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The Dirty Little Secrets of Search
Hugh Pickens writes writes "The NY Times has an interesting story (reg. may be required) about how JCPenney used link farms to become the number one google search result for such terms as 'dresses,' 'bedding,' and 'samsonite carry on luggage' and what Google did to them when they found out. 'Actually, it's the most ambitious attempt I've ever heard of,' says Doug Pierce, an expert in online search. 'This whole thing just blew me away. Especially for such a major brand. You'd think they would have people around them that would know better.'"
The whole idea of an SEO budget is to push your name out to the top line of google, bing or anything else people use to search.
The intent was to game the system. And by doing so, make a ton of money. There are no laws for internet search ... unless you can use trademark laws to push a competitor who's doing that to your brand name.
Unscrupulous yes, ruthless yes, but that is the true face of capitalism anyway. Google can try regulating, but only enough to make the same people put in pennies into their sidebar offering of less-worth, but clearly marked advertising.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
News at 11.
Reasonably written article.
If you already know the ins and outs of search or have no interest in it's specifics you can spare yourself the read, though. Ymmv.
Karma? What's that again?
This is totally unfair of Google to punish JC Penney like this. We need to help them restore their page rank. I'll start.
Nazi memorabilia
abortion factory
murder weapons
penny stock
worst place to work
token black guy
The company is "JC Penney", not "Penny".
It seems these companies, J.C.Penney, BMW, on and on, are as interested in keeping up with Google's "Laws", how to adhere to them, how to avoid them, how to get around them, than they are with actual civil laws of employee treatment, customer safety, and societal taxes.
I see they are currently #1 on bing for Comforters and #4 for dresses. I wonder if it would be possible for the search engines share data on who is cheating?
I'm actually really surprised by the article, that it took so few sites to affect results and that such obviously off-topic links still helped. I thought the algorithms were already smarter than that.
is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
I'm not in my mom's basement. I'm in my office, finishing my PhD. Just as secluded, but more socially acceptable.
Language is hardly worth using if we can't have fun with it. Perhaps you need to think outside the boxen.
First, I noted that in the article, Google claims to try to keep the "money" side separate from the "search" side. Okay, but the fact remains that if you don't crack down on cheating, then companies will have less incentive to buy paid links from Google. The fact that the quality of the results would decrease for the user is secondary. So Google surely is motivated to prevent companies from gaming the system, not out of some altruistic sense of honesty or service to the user, but because cheating threatens their paid advertising model.
The other observation is that SEO tactics could easily be used as a weapon against competitors. If you're a top-listed company and your competitors want to knock you down...all they have to do is put up spam links to your site, then report it to Google. Next thing you know, you've been de-listed.
The job of a search engine is to find web pages that are interesting to people, and it does that job by using a lot of robots with models about what's interesting. If you've got a web site you want the search engine to tell people is interesting, you can either do that honestly, by making it actually interesting, or dishonestly, by lying to the robots so they'll tell the humans that it's interesting, and sometimes that's cheaper and easier because robots only have models.
To the extent that there are "white hat SEOs", they're either doing the basic web design jobs of making sure that your information is findable (e.g. putting the keywords in text, not in images played by flash animation that other web designers told you would look cool), or else they're doing editorial work by telling you to write more interesting web content. For the most part, those people don't call themselves "SEOs", they call themselves "web designers" or "editors" or "graphic designers", though there are some companies that really do need to hire somebody to clean up bad web design.
Real SEOs are the black-hat types, who'll offer to get results for you by methods other than making your web site actually more interesting. They're lying scum, but sometimes they're good enough at lying to robots that they get results. Unfortunately, one of the big results they get is garbage all over the web, from link spam in blog comments to garbage that search engines find that's really just copying bits of content to attract advertising. Makes the web as a whole a lot less interesting.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
No they're not. In case you didn't know, Google has their webmaster guidelines posted for all to see. The motivation behind these rules is to ensure (or at least try to ensure) that their search results continue to be relevant and useful for--wait for it--the user.
So, you can either play by the rules or not. If you break the rules, don't go complaining about Google being "unfair."
He who has no
Copying a New York Times article wholesale, and then using a Slashdot post to bait-and-switch readers into visiting your website rather than the Times?
Ballsy.
Doing so when the article's content is about using malicious links to artificially inflate your site's visibility?
Just. Not. Cool.
The original NY TImes article is here. Whether you approve of the Times' registration policy or not, you shouldn't support people who steal their content and use it to make money.
So their IT guy hired an SEO firm without the board's knowledge, does it matter to Google? No. A company gamed the system and they punish the company. Too bad for JC Penny they hired the wrong guy for the job. You can't expect Google to start investigating who in the company originated the SEO move.
Whenever in an argument, remember this.
The guidelines say:
Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."
And I believe they smacked BMW Germany for that.
However pay-wall sites (like elsevier) appear to present different content to Google from what nonsubscribers can see. And they've been doing it for years.
For example, do a google search for: site:elsevier.com cancer +"lower percentage"
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aelsevier.com+cancer+%2B"lower+percentage"
Compare what you see in the search results to what a nonsubscriber can actually see. Yes many Google users might be subscribers, but far many more aren't.
NOTE: yes I have site:elsevier.com there, but for many similar searches minus the site:elsevier.com term, Google often shows up lots of elsevier links that nonsubscribers would NOT be able to read. e.g. cancer +"lower percentage" nasopharyngeal
or: carcinoma cervix +"lower percentage"
To me BMW Germany's "doorway pages" would have been less of a problem. Apparently their site had doorway pages with lots of stupid crap like "used car" (in German) repeated.
How much problems would that cause for Google's users? At least those who weren't interested in BMW's site in the first place.
This is one of those press events which gives CEOs nightmares.
There's been press criticism of Google before, but it's mostly been anecdotal - blogs, op-eds, and other commentary. This time, there's real reporting, with the New York Times naming names.
Usually, after criticism, Google says nothing, or perhaps replies in a blog posting. Google people rarely speak in forums that they don't control. This time, Matt Cutts had to sit down with New York Times reporters for an hour long interrogation.
Google's vaunted claims that they can detect link spam were shown to be false. Google didn't catch the spam, the New York Times did. Then Google made an algorithm change and claimed that fixed most of the problem. The Times tracked Google's results and showed that it didn't. Only a "manual action" moved J.C. Penny down.
Now the rest of the business press is going to take a hard look at search. Expect follow-up articles in Bloomberg, Fortune, etc. Google management has weeks of pain ahead. After their feud with Microsoft last week, their troubles with European antitrust regulators, and Blekko nipping at their heels, they didn't need this. Attention may be focused on those "manual actions". Should those be published? The European Union has specifically asked for that data, and Google can no longer deny that it exists.
I've been critical of Google's anti-spam efforts, mostly on the Places side.I thought they were better at detecting link farms of junk sites, though. That's old-school SEO. If they missed this, they have worse problems than I'd thought.
No. There are mom & pops who get suckered into SEO promises on a daily basis. There are two kinds of customers who use SEO: those who don't know any better, or are unaware their "designer" is engaging in black hat SEO, and those who entertain the idea for a while and decide to take the risk.
Those who risk black hat SEO
Here's the situation: unless you are in a totally saturated market it is extremely easy to achieve high placement organic search results if you follow Google's guidelines. You don't have to cheat at all but you do have to pay careful attention to having relevant content, clean HTML, and following accessibility guidlines helps a great deal as well. Don't spam your META tags but don't ignore them either.
We've had a couple clients leave to go with SEO specialists who happen to also build web sites, because we do web development but take advantage of Google's recommendations in the process. One client in particular - we'll just refer to him as P. for now, kept asking us about SEO every time traffic power contacted him (always under a new and different operating name because as you know every time Google finds them they punt them from the index, along with all their clients). P. did listen to us about not going with that company but has been suckered by six or seven different independent "SEO consultants."
Now, P. is in a very competitive, saturated market but even so we had achieved respectable search results. We recommended he start submitting his product to third-party distributors and ask them to link back as part of the effort to increase distribution, maybe get a few contractors to exclusively rely on his products and link back to P.'s site, and maybe get a few independent review companies and labs (like Consumer Reports) to review his product, and they would of course link to his site in the review. We also recommended a good Google adwords campaign until his product achieved critical mass.
Another thing you need to know about P.: He is not frugal but he is cheap. He would phrase things like "can you do me a favor and. . . " or "how hard would it be to. . . " and try offering $100 or even as low as $25.00 for something that would require 20 hours or so to implement, test on a staging server, then back up the live server, deploy, and re-test. He just doesn't value anyone's time. I don't understand how but one of my partners had the patience to deal with him, but by the end my patience had long run out, and one time I asked P.: "Oh, you want that for $100? Say, can you come and $foo my $bar in three different $zags for $100.00? No? Then let me ask you this: why is it your time is so valuable, but no one else's is? (The truth is I wanted him gone since he kept one of our engineers on the phone hours each week picking his brain, under the guise of negotiating but unfortunately he was with us another two years. I also worded it a bit more diplomatically than that, but it was the general point). In fact it is my fault we ever got involved with P. in the first place. He suckered us and I believed he was having a hard time getting his product out there, so I convinced my partners to take him on and help him out, giving him a fully-populated web site for $1,200.00. It was based on OS Commerce to save ourselves time so the HTML output wasn't the cleanest but we explained the pros and cons to him up front, and he decided to go with it. Over time we cleaned up some of the HTML output but over the years he was with us he kept asking for better search results, and a nicer design. We would come back with a detailed quote including graphic design time, implementing the design and then development of the features he wanted, and even though we gave him a really good deal, he would come back with something about how the original site cost him only $1,200.00. (hint: don't ever do favors for a cheapskate; they never appreciate it)
Within a couple of years he was netting $360K per year. For a one-man shop doing what he is doing, competing
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
There's another option here. If I read the article right, JC Penney denied doing it. Searches can make or break a company. So someone who wanted to sink them could have been the one doing it. Throw their links up on every gray market location they can find, and when the target makes it big, start notifying folks (media, search engine abuse departments, etc) about the "blackhat" methods that the target is using.
Who would want to see JC Penney die? Big department stores (Sears, Macy's, Belk Lindsey,etc). The lower box stores (Walmart, KMart, Target). Online retailers (Amazon, eBay, etc). It could have even been a random irate customer, and anyone who's ever worked with customers knows that there's always an irate customer.
Most likely it was a marketing decision by JC Penney themselves. I'm sure the decision was "Do it. Don't get caught. If you do, we don't know anything about it." If it ends up traceable to us, we're firing you over it." Since there wasn't a positive finger pointed, someone got a raise rather than getting fired.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Slashdot adds rel="nofollow" to all links
I thought rel="nofollow" applied only to links in posts without the karma bonus. (checks page source code) Yes, that's still the case.
Just wrote about how sucky googles search is becoming because of these retarded sites... We need a revolution http://webuilders.co.za/
"You'd think they would have people around them that would know better." Of course they do. But, as has been discussed on Slashdot time and again, there's the people that know better and there's the people in power. Unfortunately, they're usually mutually exclusive groups. I can even picture the meeting: a group gathered around a large table. 2 or 3 IT guys say "We shouldn't game the system, big trouble if we get caught." Accounting guy says "If we do it it can bring us big bucks!" High end company officer says "Cash?! Go for it!"
Your alternate theory is that a competitor actively sabotaged JC Penny's search engine rankings so that it would be the on the top results for many consumer products during the explosive holiday season; with the hope that JC Penny would be caught and punished a couple of months after raking in the dough from their increased Christmas sales?
Right.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
Searching for "black dresses" now relegates J.C. Penny to the sixth page of results, meaning that casual users who are not aware that search results cover more than one page will never see it again. Do not mess with Google.
What does work is Bing's approach of using actual user data.
No, that's spammable, too. See "click fraud". Anonymous crowdsourcing in competitive environments only works if you're a little player and nobody cares enough to spam you. If Blekko gets enough market share to attract SEO efforts, their "slashtags" will be overwhelmed by junk.
Read how Craigslist lost the battle against spam. They tried CAPTCHAs. They tried requiring unique email accounts. They tried phone verification. Nothing worked. There are power tools for defeating each of those. Most of the recommendation systems have similar problems. To check this out, read Citysearch recommendations for some category like carpet cleaning or locksmiths, cut out some unique phrase from a recommendation, and search for it to see in how many other recommendations it appears.
The only recommendation systems that really work are ones where either the number of recommendations per item is huge (as with movies and TV), or recommendations are tied to transactions (as with eBay or Amazon.)