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."

Comments

Re:Does that mean

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Bayesian tagging

[0123456]

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.