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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."
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.
did you read the article?
this is an instance where one company has fouled up the search results. google's policies state to not do that, and if you do, you may be removed from search results.
vodka, straight up, thank you!
Google tries to find a formula that gets you the best result for what you're searching for. Some web site owners try to figure out this formula in order to make their page show up in the search resuls when it shouldn't (e.g. by having words in the URL or within certain tags on the page -- rather than by having content relevant to that topic). This makes Google less useful (including for the purpose you describe) and so Google is "demoting" pages which show signs of using these tricks. This tug-of-war has been going on as long as there have been internet search engines. The difference now is that Google accounts for so much of the searches on the net that getting a lower rank in Google can have a huge effect on a site's traffic and so people freak out about it.
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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.
Google will not be hurting the "small, no-name individual", they will be hurting the companies that do nothing but set up spam-filled door pages for products and services that have nothing to do with what you are searching for.
My user number is prime. Is yours?
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.
I think that'd be cool, or at least have an option for it. Googling for information about things like video cards is almost impossible because all the links are to stores.
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?
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
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 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.
Read the article. The company set up dozens of websites in order to get themselves in the top ranks of google - as in, all of the top 10 that you would see on google would in actual fact *be the same company*.
That acn hardly be considered a situation in which you can price-compare. Google is simply fixing the problem.