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Google Blocks 'Optimized' Pages

Posted by timothy on from the they-own-their-servers dept.

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."

4 of 562 comments (clear)

  1. Seth F's theories by turg · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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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  2. Example of what google is trying to prevent by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Olagam

  3. Waaaaaa by scorp1us · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
  4. Google just doesn't care. by actionfront · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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)