Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Google's Fight Against 'Low-Quality' Sites Continues

Posted by Soulskill on from the no-more-subsidies-for-content-farmers dept.

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."

4 of 220 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Does that mean by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Google didn't get any worse, the spammers are the ones who got better.

    I understand them if they are rather slow in making significant changes to their algorithm. In this sue-happy society they have to keep any collateral damage as low as possible (i.e. valid sites that move only a few spots down the ranking - can you imagine the outcry?). It's the disadvantage of being number one.

  2. Re:Does that mean by dagamer34 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's not so much as google getting worse or better, but people and companies building businesses around pagerank, and thus the need for very aggressive SEO. Were you to dump the same "low-quality" sites onto the Internet in 2000, I'm sure the results from Google would have been FAR worse than what we see today.

  3. Re:Does that mean by HeckRuler · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Some of us actually use that shit at the top left. Suck it.
    Also, what the hell is with you people. The slogan is "don't be evil", not "do no evil". It's a minor grammar error, and you're probably confused with monkeys, but this pops up time and time again. Is this some talking point kind of thing that I'm not aware of? Did I not get the memo?

  4. Re:Bayesian tagging by 0123456 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    Because no spammer could write a program to repeatedly search for and tag their site.