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

Does that mean

[Kokuyo]

we can expect google to get better, e.g. closer to what it used to be in the early days?

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:Does that mean

[Kokuyo]

I don't give a damn about their soul, I just want it to point me to the information I am looking for.

Re:Does that mean

[dagamer34]

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.

Re:Does that mean

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep repeating the moronic claim of Google's overarching villainy. When Google does turn evil, no one is going to care because they're already ignoring you.

Re:Does that mean

[Nyder]

where the front page was nothing but a banner and search entry field? Or where "do no evil" was more than an abandoned slogan of good faith? Google sold its soul a long time ago, there is no going backwards.

A companies soul is the cost of them going corporate.

Re:Does that mean

[SilentStaid]

I'd settle for it finding these two droids I've been looking for.

Re:Does that mean

[HeckRuler]

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?

Re:Does that mean

[Archangel Michael]

This is what I don't get. How can you decry the business of another when it adversely affects you, especially when the two industries are completely unrelated (Retail vs Search/Tech)? Google's business is to provide the most relevant results to the search request made. PERIOD. One of the search terms my site consistently is in the top three sites for recently went down several spots as people who've lifted content off my site and posted it to their site, unabridged and unedited. Just flat out copy/pasted it. I know, because there are unique aspects about my content (relevantly unique), which is why my site was so well listed, and why the content was lifted and posted elsewhere.

I worked long and hard creating unique relevant pages to get to the top of the search, only to be replaced by exact copies on other websites. I'm not upset, I consider it flattery that my content is so good that people find it that useful that they want it as their own. However, I would be pissed if the information I had was commercial in nature (it isn't) and people were just taking it because of what I call the Kazaa mentality of just copying things because you want them and are too damn cheap to buy it. In a world where people (used to) buy ring tones for $2.99 but steal $.89 MP3s.

Anyway, back to my point, as a result of people plain stealing my website content, my rankings have dropped considerably by exact copies of my work. What used to be #1 on the first page is probably now somewhere on page #2. It would suck if wasn't giving the info away, the more places that have my info the better. Still, I would love for Google to realize where the original came from (history) and gave points for being "first" for relevant content.

Re:Does that mean

[hedwards]

Whether it's Google or spammers that are responsible, the reality is that Google just isn't anywhere near as useful as it used to be. And I think they waited way too long to own up to the poor quality of results, they've been at parity with Bing and pretty much everybody else for quite a while, with their only advantage being rate of updates on their index.

Re:Does that mean

[skids]

You don't have to only own one identity. However building up a good rep would be enough work that it would be a limiter to promiscuous sockpuppetry. The point is that for any identity, which could span multiple sites if you want it to, we'd A) know posts were generated by the keyholder B) be able to refer to the keyholder identity compatibly C) be able to endorse or call shenanigans on certain keyholder from our own identities. D) be able to filter content based on a trust web built up over time such that trolls, spammers, and astroturfers are effectively moot -- each identity has to earn its own reputation from real people over time, either from consitently behaving as a good netizen (e.g.providing accurate information), being a good source of opinions about other netizens, or importing trust from real-world relationships. There would probably be many "flavors" of trust e.g. "this guy is a bona-fide real person but he tends to fall hook line and sinker for chain emails" or "this guy is right 90% of the time but he does not retract it when he is wrong" or "this guy has original material but don't import his endorsements because he downrates people based on personal vendettas."

Applies to email as well as forums/wikis.

I think with facebook people are getting used to the very preliminary ideas behind building a trust network, even if it is one built on a foundation of sand. So there's that at least. I'm not hopeful about anyone developing a good trust network system, much less selling it to the public, however, since developers seem to be more inclined to re-implement the CMS wheel perpetually.

Re:Does that mean

[Omestes]

Perhaps the communal view on the issue is much more complicated than you'd like?

Perhaps Slashdot isn't a mono-culture yet, and still has plenty of dissenting views?

Perhaps the author has a point, there is a line between open culture and exploitive culture. Remixing is fine, sharing can be fine, plagiarism is not fine.

Re:Does that mean

[Omestes]

Damn double spacing... Bad /. 3.0! Bad.

If posts and moderation are an indicator, then he's right. The place need not be a mono culture to censor (actively attempt to hide from general view and squash credible debate via moderation) the debate. That's generally what happens. Anything which isn't pro-pirating is generally negatively moderated. Occasionally anti-pirating comments are either left alone or moderated up, but that's fairly rare. It likely has more do with moderation point availability rather than a desire to openly debate the merits.

I've noticed the moderation trend too, but I don't think it means to much. A lot of "anti-piracy" posts are trollish for whatever reason. Not the point of view, but it seems trolls favor posting from that side of the issue more so than the other. A lot of them are "piracy is bad", with no logic or reason backing it up. This happens on the pro-side too, but not as often. I'm not saying that this is most of it, but it plays a roll.

Worse, many pro-pirates then troll moderate those who offered an alternate view in other, unrelated discussions.

This is just a popular new thing here. I first noticed it with the "whoever is a sock puppet" troll ("Twitter" I think), and then with the doubly obnoxious "HOSTS" troll.

When it comes to piracy, the community appears anything but diverse, or fair, or reasonable, or open to discussion/debate.

I've haven't really noticed this. I'm a general moderate on the issue (pro-piracy for certain reasons, against for others), and haven't noticed any nasty mods. Even when saying that 90% of piracy is wrong, but there needs to be exceptions I'm either ignored or get a slight up-mod. Every time it comes up I notice a fair amount of debate, but generally the anti-piracy crowd just mumbles about not being upmodded, which annoys me, stop complaining about mods and work on actually being "insightful" or "informative".

Those who question the pro-pirate position are targeted. That alone says they know full well their position is extremely weak and typically without any merit what-so-ever.

I'd down-mod you for that statement. Not because I agree or disagree with piracy, but because that was flamebait.

I generally moderate against anyone who has enters a discussion in an insulting manner, and who doesn't actually bring anything real to the table. But then again I rarely down-mod people, I try to stick with the positive moderation.

Re:Good, now I can really depend

[Anonymous Coward]

on Google to send me exactly where they must know I belong because I can't make that decision for myself.

If you knew the location of the web site where you "belonged", you wouldn't have to search for it to begin with.

Can the car parts spammers be next?

[jeffmeden]

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.

Re:Can the car parts spammers be next?

[Anonymous Coward]

The best interest of somebody selling a muffler on ebay is to get your eyes on the muffler so you can consider buying it. you obviously aren't going to buy the muffler if you've been searching for elvis wigs, and I think bad tagging gets your seller rating shot to shit.

On the other hand, in a web search, the best interest for the site is to maximize their investment and get the most eyeballs. So, they play dirty and abuse the algorithm to get as many hits as possible so their ads get as many hits as possible as well.

We're just lucky in this case that Google is siding with the people on this one, but that's only because Google seems to dislike vertical search sites as much as anyone else who is trying to search for an answer and gets baited into a mailing list / aggregator of the search results you were just looking at in google.

Re:Can the car parts spammers be next?

[adeft]

Same can be said for searching for computer part numbers i.e. a replacement laptop cd-rom. If it wasn't true, this could be considered a computer analogy to explain a car situation.....

Re:Can the car parts spammers be next?

[snspdaarf]

a computer analogy to explain a car situation.....

Whoa, are you trying to get the world to spin backwards?

Re:Good, now I can really depend

[jeffmeden]

Yes, that's what this is about. Freedom to have spam served to me on a silver platter. Please Google, stop filtering all that spam in my gmail inbox too! I hate that you feel the need to protect me; I am a big boy and enjoy sifting through 1000 messages a day looking for the 2 relevant ones! Let freedom ring! /sarcasm.

Google keeps doing what its doing, SHOCKER!

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Good, now I can really depend

[rtaylor]

I run a spider. It seems over 95% of pages on the internet are content farm and similar randomly generated crap. They take a hundred sentence fragments, string them together, then see if they can fool Google and other engines into crawling them.

You will not be very happy if they stop filtering the garbage for you.

I, for one, welcome our new advertising overlords

[shoppa]

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.

Some improvement already

[Drakkenmensch]

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.

Re:Good, now I can really depend

[MightyYar]

send me exactly where they must know I belong because I can't make that decision for myself.

Congratulations on grasping the purpose of a search engine.

Anything that suppresses content farms is good!

[ErichTheRed]

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?

Re:Anything that suppresses content farms is good!

[Plekto]

The problem is that content sites and review sites and blogs and so on should be automatically excluded from all searches unless you explicitly but in words like "sale" or "review" in the search. (or have a non-commercial web sites only check box).

5 pages of reviews of a computer part that are actually all "reviews" left by consumers on shopping sites are useless when you really just want the obvious review of the part that was done by a computer review site. Their search engine also is worthless because by the time you get to page 4, you've hit the wall and are in the bit-bin of rubbish responses and sites in Malaysia and so on. It's basically "3 pages of our quick content/web spider results for this week and the rest is random filler that we've not actually searched in years". ie - their "search" feature actually doesn't seem to be searching anything in depth from what I can tell - if it's not in the immediate cache/first few pages, it's just a simple keyword search of a couple of the words you typed in with no relevance to anything at all.

Another good example - Let's say you want new car pricing.
If you call several of the main sites Cars direct and several other companies they all use the same actual call center/back-end service. TrueCar and Overstock.com uses it as well, but both post the results in front of you without the telephone games. I had three companies call me back when I was looking for a vehicle recently, but the receptionist doing the transfers when I called back for the three companies was the same woman.

"New car buying service" returns the typical results but TrueCar isn't on the first 15 pages. Overstock.com also uses the exact same service - and both seem to be far better at most importantly, keeping on top of actual local dealer inventories. It also doesn't appear in the first 15 pages. The same thing happens if you type in almost any combination of common terms. Google simply returns no usable results aside from those who have paid them to place their ads.

alta vista

[fermion]

Alta Vista was not able to save themselves by complaining that web sites were not being honest about keywords. They were not able to whine and get people to stop using perfectly legal practices.

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.

Re:alta vista

[asdf7890]

I think you are missing the point of Google's business model. Their core product is our attention, which they sell to advertisers by various means. In order to maintain their product, that is: keep our attention, they need to keep their search results relevant and useful (or at least as relevant and useful as the competition). Pushing the aggregators/copiers/similar further down the search results than the original good content sites helps to keep my attention and that of many other people (who would prefer to see, say, the original StackOverflow page instead of a copy that has 613 advert slots added), so this helps them maintain that sector of their product. And if those sites give up and concentrate on getting a high rank at Bing or somewhere else instead then that will not harm Google (they won't, of course, the listings war will continue battle after battle).

Google won, over AltaVista and others of the time, in part because the results were better - because AV's algorithm couldn't screen out the less useful results as well. They also won by just being a search engine rather than spending countless $ on becoming a "portal" when people didn't actually want a portal they wanted a search engine - perhaps AV would have done better if the $ that went into the portal thing went into improving their search functionality instead? Of course Google's keep-us-interested schemes involve much more than just the search engine these days so they could potentially fall into the same trap eventually, but unlike AV their other tools are just that: other, by which I mean that they compliment the search engine product (and the more general "information location and management" focus) or are not even related to it rather than trying to replace it.

SEO gaming - no penalty!

[plover]

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."

Re:SEO gaming - no penalty!

[TheMidget]

Or maybe, that JCPenney makes most of its money in its brick-and-mortar stores rather than online?

Or most of their online customers go directly to JCPenney's rather than searching for a source of doodads or widgets?

In the end, google might have done JCPenney's a favor by showing them how little business their SEO games actually brought, and that this is an expense they can well do without...

Bayesian tagging

[Colin Smith]

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.

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.

Re:Bayesian tagging

[Just Some Guy]

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.

That would replace "PageRank" with "whoever can afford to pay Mechanical Turk to tag their site". At that point, Google might as well drop the middleman and use their AdSense auctions to sell page ranking directly.

Re:Bayesian tagging

[Colin Smith]

Depends, if the user is identifiable, now, doesn't it.

Come on, this is the 21st century, not the 20th.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_key_certificate#Client_certificates

 

Re:Good, now I can really depend

[paiute]

I guess the humor in my original post on this thread was lost somewhere.

It was low-quality humor, obviously culled from a humor farm - and thus downgraded.

Anti Link Sites are born...

[mevets]

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.

Re:Search for error messages

[TaoPhoenix]

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.

How does google know it was you?

[WaffleMonster]

What if a competitor generates link spam on your behalf for the purpose of peanalizing your rankings in google in a bid to knock out the competition?

How do they know "who" is responsible for the linkages?

link spam

[PPNSteve]

Just maybe this will have a wonderful side effect of slowing down or even stopping automated comment link spam..

..well one can hope anyway.

Re:Datasheets

[vettemph]

Funny, two days ago I sent Google a suggestion regarding datasheets. If someone types in 74HC[anyhing] etc... We want the .pdf, not a link to bogusdatasheets.com. Hell, just make it easier to select filetype:pdf in a checkbox, on the search or results page.