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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."
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)
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If this stops the hundred odd spam sites coming up every time in now what seems to be every time I search fo a query that involves a dictionary word, then as a veteran web surfer, I'm all for it. But there'll always be a way around the filter, take it a day, a week, a month, a year. Things really can only get worse.
I wrote a small software app for a the company I work for, and someone linked to it from a discussion forum.
.exe file.
That gave that name of that program xxxxx.exe 1 hit on google. About 3 days later a search for the xxxxx.exe provided 3 hits, two of them were porn sites that somehow harvested the name of our
While it's not a huge deal, I e-mailed Google and heard nothing for 4 days. I didn't expect a response and told them that in my e-mail. However then I recieved a personalized (not a form) e-mail regarding my comments and that they'd take the issue seriously.
24 hours later they were able to filter out these porn sites that were harvesting new terms that appeared in Google.
I gotta say props out to the boys there, it's one classy establishment.
Olagam
The free search engine that listed me for free is no longer paying off! Waaaaaa! Waaaaaa!
I for one welcome the change. Too many times have 20 of the top 30 links taken you two one site, but camafloged to google somehow as to look seperate. I experieced this painfully while looking for ringtones for my cellphone.
Google is first and foremost a search engine, not a marketing tool. Those who thought otherwise are finding out they are sorely mistaken.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Google needs to separate commercial pages from purely informational pages. Anyone searching for information (not sales products) gets inundated with e-commerce sites. It's a waste of time, building complex queries that weed out dominant company names. affiliate sites, and words like "cart."
Google needs to expand its advanced search options to include toggles for different ranking criteria. Anyone who has searched in vain knows this. I have several dead-end searches every week.
Google needs to change it's outdated automatic e-mail reply blurb. Staff may read every e-mail received but saying "[we] try to send personal responses to each message" is just baloney. That was true in the early years.
Google needs to get off its laurels and start listening to its customers again.
My personal theory, albeit based on no hard evidence, is that Google has started to rely less on PageRank. Newspaper articles usually blame people subverting PageRank in some way, but I think they're wrong. Those papers don't realise that Google uses a combination of many methods to rank pages, not just PageRank.
What I think happened is this:
As I say, all this is speculation, but it makes sense to me.
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"Guess which group Google considers its customers?"
It's not webmasters. It's not end-users. It's advertisers.
Advertisers are the only ones that Google has to answer to. If they do something that makes their advertisers go away, you can bet that they will quickly reverse that decision. And, the only thing that will make advertisers go away is whatever makes end-users go away.
You see, for Google (of for any other media outlet, for that matter) the advertiser is the customer, and the end-user or reader is the product. The content is the means of delivering the product to the customer.
What defines "customer?" Someone who gives you money in exchange for goods and services.
Google does have customers other than advertisers: select webmasters who purchase Google's services for their own Intra-/Internet presences. Even here, the customer is not the end-user, but is the webmaster himself. In this case, Google's best interest is to return searches the webmaster considers favorable (which, ultimately, are those pages the webmaster thinks the end-user should see).
So, you see, Google's interests are where the money is. And the money is in advertising and select webmasters. Perhaps in Google's Internet search, they favor companies who have purchased their services. Perhaps they demote companies who have refused to, but that's only speculation on my part.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
While most months you would be right, in Nov. 2003 you are not. The update to Google this particular month featured a radical change in the algorithms used to rank sites. In previous months for the past several years the rankings would change little every month-- if you look at the top 10 sites for a particular search term you'd see some sites move up a few levels, and other sites move down a couple of rankings.
This time, however, from what I can estimate most of the topped ranked pages have changed for a particular search term, which indicates a major change in Google's algorithm, which is particularly newsworthy. If that isn't news, then what is?
The reason businesses are complaining is that there are tens of thousands of small businesses that make their living from customers who find them via Google, which is also newsworthy. And most aren't SEO professionals or scammers who've illictly tried to artificially boost their rankings, thank you very much.
Whether the change will also elicit complaints from searchers has yet to be seen-- some search terms seem to return relevant results and some do not.
I run a teeny Miva Merchant site which used to be a 'regular' (html, cgi) web store. It has been up since 1997 with little or no changes. No meta tags or keywords on the site.
A week after I messed with that stuff, Google put my site at the top of the list when you do a search for some uncommon keywords related to it. It was nice to see, but so far of limited usefulness.
Now with the Miva site (which are notorious for not being indexed) I will have to come up with a revised strategy.
I would tell anyone - pay attention to your tags, and the immediate content of your site. Everyone is fighting for placement using similar keywords, so checkout the top results and see what they are using.
OT - Doesn't Barry look like he's making some deal on the phone? "Yeah, I can get you Ted, but he's gonna cost ya. He's huge at the Laugh 'n' Snort. I think he'll go for that, I'll call ya back."
I suppose it is just another symptom of monoculture. It would be real nice to have two or three search engines that were reliable and shared the market space. OTOH, it is a 'free' service, so I am not complaining, and am happy to have such a service.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
As a long time user of Google and a reasonably large advertiser - our company is now questoning whether Google will survive the next couple of years. Through contacts, we have pointed out to Google (and submitted spam reports and submitted poor results reports) that one of our competitors has 2,700 duplicate doorway entry pages to their site. Several hundred of those are illegally indexed using "our" trademarked name. We also advised them of another competitor with 159,000 doorway pages - all indexed and showing up in results. Google's response . . . (silence)
Right, but when you search through Google (or any search engine) you expect to find rankings that accurately reflect the relevance of the page. If you search on "testosterone" you probably do not want the first ten pages of links to be to "Joe's Patented Penis Enlargement System" just because hardworking Joe set up dozens of shell web sites solely to increase his site's Google rank.
If Joe (or any other web site owner) really wants to use Google as an advertising medium, he ought to pay for a sponsored link and be done with it. Joe has no right to manipulate the ranking system, and if he's going to do that he ought to be prepared to suffer the consequences.
Another wierd coincidence - by the end of the next quarter, they're supposed to go public (Google IPO - oogles of $$$).
Another wierd coincidence - With Yahoo's recent acquirement of Overture, and the ownership of multiple search technologies, it is rumored that they may end their contract with Google soon, and power their own search.
Another wierd coincidence - MS "trying" to develop a better search engine, already trying to take on Google, even before Longhorn.
Now isn't that a great way to drastically increase their revenue prior to becoming public by making all the top searched commercial sites pay for ads on Google, especially when a bulk of those sites' revenue come from the upcoming holiday season?
Wow - Google seems to also know how to play chess!
That's why I have to laugh whenever I read stories speculating that Microsoft might do to Google what they did to Netscape. It's one thing to steal a big consulting/integration contract by throwing lots of marketing and engineering resources at the customer. But to dominate the search engine world, you have to earn and maintain the trust of millions of users who pound on your engine every single minute. I used to think that Infoseek, Altavista, and the others died solely from corporate neglect. That's partially true, but they were doomed anyway, as soon as Google appeared. Because none of them ever understood what Brin and company seem to understand instinctively -- a public search engine requires hard work on a huge scale, and it never stops.
It's great that Google continues to tweak there search engine to produce the most accurate results. The people complaining are the commercial businesses that are relying on Google search results for free advertising. First off, these "businesses" should not be relying solely on Google search result hits for traffic to their sites, they have to advertising somewhere. Secondly, Google has every right, and duty, to continue battling against businesses from gaming the search results.
My sites have probably increased in position on Google because of these changes, but I don't plan on reducing my advertising budget.
LoRider
It seems to me that the real source of the problem is in an assumption by Google, and most other search engines, that they can provide a purely string based search without any semantic context.
...) that select the a particular customized search algorithm in the Google engine. This proviudes enough info to direct the user to a customized algorithm tailored for the users expected type of results. In some respects, this is what Froogle and the other google specialty searches are about, except through the front page interface. This also provides a legitimate hook into bringing blogs back into the fold without interfering other users by looking for reviews and/or user comments.
For the issue at hand, the new filtered results implicitly assume no site can legitimately grab too many links above some threshold for non-trademarked words. But in the case of a shelving provider being referenced as "shelving" (as exampled in the second article), that is not the case. The result is commercial entities with a high PageRank are filtered out.
This is fine for users looking up info about shelving, but not for user looking to buy shelving. Hence my comment on semantic context. In this case, a simple drop down of search prefixes ("I want info about...", "I want to buy...",
And in traditional Google fashion, Google could provide links to possible alternative searches in other semantic contexts, just like they already do with spelling and the like.
The prefix approach is only one possibility. Maybe a sentence parser would be better (if you can convince current users to convert from keyword searches).