Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
I don't give a damn about their soul, I just want it to point me to the information I am looking for.
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.
Rod Taylor
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.
I'd settle for it finding these two droids I've been looking for.
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.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
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.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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.