results? About 50% of the time when I'm searching, I AM looking for vendors of a product in order to do price comparisons. So, if Google turns their search engine into a search engine that ignores those types of search results then they've just moved out of the No.1 position in my favorite search engine list. Maybe I'm missing something....
The guitars sound good, now give me about 10db more on the cow bell.
Every month or so, Google updates its database again, and every time, webmasters all over the world whose pages happened to go lower in the rankings complain that Google is broken and the sky is falling. This time is no different, except that mainstream news has picked up the story. Here are a few facts to keep in mind:
1. You can't say with authority that "Google has implemented a filter." Google isn't talking about how their rankings work. The webmasters and SEO types are like astronomers trying to figure out how Google works by observing samples of results. Take everything they say as a theory and nothing more.
2. There's a fine line between making responsibly search-optimized pages and spamming Google, and many of the people who complain are on the spamming side of that line. If you look in the forums where SEO types (and spammers) hang out, 90% of the messages are complaining that their site has disappeared and Google is wrong. If you look in web development forums, 90% of the messages are from people excited to see their pages' position increase.
3. For every webmaster that complains about their site's Google position going down, there are one or more sites whose positions have gone up. Often they're equally deserving of the traffic.
4. There are strong rumors (and some statements from a Google representative) that suggest that this is the last major update to Google's database, and that incremental "freshbot" updates will continue from now on. If this is the case, it may only be a day or a week before your site changes position again, so why complain?
5. Most importantly, notice that it's always webmasters complaining. Never end-users. Guess which group Google considers its customers?
It's Slashdot's evil twin... SlashNOT
I for one really don't give a rip if retailers throw a hissy over this. When I search the web it's because I want information, not because I want to buy something.
If I want to buy something I use Froogle. That's what it's there for.
The real moral here is that if you're depending on your placement in a search engine for free advertising, you'd better have a backup plan.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Google - thanks abound from me. I personally find it distasteful when I'm searching for research on a particular topic. More times than not - most of the top listings are by an amazon or other shopping portal that has NOTHING to do with my search.
Yes, many businesses are being hurt by GOOGLE's policy - however, it is GOOGLE's search engine! They have done nothing wrong but try and give authentic results to their Web Surfing friends.
Given the underlying reason why google is a good search engine (leveraging the popularity of the site by others), I don't want "my" search engine to be fooled into giving me commercially-orientated results.
If Google has re-organised the page-ranking system to cut out the link-merchants, I give it an unreserved thumbs up
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
...is no substitute for a business plan.
So some people are trying to cheat the system, and Google is taking steps to prevent this. Good for them, I say. I'm tired of getting pages that appear to be legitimate, only to find that they're just redirect fillers.
As for Google's practices in general, retailers are free to moan and groan about their rankings, but there is no obligation for Google to specifically cater to their needs. If Google decided to change its algorithms, such that all links were turned alphabetically rather than by PageRank, they would be well within their rights to do so. Of course, I imagine that such a move would result in many people seeking other search engines soon enough.
Don't they realize that Google wasn't created for them? Rather, it is created for surfers. There is one surefire way to get noted on Google if your business depends on it: advertise. You get what you pay for.
Despite my personal pride in being one who tries to grasp a concept/issue via multiple sources from different perspectives, i just realized that the vast majority of my information these days funnels through google. And i know i am not alone.
I would wager google's potential control of information distribution and content filtering rivals that of major centralized information outlets like CNN or the NY times. Kinda unnerving.
From the second linked article:
An example for Google UK is the search for the word "shelving"... On the main Google search for the same phrase, the results return 1 site that sells shelving, 6 shopping portals, 2 Universities and 1 Amazon store. Yet previously these results showed 9 shelving suppliers.
What does this guy expect? He searches on a single word and expects that every result be a retailer? Why not add some extra terms, like "buy" or "seller" or "retail" after that, buddy?
Seriously, should I start crying foul when I search Google for "dog" and it returns information on breeds rather than specific pet-stores?
most of the non-/.-reading public hasn't heard of froogle...
Surely he is only missing something if he lives in North America as Froogle is pretty much useless to everyone else.
Warning! This post may contain a pun!
I have little sympathy for companies that get blocked because they set up lots pseudo-identical sites in an effort to garner better google restults.
No company that relies upon their website for business should fail to account for their google rankings. To not do so is dangerous. This means preparing one's site for googlebots and heeding it's terms and conditions.
Not that I'm saying it's not unfair that google wields this much power. But it does.
--- We have a pool and a pond, the pond would be good for you.
Lately some search results have been filled with spam pages designed purely for climbing up the page ranking scale on a site that may not offer the information you are looking for.
I think google should make a modification to the google bar so users can rank a sites relevancy.Kinda like StumbleUpon (I think thats the name).Users can weed out the spam results and we can get the great search results google once used to provide...
Google updates every month, and every month webmasters throw hissy fits over PR and SERPs.
I get SEO spam simply for being the technical contact for a couple of domains at work, and I will bet my bottom dollar that anyone who does business with those people will be wiped of the map come the next update.
By contrast, all the sites I manage still show up as usual. I've been no.1 on key terms for a while, simply 'cos the sites provide relevant, useful info in a well-structured manner, and doesn't mess around with Google.
One thing I am curious about is whether or not Stuart Langridge's accessible image replacement technique counts as an attempt at spamming Google: after all, it hides header text behind images...
Google needs to get off its laurels and start listening to its customers again.
When was the last time you PAID for a Google search? As far as I understand it "customers" pay for a product or service.
As well they should.
I HATE when I am trying to search for something, and just keep coming up with crap sites.
I do web design, and my customers keep asking me how to get further up in Google rankings. I always tell them the same thing- have good content, and get other legitimate sites to link to you.
Some of them have been using these services that set up the link farms, and I will be very happy when it goes away.
I would much rather have the REAL website be the basis for the ranking, not a bunch of crap.
No reason to lie.
Google doesn't force end users to use their search engine, they simply have become very popular due to the quality of their searches. I see nothing wrong with attempting to increase that quality by downranking sites attempting to trick their algorithm. They owe the end user nothing, and if their changes decrease the quality of results, the marketplace will decide on a different search engine. After all, those sites were creating an artificial value for themselves at the expense of other, more legitimate sites. If anything this will lead to the *actual* value of google sponsored matches, not an artificial one.
With the various search engines available, I wouldn't say google has a monopoly, and if there is a monoculture favoring google, it is because of end users choosing quality, not because people are forced to use google. I see nothing dangerous here. Google owes us (end users and webmasters alike) nothing not a specific ranking algorithm, not a free search service, nothing at all. If they have found ways to monetize the service they provide, all the better, because I am happy that the service exists and want it to remain around. For the record I don't work for Google, nor am I affiliated with it, and I am not running a website.
ACMD eht detaloiv evah uoy
What I'd love to see is Google block all those stupid search sites... you know the ones that make there google result look like an interesting page but when you click it you get a page that has 50% adverts and some search results for whatever you where searching for ...... those really bug me.
I've seen the online retailer rage first-hand...
It's thier own fault. I'm sorry. Google doesn't OWE them anything. They aren't paying google.. google is indexing the web, not promoting their business.
People who do all kinds of work and fuss over how to perfectly optimize their page so they will get a higher google ranking than all their competitors... they need to understand that there are no rules in the game they are playing.
IT's also common sense that, if Google is what makes or breaks your business, you should understand all the risks involved.
Google is a service that is, for the most part, free to those who benefit from it.
Somebody discovers that they can manipulate this service to increase their benefit.
The people who provide this (free) service chose to ignore those manipulations. Maybe they deliberately lower the ranking of some pages, to hear the whiny TFH crowd speak.
Then those same whiners--who contributed NOTHING to the process from which they benefit--scream for damages.
If someone invented a pill to make people immortal and one of these jerks didn't get his pill, these same folks would want the inventor jailed for murder.
Until you form a union and negotiate a contract with google--that includes a "past practices" clause, just STFU.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Seth Finkelstein has been posting a few theories lately on what Google is up to. (Also contains links to other articles.) He suspects they are using some sort of Bayesian filtering around the rule "If a simple search has spam-related keywords, penalize high-spam-scoring results" (spam being search-keyword spam on web pages -- not e-mail spam)
Easy to defeat a bayesian filter: use a sentence generator. Feed a few hundred mission statements and "about us" pages into a markov model and let it churn out babble. You're not really concerned with being 100% coherent, since none of your generated spam is actually on the site having its ranking pumped up. You just want uniqueness, the bane of any bayesian filter.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
I know p2p search is hopeless, but here's some ideas on how to do it anyways. I'll phrase it like an inductive proof: first make a node, then add a neighbor.
NODE - I'd use Lucene. Lucene is a traditional keyword search engine that is fast, lean, free and open. It's carried under the Apache Jakarta project, so it's not going anywhere. And, it's easy to develop with. Alternatively, any good search will do... you could probably bang something together with GNU shell utils.
NEIGHBOR - Turn search into a common TCP/IP protocol, a la SMTP, FTP, etc.. Telnet to port 534268 (the digits that most look like "SEARCH"), and have something like this:
If there are no results at that node, the server forwards you on:
So, you'd start by querying your own host's search-engine. Perhaps it would spider N-deep from what you browse, so it would perhaps have ready responses for many of your queries.
But your own node may not have the answer for you, so you forward on to the next. How does the forwarding table get setup? One way to do it would be by hand, but also, I imagine posting "known expert" lists to gnutella could help automate the process. A list would be a map of keywords to IPs. These lists wouldn't need to be too robust, as they'd serve to occasionally seed the network, not constantly sustain it.
Once you had a good forwarding table on your node, you'd have access to quite a large search DB. With 100 nodes in the search network, each using 1GB for its index, and 3:10 index to indexed ratio, that's 100*1GB*3.3=330GB of indexed text. Let's say the average webpage is 100KB (?), that's a total search DB size of 3.4M pages. Increase the number of nodes to 10,000 and increase each node's index size to 10GB, and you have 3,460,300,800 pages, which is just about equal to Google, which is currently at 3,307,998,701. 10k nodes happens to be about what distributed.net is running right now, and 10GB is getting cheaper by the minute. ;)
Rather gives lie to the assertion that "Marketing is a legitimate occupation," in my mind, when there's always some marketing industry apologist out there ready to defend Yet Another Slimy Marketing Tactic as "smart marketing."
Email was a wonderful thing until some cretins decided it was their god given right to fill the infrastructure so full of shit that it's becoming impossible to maintain and of much more limited use, all because they're so much more important that everyone else and want to hock their crap.
IRC was a wonderful thing until some other pack of cretins decided it was their god given right to deluge the infrastructure with shit, all because they're so much more important than everyone else and want to have their immature little pissing contests
And the web and the search engine concept was a wonderful thing until yet another pack of cretins decided it was their god given right to deluge THIS infrastructure with shit, because they believe that this great big network exists soley to promote their crap
So who gave them all the fucking right!? And why are these pieces of shit always the first to whine about how THEIR rights are being trodden on? I just wonder what sort of process makes these pricks honestly believe that such a beautiful and diverse resource is there for THEIR benefit and it's all fucking ME ME ME.
OK I can play ME ME ME too! I want to be able to browse the internet without your fucking product being shoved in my face!
I want to be able to communicate with my friends and colleagues over email without having hundreds upon hundreds of pieces of dreck advertising your disgusting crap shoved in my face!
I want to be able to use a realtime chat network without enduring splits and lags and security checks and masses of scans just because some braindead 12 year old moron got a bug up his ass about someone insulting him over this system!
Why is it that these days if you look at an IRC server or an SMTP server, 90% of the source is a ghastly and hugely tangled mess of code that's just there to keep the 0.001% of pricks who want to ruin it for everyone else out, and managing those systems turns from a straightforward and communal activity into an arcane battleground where everyone is an enemy? Just try scaling that up tenfold for Google and their golden egg laying goose that every selfish twat wants to work how THEY want it to work and fuck everyone else.
Argh... I would be honoured to shake the hands of the techs running Google, and good on them for actually fighting back against these fucks. And as for these cretins listed above, WHEN THE REVOLUTION COMES WE WILL MAKE SAUSAGES OUT OF YOUR FUCKING ENTRAILS (to borrow a nice little expression from someone by the alias of TRASG0)
Unbe-freaking-lievable what weird ideas of entitlement people have when it comes to free services.
In any case it's simply very poor business sense to rely solely on being listed in the top 10 Google results for the search "fruit basket" to get any business.
I wish google would do something about this type of crap in search results. Search I used was: google search
It really pisses me off when half my results are links to other search engines, that never seem to have any information about what I'm looking for.
Casca
On the other hand, when IE first appeared it really was something of a joke. It was just a rebranded version of Spyglass Mosaic that Microsoft hurriedly licensed when they realized that they'd ignored the Internet for too long. Lots of silly bugs and poorly designed features.
But that's all beside the point. I wasn't talking about the browser war -- I never even mentioned browsers. IE played a part in destroying Netscape, but only a small part. Netscape's main source of revenue was supposed to be on the server side. This was true even before Microsoft destroyed the market for browsers by making IE a freebie. But once Microsoft became a competitor, Netscape had no hope of selling its server software or integration services.
I remember a news article, '97 or thereabouts, about Netscape and MS competing for a major integration contract. (Can't remember the name of the customer.) MS, being late to the party, didn't even jump in until Netscape almost had the whole thing wrapped up. All the specifics had been negotiated and agreed to, and only the final formalities were left. Then MS beseiged the customer with a massive sales pitch, a huge and expensive prototype, and of course a lowball bid. (When you have MS's revenue streams, you can afford to take a huge loss just to get a long-term customer.) Netscape never knew what hit them.
That sort of thing explains most of MS's dominance of the software market. But it doesn't work against somebody like Google, which essentially depends on millions of small customers who can't be easily turned.
google is useful and successful and praised by its satisfied users because it shows them the pages they want to see.
Anything done by a page author to try to improve the page's rank -- anything -- is an attempt to show the end user what the page author wants to be seen, not what the end user wants to see.
Those using the web for commercial purposes can't help but want to deny this reality somehow. They can try, but as long as google is google it will try to to thwart them, and they really shouldn't complain. (Though of course they will...)
People who run e-commerce sites, and the "search engine optimizers" they sometimes employ, tacitly assume that the only possible query surfers could have in mind is "Where can I buy X?" And they then proceed to get badly excited that google is "failing to return relevant results" if it dares to return highly-rated links that merely provide information about X.