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Google's Fight Against 'Low-Quality' Sites Continues
nj_peeps writes
"A couple weeks ago, JC Penney made the news for plummeting in Google rankings for everything from 'area rugs' to 'grommet top curtains.' Turns out the retail site had a number of suspicious links pointing at it that could be traced back to a link network intended to manipulate Google's ranking algorithms. Now, Overstock.com has lost rankings for another type of link that Google finds to be manipulation of their algorithms. This situation has led Google to implement a significant change to their search algorithms, affecting almost 12% of queries in an effort to cull content farms and other webspam. And in the midst of all of this, a company with substantial publicity lately for running a paid link network announces they are getting out of the link business entirely."
we can expect google to get better, e.g. closer to what it used to be in the early days?
on Google to send me exactly where they must know I belong because I can't make that decision for myself.
As long as they don't change their algorithm so that the Santorum Google bomb ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santorum_(sexual_neologism) ) loses effect, I'm happy.
Please tell me they are going to start going after the myriad car parts spam sites that flood the google rankings when searching for anything but the most obvious automotive items. I am sick and tired of sifting through a dozen completely worthless sites when googling for a part number I am trying to track down. Ebay is more reliable than google for almost everything I am looking for lately.
Completely unpredictable that Google keeps maintaining their product, unfathomable
Next target, those stupid mailing list aggregators that keep popping up first in results, but are a redirect to a redirect to a redirect ... and digg/reddit types
What I can say as guy who sells ad space on his website: My Google AdSense income has gone up by a factor of 5 to 10 in the past two months. No, I'm not gonna be able to retire on this money. But it's an obvious increase. And I see it coming at exactly the same time as I see Google cracking down on rank spamming.
I think Google has "rationalized" a lot of their ad process (both ranking and sales) and the only guys who are hurt, are the ones who were gaming the system to begin with. e.g. click fraud and spamming the ranking.
Does anyone actually search for you on Google? And click your link regularly? That also helps if your popular enough to at least receive that. It also helps if your site is easily searchable and a few other technical specifics any good website administrator should know.
HTC EVO 4G LTE w/ CM 10.2 | NookColor w/ CM 10.2 | Samsung Epic 4G w/ CM 10.1
My searches don't seem to be turning up quite so many fake download sites with "certified full download" links anymore, good riddance to those.
Mine has stayed relatively stable. Couple dollars more like usual. While I'm sure it depends on the type of content that drives revenue to your site, I have a feeling that very little has changed for those who make more than a couple dollars a day.
Any organization dumb enough to hire an idiot like you is doomed to begin with, so stop sweating your page rank and go sort some more glass.
Anything that banishes content farms from the web is a good thing. I'm tired of sites hosting copies of Wikipedia or newsgroup posts only to manipulate their rank. If you do this, you're scum. It really negatively affects my ability to find good content. Content farms really hurts programming related searches. So many times, I find somebody asking the exact question I need the answer to, but there's no way to read the replies. GRRRRH!
It's mainly because Google doesn't like or believe in the mission of your non-profit.*
*I completely made it up...
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me". - stolen from Dan C alt.os.linux.slackware
One of the things I use Google for extensively is the ability to search for wierd error messages, return codes, etc. that appear in commercial software I use for work. It's very frustruating when your very specific search query returns 45 different sites, all of which are rehosting the same forum post or newsgroup article. These get ranked higher up than other unique posts, causing a lot of scrolling through results and wasting time. Also, these aren't queries like "bmw 335i" or "" that are guaranteed to return millions of unique hits. I'm looking for the one other guy in the world who's found this issue and has a workable answer. Google used to be pretty good for that, especially if your query was well formed and incredibly specific.
Real world example - I got an error message trying to install Windows 7 SP1 last week, with a long hex number and a very specifically-worded message. I typed the query into google, and the first hit was some idiot who had no idea what he was talking about on a support forum. The next 5-6 hits were that exact same idiot's post rebroadcast to sites like eggheadcafe.com, techarea.in, etc. I eventually found the answer, but it was on page 3 of the search results.
On another topic, how and why do these content farm sites exist? How does eggheadcafe.com, which just copies newsgroup and forum data, able to pay to keep the site going? Are they all just looking to cash in on ad revenue? Do they really get that much in revenue to justify the site-crawling they must have to do?
Market forces will insure that firms will continue to hack the google algorithm. If Google fights back too much firms will begin to use and promote other advertisers, like Bing. This is a typical case where the end user is not the customer. The customer is the firms that pay Google to advertiser. Then search engine only serves to collect views that raise the value of those ads. Therefore the only issue is if the 'low quality' search results causes substantially fewer people to view ads.
In fact I don't see Google doing anything to make the search results better. All the link farms with Google ads appear to perpetually stay high in the ranks. The only time that anything seems to be done is when a firm fails to pay Google for ads and instead pays other firms to manipulate the rankings. I can imagine that Google, who will doing anything, ethical or not, to be the only ad agency on the web, would find that to be a very bad thing.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I still get the right search results for "French Military Victories"
I've just looked back at JCPenney's stock price, and there's no fluctuation or even a news mention about them getting Google-slapped for SEO gaming. They made it through the Christmas season selling tons of stuff, Google has slapped them down, yet there isn't even a bump. An analyst noted they had slightly weaker January sales and blamed it on "Lower inventory clearance coupled with bad weather".
Apparently it means that SEO gaming does not rise to the level of "Corporate Evil" that would divert shoppers or stock traders. I guess the public must just see it as "corporations advertising like normal."
John
Let people tag sites they've found as a result of a search. Build a tagging system which will allow people to exclude linkspam for example.
I've set up Bayesian tagging for my email client and it works quite well, all my mails come in pre tagged, pretty much 99% accurately, only an occasional one comes through with an incorrect tag these days.
I'm aware of the processing overhead involved... which is what the Google Toolbar is for. Or should I have patented this idea first? Maybe they could just buy Stumbleupon.
Deleted
...will stop buying those infuriating astroturf placements here on Slashdot designed to bump up their SEO...?
What I don't get is why companies (and individuals) are always reactionary. Why don't they get to the root of the problem?
Here is one solution: Why not offer the "service" itself? Why not supplement the content farms with their own? That way, they control the need for this nature to occur, and can harness the profit from it. Their bottom line would love it.
If I have a site that google has identified as a "bad link source", I can sell that as a service so companies can lower the rank of their competition.
Of course, Dr Suess saw this long ago http://www.squidoo.com/thesneetches.
Now, Overstock.com has lost rankings for another type of link that Google finds to be manipulation of their algorithms. ... And in the midst of all of this, a company with substantial publicity lately for running a paid link network announces they are getting out of the link business entirely.
So where are the stories to support these two statements? TFS wasn't a summary of a story, it was a few low quality links and some bold, without citation, claims.
you-know-what.ragingfist.net
w00t!
.. that Google will FINALLY go after dodgy outfits like ExpertsExchange cloaking their search results and hiding answers from people who click through?
Man, those guys suck.
Mine increased about 3-4 months ago, but not as much as yours did. Bit under double. Still nice to have, but I certainly wouldn't object to a bigger increase.
I suspect it's some other factor, but we can always wonder. It's certainly possible that sites doing more poorly in the rankings would try to regain traffic with the content network.
It sure would be nice if google laid the smack down on all of those bogus electronics datasheet archive websites. Those are totally useless and make it very difficult to find specs on old parts.
The next generation is to get out of generic search. Build a roster of say 5 sites that do a great job on your error code problems and then use advanced search to stay in that domain.
Set up your browser to be specific search domains. (Non error related example) - I typically run IMDB and Wikipedia in a pair, so I do the search on those, one per tab.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I fully agree with Google, I hate it when I search for something [query] and I see a result like `find cheap [query] on http://www.very.low.quality.site.com'.
You know it's funny to see all these google hating articles online. I rank them right with the "gaming causes violence/rape/torture/etc" articles that are nothing more than an attempt to gain article views and ad clicks.
Where I get disgusted is when I see the conspiracy theorists who say that google isn't going to change anything because they're "making money" off spam sites, when in reality, the more people who are frustrated with google's search enough to leave the more google loses money of SEARCH ad (adwords) clicks.
At my company we spend about 20% of our google advertising budget on adsense ads and that's just to target a single site in our niche. Do you seriously think that google would do anything to damage 80% of their income to try to increase the other 20% by a few percentage points?
Google could care less about adsense clicks. Those are pennies compared to the massive cash that marketers throw into adwords. Saying that google wants to lower their quality of search results OR not actively better those results to make their searchers happy betrays deep ignorance of the way google's business operates.
But of course you couldn't prove that google is doing one thing or another... that's what makes it a good conspiracy.
I gave up on AdSense years ago, just the fact that they didn't bother to care whether or not the javascript worked across platform was enough to lose any interest in using their product. I don't mind them filling in free ads if nobody has paid for a particular spot, but when their javascript prevents people from showing their ads on my page, that's a problem and given that they supply the tools necessary, it's completely unacceptable.
How about malicious link farms, that is someone sets up a link farm specifically to screw over one of their competitors?
Also, how about aggregation sites... Sites that have "content copied from other sites" but provide data from multiple locations in a single place making the data that much easier to use? I wouldn't consider such sites to be of low quality.
One thing that does irritate me, if i have a technical question google can usually find 50 instances of other people asking the same question, but not all of them will have been answered and you have to go through each one until you find one which has an answer.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Google's latest change is being discussed in the "search engine optimization" community. The consensus seems to be that a few big-name junk sites are being hit, and some minor link farms stopped having an effect, but the change isn't doing much else. "eHow" entries still show up. "alibaba.com" (a wholesale supplier directory, mostly for China, India, etc.) was hit, "globalsources.com" wasn't.
This may be a "manual adjustment", in emulation of Blekko's blacklist of content farms. Google's announcement, of course, provides little useful information.
My revs are up marginally the last few months. My theory was that it's Google doing a much better job of using their DoubleClick display adds to follow users around the web - it might be specific to my main site, it's very niche, and there really weren't that many distinct advertisers. Plus, I've been noticing Google ads following me as I browse the web. It's a little eerie, for example, I was researching antivirus packages for work. A day or so into the process, I'd start seeing ESET NOD32 ads everywhere.
On the advertising side, i.e. AdWords, my costs are up a little bit too. Maybe it's the economy improving or general growth in the Internet... I'm not sure yet. I've been meaning to take a closer look at how much I'm paying per click.
The content farmers where getting so good real results for very specific searches did not appear until at least page 2 or 3. I actually have started using alternate search engines from time to time in attempts for better results (with minimal results). If this helps, thank you Google.
The other day I was approached by a marketing firm that wanted to buy a text link on the front page of my main website. That wasn't new, any webmaster of a half-busy site will get generic link buying requests frequently. This was different.
It was clearly a specifically written email to the webmaster, me. It wasn't the usual automated scatter-shot form letter email. I was curious, so I asked for a bit more information and it turned out to be a Fortune 500 firm that wanted to rank highly on printer supplies. No, not JC Penny, but it would be every bit as controversial. Anyway, it was tempting, but I didn't bite. Their desired link text didn't really make sense on the site, and just as importantly, I don't want to tempt the wrath of Google.
freedom at work - capitalism is based on freedom, and when people think they are "free to take what someone else created," people who depend for their livelihood on that creation won't great as much or will create something that isn't as easily stolen. It is the classic free-rider, where we pay more for movies, dvds, downloads, games, and applications because a certain percentage of people will steal it.
And I agree with your point, btw.
The Slashdot posting was mostly plagarized from this story at SearchEngineLand. That story also has the phrase "And in the midst of all of this, a company with substantial publicity lately for running a paid link network announces they are getting out of the link business entirely.", without saying who it was. Searching for that phrase in Google brings up 73 results from sites which scraped that article, but no insight. Variations on that phrase bring up mostly hits to scraper sites.
Clearly, the new Google patch doesn't detect scraper sites. Catching those would be a big win, because there are so many of them and they have near zero value.
There's a new nonprofit site in the UK, Churnalism, which is intended to help detect which stories were copied from other content. But its database is too small and its algorithms too weak to detect much. It may improve; they're just starting out.
It was like thousands of Search Engine Optimizers cried out, and then suddenly were silent...
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
Related, Conductor, a link broker, is dropping the link brokering business and focusing on automated SEO tools.
http://blog.conductor.com/2011/02/conductor-to-focus-exclusively-on-seo-technology-in-2011-beyond/
How do they know "who" is responsible for the linkages?
Seconded! I noticed the ads following me around too. I shop for stuff on newegg, amazon etc. Then I start seeing the same products popping up in all the ads everywhere else I go. Man that really works too because I look at them!
simple, fast homepage with your links: http://www.ngumbi.com/
Maybe your web site isn't as relevant as it used to be for that query? Maybe users are finding more valuable content elsewhere? Why do you believe the status quo should be inviolate?
Maybe someone with the necessary expertise could write a Firefox plugin (similar in concept to AdBlock) that would include a bunch of crowdsourced "-" terms in searches run through it, based on a database of spam sites. I know one thing that drives me nuts is looking for the one business that sells obscure widget X, and their web site & contact info is buried on page 7 under page after page of fake "directory" services that seem to exist only to extort businesses into paying to have a link to their web page included (all those "if you are the owner of business X and would like to update your profile, please contact us" sites). Then you could run a search through the plugin that would silently include 50 lines of excludes in it to tell Google you don't want anything from those domains.
Just maybe this will have a wonderful side effect of slowing down or even stopping automated comment link spam..
..well one can hope anyway.
PPN
It was a scammer pretending to be a Fortune 500 firm.
Lowest of the low quality. Prints whatever lies rumor or innuendo comes its way. Should be black holed before Matt accuses the world of misconduct.
This probably means that big companies get ranked higher, and the smaller guy will end up on the bottom of the list.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
the most relevant tech articles on google are all 8 years old.
I was part of a startup 10 years ago that was doing something like this. We used the DMOZ data to build a matrix of word frequency relationships to categories. Then when a user entered a query, we would determine the category, and send their query to a more specific search engine. For example, if they typed in 'beatles', we would identify this as a music query & send them results from allmusic.com. Unfortunately around the time our product was getting usable, the dot-com crash happened, all of our funding dried up and we had to give up.
Computers don't make mistakes. What they do, they do on purpose.
Ah, that's really refreshing to see the moderation system doing it's job.
Bravo, this one's for you mods.
If you have an identified account and an identified choice, you can use various collaborative filtering techniques to suggest the autotags for a site. You have sets of shared bayesian statistics with those who have tagged sites similarly having greater weight than those who didn't.
Google's real problem is anonymity. The reputation of the link spammer is the same as a legitimate linker.
Deleted
It just creeps me out and makes me turn on my adblocker+ again.
This is the sig that says NI (again)
Google results typically find three kinds of content
Google's quality regarding Real Stuff is as high as ever, and their ratios of Real Stuff and Unrelated Stuff are still pretty good, though the Web may have a higher noise-to-signal ratio than it used to. The problems I've seen have been the radical increase in content spam by people whose business models consist of littering the web and monetizing it, and it's an arms race between them and Google to keep it under control. It's probably worst with medications (especially if you're looking for drug interactions between Medicine A and Medicine B, which tends to lead to sites selling both of them, even though neither one of them is Medicine V where you're expecting mostly spam...), but I've even gotten content-farm trash when looking for design information on electronic circuits.
A couple of things have surprised me - it sometimes seems like Google must be collecting data that's generated in real time, given the number of results I've seen like http://www.example.com/keywordA-keywordB-keywordC/article.html, where I wouldn't have expected that combination to be frequent enough to pre-stage it all. Also, there are a lot of sites that seem to basically be imitation search engines, where if you're looking for a topic, they'll have a page that's a pointer to a bunch of links about the content, rather than the content itself; it's almost as if they randomly picked some Google results and fed them back to Google, except that many of them aren't actually useful. Is it possible that they just keep a bunch of keywords around, and robogenerate dynamic pages when Google crawls their site? Music lyrics are really a minefield for this kind of thing; it seems very few sites have actual lyrics, even if they're offering to sell you ringtones for songs.
Good luck to Google downrating most of this tripe.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Google's original pagerank was always based on having links from other sites - Back when most of the web's content was written by actual humans, the more links you had, the more likely it was that multiple actual humans had found your pages to be interesting. And that was especially true if the links were from interesting humans. These days, it's mostly robots all the way down - even if humans are writing the useful content, the pages themselves are mostly written by dynamic html generators that pack lots of links to the other content on a site.
Having said that, I have noticed that a bunch of content I manage became much harder to find on Google a few years ago when we switched the domain from a .org to a .com (due to the usual random domain-registrar difficulties.) I run the mailing list for a group of people who go out to dinner weekly in/near Silicon Valley, and we've got a decade or two of pages of "This week's dinner at Restaurant X, Schedule of restaurants for the next couple of weeks, review of Restaurant X, directions to Restaurant X", and before Yelp came around, if I wanted to update the review of a restaurant we hadn't been to in a while, my site was often near the top of Google results, sometimes the only result if the restaurant didn't have its own web page and the local paper hadn't covered it. Fortunately there's a lot more real content now that Web 2.0 has users writing restaurant reviews, but the domain name change made the old results drop off the map for a while even though the content was still all there.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
While you run a spider, a "Spider run" is a short excursion into the Underworld where players do a number of tasks. I would like to get 5 trappers together for a spider run. I pretty much know the way. By default, Spider scans all connected drives, but experienced folks are welcome:). The camel spider stories began to spread during the 1990-91 Gulf War, a number of tasks with the purpose of being able to charm a Black Widow, the spider of the Underworld. Can I run a spider without creating a project? Now second I am in need of money and would like to know a very good uw black widow spider - either an HTML application or Remote XUL application.
What do you think?
Every time I search for the part number of an electronic part hoping to find a datasheet or any other info on it, all I ever seem to get is sites with massive lists of part numbers claiming they can sell me one of these parts or a dodgy site claiming to have a datasheet but instead having nothing but junk.