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Spam Sites Infesting Google Search Results
The Google Watchdog blog is reporting that "Spam and virus sites infesting the Google SERPs in several categories" and speculates, ...Google's own index has been hacked. The circumvention of a guideline normally picked up by the Googlebot quickly is worrisome. The fact that none of the sites have real content and don't appear to even be hosted anywhere is even more scary. How did millions of sites get indexed if they don't exist?
At the very least GoogleBot could check if there are common blacklist words ("viagra" et al) on the website when identifying itself as IE or Firefox.
So medical supply or information websites shouldn't be indexed by Google?
I know what you're trying to do, but no word is 100% inappropriate. What if someone is actually looking for information on Viagra, or replica Swiss watches, or cheap stocks? What if someone is looking for information on spam?
Check for significant differences in content with different user-agents yes, but banned words? That really doesn't seem like a good idea to me.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
It may not be a question of a single developer making changes, as much as a single developer (or group of them -- safety in numbers) divulging to certain third parties how the algorithms work in the page ranking system. It's very rare any company gives anyone production access to make changes, but then again I've seen that happen too, where something breaks, they give a developer access to patch it in a hurry before the hew and outcry set in, then forget to revoke his/her access. Of course Google is global, so any change would have to propagate through the system vis source control, so tracking it wouldn't be that hard. I doubt any developer, no matter how nefarious, would take the risk.
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People, its just a blog. If someone has really hacked Google, we will hear soon enough. Otherwise scamming and spoofing the ratings with rubbish sites is a sport thats been going on a long, long time..
"A nation that forgets its past is doomed to repeat it." - Churchill