Google Tweaks Algorithm; EHow Traffic Plummets

jfruhlinger writes "For some time there's been rumbling that Google's search results have been gummed up by low-quality pages from 'content farms,' written at low or no cost specifically to score high on common Google queries. Now it looks like the latest update to Google's search algorithm is having an effect, cutting into traffic to eHow (and cutting down the stock price of eHow's owner, Demand Media, in the process)."

Comments

and nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

of value was lost!

Re:and nothing

[Richard_at_work]

Demand Media tend to buy up a lot of pre-existing sites as well - Airliners.net, a fantastic aviation enthusiasts site, was bought by Demand Media in 2007 and rapidly went down hill resulting in a lot of members leaving :( Something of value is definitely lost once Demand Media get involved.

Re:and nothing

[Joce640k]

{image src="teeny violin.gif"}

Re:and nothing

[Seumas]

Now, if they'd only start to drop their affiliation with that fraudster who runs Rip Off Reports. The guy who allows anyone to anonymously complain about any company or even any *individual* with private personal information and no validity to their complaints (say, they're just a bitter ex) and will only address the issue if you pay money to be part of the service as a "business" (thousands of dollars, if I recall). And, somehow, they are always magically weighted to the top of Google. (You can do a search for plenty of well known tech personalities and others who have had problems with this guy's blackmail service hiding as a legitimate consumer advocacy service).

Yahoo and others have not weighted them the same way that Google has prioritized the results.

Re:and nothing

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

Speaking of nothing of value... I smell a lawsuit coming.

Re:and nothing

[Compaqt]

Isn't that the same thing that GetSatisfaction.com does? I think they ask companies to pay in order to respond.

Re:and nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

With a comment like that, you obviously don't have all the information so I'll fill you in.

I'm one of the top writers for ehow (or used to be) and they were even nice enough to fly me and some other top users out to their HQ in Santa Monica to preview site changes and suggest my own. At that time, things were going downhill fast. To combat it, they implemented a moderator system and I was one of them. My deletion percentage topped off at around 80% so yeah, it's not an exaggeration to say most of the content was indeed crap. It was mass produced by mostly lazy housewives who wanted fast money with no effort, not to mention a lack of writing skills on their part. So the moderator program deleted the vast majority of them, thousands per day, at great cost to DM. But content respectability was a big issue so they had to do something about it.

The 2nd huge issue was plagiarism. Long story short, they bought a 3rd party solution to search the entire web for duplicated or mostly similar content and flagged it within a week in most cases. It was so sensitive, if you posted your how to article on another site, it would find it and flag it as plagiarized until you proved you personally put it in both places. So basically copied and pasted content is extinct.

After these 2 measures, the quality went up but not quite enough and they ran into a huge problem. The moderator program was costing WAY too much money for the deletion percentage. You can't spend like $2 paying moderators to delete 4 articles and make up that revenue with the 1 good article out of 5 that was left over and that was the rate of good to bad for content being written every day. So they took an insane measure. They cut off all new account subscriptions at ehow.com and disabled ALL EXISTING USER ACCOUNTS. As in, all 2 million or so. They now have no writing users at all. It's like a read-only membership system now.

Where does their new content come from? Demand Studios, their ultra professional writing sector. To join DS, you need to pass a ridiculously difficult entrance exam and send in a resume in some cases in order to write for them because the content goes to magazined and respectable online publications. Around 95% of applicants fail and more get denied after their 3 initial probationary articles. Now DS is the sole way to get content onto ehow.com. So in the future, their articles are going to be excellent. As an IT professional and writer, all my articles are valuable and concise information that answers exactly what users are looking for when they search for it. That's why practically none of my articles got deleted. Some of the real losers there got 90%+ of their articles deleted and we're talking hundreds. So their zero tolerance policy on crappy content will improve the site in the future.

However...

My overall impression is that they're an awful company run by incompetent people in every position from the programmers to the customer support and they didn't seem any different when I met them in person. So yeah, who knows how they'll end up in 5 years. But it's really not as bad as this article makes them sound (anymore). I do definitely hate them in general though.

Oh and by the way, my Jan, Feb, March, and now April earnings from my static article library have been back to back record earnings and I've had them up and unchanged for about a year and a half now. I don't think their traffic is dropping or at least it's not dropping for content that was actually good. I think Google just removed code that let a brand new page get autoranked super high because of being on ehow.com and that's it. My articles are so good, they have a ton of inbound links from blogs and tech support forums so if Google weighted that the same or higher now, my page views are doing just fine because of it.

Re:and nothing

[Seumas]

I'm not sure what is involved with GetSatisfaction, but I know that the Rip Off Reports guy thumbs his nose at everyone and will absolutely never take anything down unless he is paid. And there is no requirement for putting something up (in fact, false accusations are known to be made very frequently not by consumers or visitors, but the site's own staff). You just create an account and post whatever you like and libel people (not merely companies, but even your next door neighbor or an ex or your coworker) and it will never be taken down, unless you join their expensive program, at which point you can suddenly have such things removed. (Oh, also note that you can't have an accusation removed even if you are the one that wrote it and later changed your mind). The guy behind it is about as shady as you can be - even for the internet.

http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/2007-02-01/news/the-real-rip-off-report/1/

http://www.97thfloor.com/blog/public-spam-report-google-your-honeymoon-with-rip-off-report-has-to-stop/

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/chris-bennet-on-rip-off-report

If there is someone you dislike, you can get revenge very simply and effectively by destroying their reputation without any possible recourse. Just crate a fake account and go to the website and start making shit up. Accuse them of criminal activities. Of fraud. Hell, accuse them of rape and child abuse. Include their full name and address and place of employment and anything else you like. It will stay there and when other people look up their name, they'll see these complaints on what an ignorant person would otherwise view as a legitimate consumer advocacy website. Pretty effective! Hell, try this out on your competitor, if you're in business.

Anyway, you can google all you like about it. I was pretty astonished when I heard about it and started digging around.

Re:and nothing

[Seumas]

All I ever saw at eHow was a bunch of useless shit, like "how to sext" and "how to wear a chunky necklace" and "how to have phone sex" and "how to name your dog" and "how to landscape" (with such insightful comments as sweeping your patio and mowing your lawn -- wow!).

I recall a time - for a few weeks - when eHow seemed like it had some potential. It very quickly dwindled into a sibling of Yahoo! Answers.

Re:and nothing

[webmistressrachel]

You're wrong there, at least stick to the truth when you're trolling me. I'm not perfect, I'm not even always correct when I give my opinion, but to say that because you've been burnt by me recently regarding someone who is transgendered? And even then, what if I was? You have a problem with transgendered people?

I know, I know, if it doesn't bother me because it's not true, why bite the troll, but if I don't reply then everybody will believe that there's some merit to AC's post because "You know, she didn't deny it..."... oh yes, correction, "he didn't deny it..." lol.

For the record, I am real, I am traceable (through my posts here; I made this decision recently), I am a woman, and I am genuinely proud of my life's work so far (I'm 29). I come here to let off steam, to play devil's advocate on important issues, and to be trolled (which I actually enjoy)

I often write posts in specific ways leaving openings for trolls, and have fun with myself predicting which trolls (points made, not people) will come and play. When I outed myself to prove I was real, I used (and will continue to use) the worst photos I have in my collection, which were taken when domestically I was at the lowest ebb I've ever been at in my life, living in a bad relationship (more than 2 years ago).

The parent troll was a predictable result of my calculated choices in referring to that profile. Those of you who have brains have since researched the more un-clickable information I have posted since then and before then and know better than to judge me only by that one bit of evidence - it's not even my house, but the trolls flooded in fast and furious! It's not hard to find out, just from postings on /., and by doing google searches (no quotes necessary if you read the right posts) about who I am, why I come here and act the way I do, and how I have, despite all the odds against me due to my background and (lack of!) birthrights lol, succeeded in contributing to and participating in society in a way most people never get chances to.

And I've done it all for myself, without a "help up" or "knowing the right people", but by being intelligent, skilled, bold and yet polite (most of the time). Those people who already know all that are welcome to troll me, too, but I will respect them all much more than this poster for at least using the facts against me rather than using something intended to turn "groupthink" against me, just like a playground "jock", playing on the other children's weaknesses and prejudices... racism, spectacle-wearing, a boy that looks girlish, a girl that looks boyish (YES I GOT IT AT SCHOOL FOR THIS - WHY YOU THINK I'M SO SENSITIVE ABOUT THIS ISSUE???)... you've probably done them all. So for example, political trolls, once you find out just how many times I've stood for election and for which party, you are especially welcome.

At least I'll know you have some brains, and your points will be based on something relevent and important to others, rather than a malicious lie which has spread from people who are so shallow and dumb that they are actually bullying someone else on this forum who IS transgendered. Hey, if that's how you feel about gender issues, why not just go take it up on a guns forum or something? Oh, I know why, they wouldn't tolerate it. And I'm sure a transgendered person with a gun isn't somebody you'd want to bully, at any rate, since they probably don't allow AC on gun forums. That's why you're not on the gun forum. There must be a forum for jocks and bullies somewhere, though, I just know that this isn't it.

ps. The only reason this reply took so long is that I'm over 25 posts, strange that. I've got Good Karma. Why only 25? Seems a little low, what if I post and get 24 trolls which need rebutting?

I can't post again, even if I'm about to post the most insightful comment /. has ever seen? Ok before anybody bites that's not a troll or a brag it's a joke. 25 does seem low though, for someone with Good Karma and plenty of +5 posts going back years.

The only reason I didn't reply to the last round of gender stereotyping is because the same thing happened, I was over-trolled and couldn't reply. I was fuming. Now it's happening again.

Wouldn't it be a lot simpler

[vlm]

Wouldn't it be a lot simpler to just block all robot traffic to expertsexchange, ehow, and the like? Or even more trivial, allow users individual profiles to block specific user selectable domains?

Re:Wouldn't it be a lot simpler

[danbert8]

But I don't want a sex change, even if they are experts!

Re:Wouldn't it be a lot simpler

[rgviza]

they buy up domains, prop up content farms on them, and all links on the content farms go back to eHow. So it's not as simple as blocking robot traffic to the offending domains (ehow and the like), you need to also crawl the content farms (easy because the SEO people register the pages to be crawled and google is already crawling/ranking them). Pages on some random domain that only have links to eHow, which are not on eHow.com, are probably farm content. Ditto for other farm content pointing to other domains.

The trick is for the robots to be sophisticated enough to ignore hidden (to user's browsers) content on the pages, look at the visible links and make a decision as to whether or not the content is legitimate based on where the visible links go.

Of course the SEO people will be on top of this and figure out a way around the algorithms. They always do...

Re:Wouldn't it be a lot simpler

[rudy_wayne]

But I don't want a sex change, even if they are experts!

Maybe you would like Camp Anal

Re:Wouldn't it be a lot simpler

[xtracto]

I do not understand why people hate experts-exchange. A lot of times I have found solutions to real problems in the answers of this site. On the other site, eHow really dones not provide any value.

Re:Wouldn't it be a lot simpler

[_0xd0ad]

Because 99% of the time, expert-sexchange just blatantly copied the question and answer from another website, and they try to hide the answer to get you to pay to register to see it. When someone wants me to pay to get something that I could get for free elsewhere, my basic reaction is "no, fuck you, you greedy bastard."

Sort of like the MLB wants me to pay to listen to live baseball games online while they're being broadcast live on free AM radio... and I can't even go to the AM radio station's website and listen to their live "on-air" streaming audio. No, fuck you, you greedy bastards... if I wanted to hear them that badly I'd go buy a cheap portable AM radio - it'd be cheaper and last longer than a subscription to your website. I only care to listen to one team's games anyway. As an added bonus, the radio wouldn't consume available bandwidth on my internet connection.

Re:Wouldn't it be a lot simpler

[gad_zuki!]

I dont like being in the position defending that site, but you're wrong. Their content is made by their own users and they don't steal content from other sites. They have a pay mechanism, but all the answers you find via google can be found by scrolling down to the bottom of the page. No need to pay anyone.

Re:Wouldn't it be a lot simpler

[oliverthered]

unless you pay, or possibly gressmonkey etc.. the pages one would assume.

read at -1

Re:Wouldn't it be a lot simpler

[poena.dare]

Honestly, I _have_ found a number of answers on ExE, it's just stupid that you have to scroll down. eHow is just an armpit - most every time I visit - say - looking for XP fix info - I end up at a page that explains how to find Control Panels in the Start menu.

Dear Google: the more ads a page hosts, the less chance that page has usable info. You have met the enemy and he is you!

Re:Wouldn't it be a lot simpler

[aepurniet]

buy up domains, prop up content farms on them, and all links on the content farms go back to eHow

this is not how the google ranking algorithm works. if eHow has a lower site rank (page rank for all its pages), then linking to it wont help you increase the content farm's page rank. what does that is when high page rank pages link to the content farms site. its a little recursive, and im sure its changed a little since the original implementation (think kludge factors). all those sites (ehow/sexchange) were actually ranked higher since people did link to them, and the sites did provide some content that some people were interested in.

Re:Wouldn't it be a lot simpler

[fyndor]

I have actually found answers to questions using experts exchange over the years (im a programmer), though I scroll to the bottom of the page to get result rather than paying them. Not a big fan of their "SEO" hack though (hiding results at the bottom and making page look like you have to pay to see results). Granted though, I have no idea if I would have found the same answer had it not been the first google result. Maybe a decent answer was lurking in the second google result, but they aren't totally worthless.

Re:Wouldn't it be a lot simpler

[Kamiza Ikioi]

Except that it's an opinion. I've used a couple eHow articles for things I have no clue about. On the other hand, their articles are crap and don't even load properly on my phone. I really like Experts Exchange, but if you are like me and don't carry around your pass, no phone access. So I completely understand being ticked off.

But the key many people forget is that Google has to be careful to only block obvious spam sites or face the wrath of hundreds of governments wanting them to be content filter for them as well. Google falls back on "It's the algorythm." That's a difficult position. They have to get better results by tiny algorythm ranking modifications that don't completely fsck their other search results. I've listened to podcasts with Matt Cutts on them (TWiT.tv), and it's a very thin line they have to walk.

Because the moment they are seen as targeting anyone legitimate, they will be sued for on anti-trust issues.

Re:Wouldn't it be a lot simpler

[GameboyRMH]

Don't forget the classic vacation destination, penisland!

Re:Wouldn't it be a lot simpler

[Seumas]

That seems unfair to those of us in the market for sex change advice from experts.

Also, one of the first things I blocked when Google offered the "block this site from any future results" service recently was Yahoo! Answers and ChaCha and all the other bullshit "answer" sites . . . and then sites like eHow. On rare occasion, you might find something useful on them and they *are* obviously hand written by actual people. It's just that it's still such garbage. There is even an eHow on how you should behave at a sex crime trial. And, increasingly, more of their stuff is just copied and pasted from other sources. Like "what are state gun laws for my state". Then there's the very useful ones, like "how to text message" and "how to have phone sex". Fucking retarded.

Re:Wouldn't it be a lot simpler

[SnarfQuest]

Does 'expert sex change' really draw that much traffic? Is there also a site for non-experts?

Re:Wouldn't it be a lot simpler

[tibit]

I think that everyone who posted that you supposedly have to scroll on EE to view things for free is a shill for the site. I have tried it on a PC and on a Mac, on a few different browsers, and I can't see a single answer. There's nothing to scroll down to. The page is always maybe 1.5 screen heights long, and it offers you to start a free subscription. So, dear AC what's the fucking trick?

Re:Wouldn't it be a lot simpler

[PhunkySchtuff]

Re: needing a pass for Experts Exchange - if the content isn't available freely then google can't index it. If you land on an Experts Exchange page from a google search just scroll... scroll... and scroll some more and you will see the actual content right at the very bottom of the page. No pass needed.

I used to hate experts exchange with a passion for their spamming of google results, now I don't really like them but there is at least some useful information there if you scroll to the bottom of the page.

Re:Wouldn't it be a lot simpler

[Compaqt]

I think you have to be coming in to it from a Google search. That's the only time I've ever been to the site (or Yahoo Answers, or Stack, eHow, etc.).

Re:Wouldn't it be a lot simpler

[mjwx]

Wouldn't it be a lot simpler to just block all robot traffic to expertsexchange,

What if someone wants a sex change?

Are you suggesting they should get it done by armatures?

Well duh the stock fell

[elrous0]

If your company's business plan focuses exclusively (or even primarily) on gaming Google search results, then anyone dumb enough to invest in you *deserves* to be screwed.

Re:Well duh the stock fell

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Unfortunately, while link farmers deserve to spend eternity licking fiberglass from satan's lava yacht(clinging to the outside, naturally), I suspect that investing in them is actually fairly rational.

Investing in any one is likely a bad idea; but the genre as a whole seems to be able to stay at least a bit ahead of the search guys, and likely makes a profit during that time. As long as regurgitating their mass of serf and/or script generated sludge in slightly different formats is cheap enough, they are unfortunately likely to be a decent investment on average.

Re:Well duh the stock fell

[vlm]

regurgitating their mass of serf and/or script generated sludge

And people wonder why I got rid of my facebook account. Oh wait you were talking about link farmers, sorry. And no, all of my "friends" were not link farmers, they just wrote that poorly.

Re:Well duh the stock fell

[MikePikeFL]

Investing in any one is likely a bad idea; but the genre as a whole seems to be able to stay at least a bit ahead of the search guys, and likely makes a profit during that time. As long as regurgitating their mass of serf and/or script generated sludge in slightly different formats is cheap enough, they are unfortunately likely to be a decent investment on average.

Say! That gives me an idea! What if we bundle all these link farmer investments together, the good with the bad, and sell those off to unsuspecting investors! Do you think we could make a ton of money that way and screw a bunch of unsuspecting people? Would that work? Could we get away with that?

Re:Well duh the stock fell

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Well, my original vision was more in line with link-farming as being an activity analogous to mining: every site you exploit ends up a polluted wasteland; but some percentage of them yield enough valuable minerals that you turn a profit.

However... your idea intrigues me.

Re:Well duh the stock fell

[Charliemopps]

yes, but it's to the point now that when you do a search, the first 10 pages of results are nothing but these sorts of BS sites. And the sites are getting better and better at mirroring themselves under multiple names. I applaud googles efforts.

Re:Well duh the stock fell

[hedwards]

I don't think it's a valid analogy, doesn't Google's ToS have something to say about tricking people into clicking on your site? And if not, I'd be surprised how long until they add it. Trying to create a company on the basis of defrauding advertisers isn't something that screams good investment to me, but then again I don't own a Ferrari yet, so I could be wrong.

Re:Well duh the stock fell

[Runaway1956]

That strikes me as an overstatement. Either that, or my search parameters meet my needs better than your search parameters, or some such nonsense.

From time to time, I do notice trash crop up in a search. Sometimes, the first 5 or 10 results are pretty obviously noise accompanying the signal. But, ten pages of results? Never. Not even a full page. Crap - I'm going to check something - some stupid term - UTERUS!

http://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=uterus&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

I clicks the first ten links:
wikipedia - not good, not bad, it's informational
www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/imagepages/19263.htm - looks alright, educational, I guess and seems to lead to other educational material (didn't check)
www.medicinenet.com/uterine_cancer/article.htm - looks alright again - educational, but there are links to what look like practitioners sites.
http://ibnlive.in.com/news/226-hysterectomies-in-6-months-in-rajasthan/149579-3.html - news article, appears to be about forced sterilization, or unethical doctors
http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/04/17/2171976/south-florida-activists-pen-the.html - 'nother news article about an activist group
http://www.emedicinehealth.com/prolapsed_uterus/article_em.htm - looks like a mirror of medicinenet above - same adverts, different article
http://www.nuff.org/health_theuterus.htm - you'll note I'm not digging deeply - looks like a nonprofit concerned with women's health?
http://womenshealth.about.com/cs/uterinehealth/a/abouttheuterus.htm - looks like what the name implies - educational
http://www.pathologyoutlines.com/uterus.html - lots of links, looks like it's educational, but again, I'm not digging deep here
http://www.medterms.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=5918 - another medicinenet mirror, this happens to be yet another related article

Somewhere, somehow, perhaps my settings tend to show pertinent results? I don't know - maybe you're trying to pull the wool over our eyes?

Re:Well duh the stock fell

[bill_mcgonigle]

I suspect that investing in them is actually fairly rational.

Starting them is even more rational. This guy was able to bring the company public and sell shares before Google did anything about it. Odds are he put the Google algorithm risk in the prospectus and made out well.

Already done.

[kcbnac]

Previous Slashdot discussion:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/03/11/1711252/Google-Introduces-Domain-Blocking-To-Search

Article discussing how:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/hide-sites-to-find-more-of-what-you.html

Re:Already done.

[vlm]

Interesting.. I did not realize that feature was available, because it is not shown to me in my results. There is no "block" option next to the "cached" and "similar" as seen in the blog posts etc. I do see in my search options that I can manually block up to 500 domains from search results. Nothing weird here, just a normal google account and a normal firefox with no unusual addons/extensions.

Maybe that option only appears for certain "special" domain names, or "special" searches?

Re:Already done.

[nitehawk214]

Well that is a downright stupid implementation. Why should i have to go to a site I know I hate in order to get it blocked?

Re:Already done.

[Maximum Prophet]

You have to be logged into a google service, click on a link in the search results, go back, then just that link will have the "Block" button. It took me a few tries before it worked for me.

Even better, you can go right to http://www.google.com/reviews/t to set things up in bulk. Then, when you search, at the bottom of the page should be a link like "Some items were blocked, click to see"

Re:Already done.

[Maximum Prophet]

You can go right to http://www.google.com/reviews/t to set things up in bulk. You do have to be logged into a google service first, and for the blocking to work.

Re:Already done.

[NevarMore]

Is there some way to do a rules based block? Like anything that clones StackOverflow content should just be hidden or link me directly to SO?

Re:Already done.

[vlm]

You have to be logged into a google service, click on a link in the search results, go back, then just that link will have the "Block" button. It took me a few tries before it worked for me.

You that bit at the start of the HHGTTG? About the plans available for review in a vault in the basement on a planet circling another star or something like that? Yeah thats what I'm thinking. At least its not in Klingon.

Re:Already done.

[Abstrackt]

Maybe that option only appears for certain "special" domain names, or "special" searches?

You have to be logged in to use the feature and you must have visited the site at least once through a search, the option to block the offending site comes if it shows up again through a different search. There's also the option to block URLs manually under search settings, which is what I recommend.

Re:Already done.

[Tuan121]

1) You don't, see below
2) You might not know every site you wanted blocked off the top of your head, trial and error for a while is the best way to go then

Re:Already done.

[earls]

And there's an extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nolijncfnkgaikbjbdaogikpmpbdcdef

Re:Already done.

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

if you're logged into your google account, go into search settings, roll to the bottom of the page and there'll be a "Blocked Sites" section where you can add sites manually.

Re:Already done.

[digitig]

Doesn't seem to be any such section here.

Re:Already done.

[natet]

Awesome. Experts exchange now blocked! This has immediately become my favorite google search feature.

Re:Already done.

[xaxa]

Awesome. Experts exchange now blocked! This has immediately become my favorite google search feature.

With an HTTP referrer from Google I see the answers, right at the bottom (press the "End" key).

Or, use the "Cached" link with Javascript disabled to see the "hidden" answers.

Re:Already done.

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

I have yet to see this feature enabled in my locale. Maybe they haven't converted the code to PAL yet?

Re:Already done.

[cjb658]

You do realize that on EE, you can scroll to the bottom of the page for the answer?

Re:Already done.

[LizardKing]

You do realize that on EE, you can scroll to the bottom of the page for the incorrect answer?

FTFY

Re:Already done.

[Runaway1956]

Ohhhhh - I dunno. Google has a lot of neat things, some of which I haven't found on my own. Guess I'm not a Google fanatic. Anyway - I am logged in, and I clicked the link in sibling post, to find this: http://www.google.com/reviews/t

Manage Blocked Sites
If you don't like a site that appears in your search results, you can block all the pages within that site. Then you won't see any of those pages when you're signed in and searching on Google. If you change your mind, you can unblock the site later.

Sites will be blocked only for you, but Google may use everyone's blocking information to improve the ranking of search results overall.

You may block up to 500 sites.
You currently have no blocked sites.
Manually block a site

Now - 500 sites doesn't sound like a lot, but hey, if you're entering TLD's, they go a long, long, long way, right?

Re:Already done.

[demonbug]

Awesome. Experts exchange now blocked! This has immediately become my favorite google search feature.

I always read the URL as Expert Sex Change, so have never visited... So you're saying it isn't worth visiting anyway?

Re:Already done.

[onepoint]

Well google does cover that, just in case you do read Klingon, they want everyone to be able to read it http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=xx-klingon

Re:Already done.

[mikael_j]

It used to be that you couldn't, they showed the answer to Google but hid it for everyone else. That scumminess appears to be gone, I suspect Google bitchslapped their pagerank for it...

Re:Already done.

[Solandri]

You have to be logged into a google service, click on a link in the search results, go back, then just that link will have the "Block" button. It took me a few tries before it worked for me.

Ah ha! That's why it stopped working for me a couple days after Google implemented it. I don't use the back button, I open up Google search results in new tabs. So my Google search page was never being refreshed.

Re:Already done.

[E-Rock]

Thanks for posting the link to http://www.google.com/reviews/t, I couldn't get block to appear even after logging in. Bye-bye experts exchange!

Re:Already done.

[Larryish]

I always read the URL as Expert Sex Change, so have never visited...

Well mate, in all fairness...

If you MUST have a sex change, the procedure SHOULD, in fact, be conducted by an expert.

Re:Already done.

[Kelbear]

THANK you for linking me to that.

I've been annoyed that since the announcement of Google's blocking feature, I'd never been given the option, and manually entering site blocks is a clunky way of doing it.

Re:Already done.

[RobertM1968]

Awesome. Experts exchange now blocked! This has immediately become my favorite google search feature.

I always read the URL as Expert Sex Change, so have never visited... So you're saying it isn't worth visiting anyway?

Yeah, not worth it at all... I spent weeks looking for the sex change part (much less finding an expert at it), and got nowhere... ;-)

Re:Already done.

[nitehawk214]

I had the same problem. Did you click on the site, then go back to get the block link?

You can also explicitly block domains if you log into a google account and go to settings.

Good riddance, Big Resource

[bhunachchicken]

I don't know about anyone else, but I was beginning to get very pissed off with looking up things on Google and constantly being linked to Big Resource, which was just a huge page of nothing.

Gettin' even bigger? Get as big as you like, you'll soon not see any visits from me...

Good

[chemicaldave]

Google has been turning into a cesspool lately.

Re:Unfair to eHow and comparable businesses?

[kcbnac]

Said suits have been tried, and failed miserably. Google's algorithm is a trade secret, and are not required to prop up others business models. They won't try, Google's won enough cases like this, even if they did they'd get their butts handed to them on a platter in court.

Hit me badly too

[zakkie]

I run a website that is entirely my own work, is the result of years of research and involves many hours a day of new research. I am able to provide the data I collate for free to everyone because AdSense income covered hosting costs and allowed me to pay rent and buy food. I was not making vast sums of money, but I could do what I love and provide a useful resource to thousands of others. Now, scraper sites get ranked above me and even sites that cite me as the source rank higher than I do for many keywords. It's unfortunate, but for me this means less time doing actual original research and more time having to go out and market myself.

As a one man organisation, it's going to be really tough to keep going. I think Google have made a massive error here - by saying they can gauge the quality of a website (and its usefulness) algorithmically is arrogant and short-sighted. I hope they figure this out quickly. I really do hate having to sell stuff, even my own work!

Re:Hit me badly too

[drinkypoo]

I think Google have made a massive error here - by saying they can gauge the quality of a website (and its usefulness) algorithmically is arrogant and short-sighted. I hope they figure this out quickly. I really do hate having to sell stuff, even my own work!

You have it entirely backwards. Google has made the only intelligent decision here, by saying that they cannot possibly gauge the quality of all websites manually, and sticking to their guns about doing it programatically. That way, suing them over your position in the rankings is much more difficult because they can prove a lack of favoritism.

Re:Hit me badly too

[exploder]

Are you a (one man) content farm? You're pretty vague about what kind of data you provide.

Re:Hit me badly too

[bmo]

So what's your site?

If it's useful, I'd like to see it.

I like useful things. I'm sure the rest of Slashdot likes useful things too. So post it here. We'll go visit.

What have you got to lose?

--
BMO

Re:Hit me badly too

[zakkie]

Well yes, but Google should not be judging a site's quality as such, they should be indexing the web. There is significant overlap in those concepts, sure, but currently their algorithm for indexing is broken - demonstrably so - and they are trying to do too much too soon. Wiping out the small independent publishers who provide mountains of good information is surely not what they intended to do.

Re:Hit me badly too

[moonbender]

He's got a link to his site in his /. profile so you can judge for yourself. The site looks fine to me, genuinely useful to people who're interested in that sort of thing.

Re:Hit me badly too

[pz]

I really do hate having to sell stuff, even my own work!

By relying on AdSense for income, you are selling your own work. Thinking otherwise is allowing yourself a convenient illusion.

Re:Hit me badly too

[blue_adept]

Wiping out small independent publishers who "collate" mountains of information that they don't own the copyright for may well be what google intends to do. Let's be clear here. Are you an author? Do you create content? Or do you amalgamate other people's work, with or without their permission and/or using "fair use" provisions of copyright law? You don't really say, but I'm guessing from the tone of your post that you don't in fact create content. So, if your site is useful, provide the link, so we can have a better informed discussion about the merits of your site wrt the recent change in google's algorithm.

Re:Hit me badly too

[dave420]

But not selling it for cash, just page impressions.

Re:Hit me badly too

[zakkie]

If you can't figure out how to find the link, I'm not sure your opinion on my site will be worth much, mate. But thanks for the kind offer.

Re:Hit me badly too

[Artifex]

Well yes, but Google should not be judging a site's quality as such, they should be indexing the web. There is significant overlap in those concepts, sure, but currently their algorithm for indexing is broken - demonstrably so - and they are trying to do too much too soon.

I'm confused; are you in the index or not? If you're in the index, then your complaint is really about the ranking you're being assigned. But you just said you don't want them to judge quality (though earlier you argued that your quality is what differentiates you from your competition). How else should they be judging your content?

Re:Hit me badly too

[zakkie]

By relying on AdSense for income, you are selling your own work. Thinking otherwise is allowing yourself a convenient illusion.

Yes, but I don't have to stop researching my data, making my site work better, adding features, etc. Eventually I could look to hire people to sell for me, but I'm certainly not in the position to be able to do that yet.

Re:Hit me badly too

[vlm]

So what's your site? ... What have you got to lose?

Zakkie links to http://www.carfolio.com/ on his /. profile page. I'm personally completely uninterested in the topic, but it looks like a real site as opposed to a content farm.

He's probably worried about losing his anonymity, knowing that /. is the most likely place on the net to have us all check his whois and reverse DNS records just for fun, etc.

Re:Hit me badly too

[zakkie]

So what's your site? ... What have you got to lose?

Zakkie links to http://www.carfolio.com/ on his /. profile page. I'm personally completely uninterested in the topic, but it looks like a real site as opposed to a content farm.

He's probably worried about losing his anonymity, knowing that /. is the most likely place on the net to have us all check his whois and reverse DNS records just for fun, etc.

I was commenting on the story, because it impacted me quite directly. Those who wanted to see my site could easily have done what you did :)

Re:Hit me badly too

[zakkie]

It's an odd freaking post. On one hand he says content farms were ranking higher than him. This fix will allow people to remove those content farms, and now he complains that his hits will go down?

So he was relying on the content farms to link to him and he mad that they get higher pagerank, but happy that they do? :boggle:

Perhaps I wasn't clear. After the update, my site is lost in a sea of results to content-scrapers who had taken from my site without linking back or citing me as the source, many of which ranked higher than I did.

Re:Hit me badly too

[faedle]

In other words, Google's algorithm is working.

Re:Hit me badly too

[gstoddart]

I think Google have made a massive error here - by saying they can gauge the quality of a website (and its usefulness) algorithmically is arrogant and short-sighted.

WTF? Google has always 'algorithmically gauged the quality and usefulness' of a website. That's what they do. That's what they've always done, and that's what search engines are for.

When they first came out, they were the best search engine because they explicitly pruned out the cruft and the link farms that had polluted all of the other search engines and made them useless. When I found Google, Yahoo and every other search engine got pretty much dropped, because Google actually returned content.

Google has become a multi-billion dollar concern by showing the 'arrogance' of thinking they can get rid of the shit and highlight the useful stuff.

If you truly have original research, and people actually cite you, then hopefully Google's new changes will actually help you and hinder the link farms and scrapers.

But, thinking it "arrogant and short-sighted" for Google to continue to do what they've always done is, well, arrogant and short-sighted. Google has been doing exactly this for over a decade, and continuously trying to make it better. To say that now they shouldn't be doing it because it might lower your page hits is hypocritical.

Personally, I'm all in favor of anything which gets rid of some of the useless damned meta-link sites that don't have anything of value, but exist purely to drive traffic from Google. I don't think such sites should be rewarded. In fact, I think they should be dropped from the search results altogether, which is hopefully what Google is doing here ... dropping eHow is a good start.

Re:Hit me badly too

[gnapster]

What he means is spending time on marketing, instead of actually being productive. It wasn't that hard; don't be dense.

Re:Hit me badly too

[zakkie]

Well yes, but Google should not be judging a site's quality as such, they should be indexing the web. There is significant overlap in those concepts, sure, but currently their algorithm for indexing is broken - demonstrably so - and they are trying to do too much too soon.

I'm confused; are you in the index or not? If you're in the index, then your complaint is really about the ranking you're being assigned. But you just said you don't want them to judge quality (though earlier you argued that your quality is what differentiates you from your competition). How else should they be judging your content?

I am in the index, and Google is going a really shitty job of figuring out quality on whatever these new algorithms consider to be signs of quality. My site is older (they can verify that easily enough) than the scraper sites, has more links to it (the basis of the original page ranking system) and is also quite clearly being duplicated by these sites. Had Google stuck to just indexing the web as they did, the natural order of things would have been more favourable to me. Which IMHO is what it should be in this particular case.

Re:Hit me badly too

[dhammond]

Small correction. When Google first came out, there were no link farms because Google was the first search engine to rank results based on the quantity and quality of links going to sites. That was their great innovation.

Re:Hit me badly too

[avm]

Nice site. Bookmarked for future reference so I don't have to deal with the content farms and their pop under flash nonsense.

Re:Hit me badly too

[pspahn]

You'll just have to order this month's edition of "How to game Google with SEO".

Re:Hit me badly too

[NevarMore]

You should have a link to your site in this post then.

Have you considered sites that boost search rankings by reposting your content? Note that this is different from a content scraper, you gotta submit an article to them first they don't just go and scrape it.

I think ArticleSnatch does something like this. Basically you post an article there, take advantage of AS's search ranking so your content shows up in searches, but then AS links to your original site/blog so you still get traffic driven to your site. AS wins because they get ad impressions and content, you win because it drives traffic to your site.

Re:Hit me badly too

[Bucc5062]

Interesting...It took some minor investigation to look up your web site. I then did a generic type Google search (vehicle technical specifications) and tada! You're site popped up as the first link. It would seem that perhaps their algorithm is doing its job.

The web site was a little rough on the user. I did not find it very user friendly for looking up vehicles. I tried with my two rather common vehicles, 1999 Dodge 2500 and a 1997 Nissan Maxima. Could not find either of them. I am jsut wondering how you make money off something like this/ I'd love to drop my life as a Sr Developer drudging my way to an office each day and work from home, managing a web site with Google sending me a check.

Anyway, looks like you got top billing again.

Re:Hit me badly too

[Idarubicin]

I think Google have made a massive error here - by saying they can gauge the quality of a website (and its usefulness) algorithmically is arrogant and short-sighted.

You're right. Google should hire an army of individuals to manually rate the content on every web page that they crawl. Human beings could index and categorize web sites to make the good stuff easier to find. This directory approach provided easy access to thousands of sites for clients of Yahoo! in the 1990s, and it's why dozens of internet users still rely on Yahoo! today.

Yes sir, there's nothing like the feel of good old-fashioned hand-crafted search results. Sure, they cost a little more and take a little longer, and it's getting harder to find new young search artisans willing to pick up the trade, but it's surely worth it in the end. Please take a number, and a search technician will be glad to add your site to the index as soon as he gets around to you--probably in late 2023.

Re:Hit me badly too

[Vectormatic]

if said website is under you homepage in your /. profile, then i am surprised you are able to sustain yourself with it.

The last frontpage update (on what appears to be a car blog) is from fricking february, and the menu structure seems very unlikely to provide me with any kind of worthwhile content, there are multiple car-news sites that are many orders of magnitude more interesting.

The specification part also seems rather non-user friendly to me.

Honestly, spend more time on making your website worthwhile rather then trying to sell what it is now

Re:Hit me badly too

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly, it looks as though his site is largely an aggregator of printed content. The front page appears to have original news-release summaries, but all photos are stock photos (which can't help), and it looks like the vast majority of the content is the "Car Database", numeric specifications like wheelbase, curb weight, etc. likely collated from a variety of magazines (and may be duplicated on the magazines' websites for all I know).

Also, there seems to be piss-poor SEO being used (at least the good kind encouraged by the search providers). It appears to be using a simple scripting mechanism to look up cars by numeric IDs in the query string. Putting the car name in the URL and using URL-Rewriting instead would probably be nice, perhaps a sitemap file would be helpful. The main content is listed after all the ads, headers, footers, left and right sidebars, hell, I'm surprised it's not after the </html> tag...

To me it doesn't look like there's that much original content, and content farms are likely to use better techniques to make them look like the authentic source....

Re:Hit me badly too

[bmo]

>latest article is feb 13
>article before that is in October 2010

You're not trying very hard. Honest opinion.

Maybe you're dropping because you don't have current information.

Posting with no karma bonus cuz offtopic. Just had to add that here, though, because someone needs to tell you.

--
BMO

Re:Hit me badly too

[Andy Dodd]

That's weird, since the whole intent of the update was to knock down the rankings for the content-scrapers - it SHOULD have helped you instead of hurting you.

Re:Hit me badly too

[asvravi]

Here is a post from his site dated Sep 23rd 2010 - Rogues, rapscallions and rascals Thursday September 23, 2010 Carfolio.com has been collecting and collating automotive technical data for many years, before actually having a website or even an internet-connected computer. Realising that there would be interest in this database, I decided to put my data up online in a very useful and functional way. It has always and will always be free for anyone to utilise. Some people, however, have decided to crawl the site and put all the data into their own database and resell and republish the information without attribution, credit or acknowledgement. Some go as far as to add 10mm to the basic dimensions so as to try and disguise their actions... I find that extremely bizarre, as part of the whole idea behind Carfolio.com is to get as many errors found and corrected as possible, and to that end I have always encouraged feedback and dialogue about the specifications. Factual errors are always corrected if sufficient sources are supplied. So as to ensure the best possible quality of data for Carfolio.com users, here is a list of the sites currently known to be using the data without attribution. I will not give them a link, of course, as that will unduly increase their search engine ranking. autofiles dot org carspector dot com data4car dot com carocean dot co dot uk (and de, es, pl, it, fr) scorpiocars dot net ukmotorist dot co dot uk getcarspecs dot com Please be wary of the data from these sites as they are definitely not updated and almost certainly have introduced additional errors when crawling or attempting to obfuscate the source of the data.

Re:Hit me badly too

[IICV]

I think he was just hoping you didn't mean the site in your Slashdot profile, because that thing is a piece of junk. You aren't updating the main page even monthly and your content seems to consist of freely available information that you've just re-worded into blog posts and put into a database.

Basically, I'm sorry to say it but your site doesn't really deserve a good ranking.

Re:Hit me badly too

[metamatic]

Well yes, but Google should not be judging a site's quality as such, they should be indexing the web.

Google isn't judging your site's quality. They're ranking it based on how the rest of the web judges your site's quality. If nobody thinks you're worth linking to, your rank is poor; if everyone links to you as the definitive source, your rank is high.

Re:Hit me badly too

[Spykk]

Well, your first mistake was posting about your site on slashdot without including a link. A high rated slashdot post can get you a lot of views. Your second mistake was not investing in my SUPER GUIDE TO INTERNET WIN!!1!

Re:Hit me badly too

[zakkie]

>latest article is feb 13
>article before that is in October 2010

You're not trying very hard. Honest opinion.

Maybe you're dropping because you don't have current information.

Posting with no karma bonus cuz offtopic. Just had to add that here, though, because someone needs to tell you.

--
BMO

My main updates do not happen on the front page. That is for something interesting or noteworthy and I do it when I have time or feel there is a need. If you click the "Latest additions" link you'll see the last 250 models added to the database. That is the engine room, so to speak, and you'll not find anything last added (never mind updated) later than March 2011 in there.

Re:Hit me badly too

[zakkie]

See, that's your problem right there.

Your business model is: get people to visit my site so I can collect ad revenue.

However you turn away people who were curios about your sight because you've decided that anyone who doesn't take the initiative to look at your profile and follow the link without any promoting from you isn't worthy of giving your their business. (you didn't say "it's in my profile" you said "if you can't find it I don't need your business").

If you want to make money from ad revenue you have to make an effort to get people to see your ads. and no having good content isn't enough without promotion.

Actually, the link is not only in my profile, it's shown in the very place the comment was! My point was actually that if he couldn't find that then I was not likely to consider his feedback about my site (or anyone's for that matter) terribly highly. However, I was probably a bit snippy and I apologise for that. I could have easily said "Here you go, here's the link." Humble apologies.

Re:Hit me badly too

[gstoddart]

Small correction. When Google first came out, there were no link farms because Google was the first search engine to rank results based on the quantity and quality of links going to sites. That was their great innovation.

Well, given that when Google came out many searches on Yahoo were completely shit because people were putting 100K worth of crap in meta tags so that anything going for search keywords would hit it.

Those sites might have had some links, and they may or may not have had anything to do with what you searched for. It was all about trying to sell doubleclick ads or install malware. In that sense, I don't see them as being any different from the crap web sites which exist purely to drive link traffic. I don't really see much distinction between what you call a link farm now, and the crap faux traffic sites from the late 90's.

It was all shit designed to drive eyeballs to stuff that wasn't actually relevant, but would be beneficial to the guys who ran it. It doesn't really have anything to do with what you searched on, or only tangentially ... but it's only showing up in your search because someone went to great lengths to make sure the search results were poisoned.

Same shit, different decade.

Re:Hit me badly too

[zakkie]

Honestly, it looks as though his site is largely an aggregator of printed content. The front page appears to have original news-release summaries, but all photos are stock photos (which can't help), and it looks like the vast majority of the content is the "Car Database", numeric specifications like wheelbase, curb weight, etc. likely collated from a variety of magazines (and may be duplicated on the magazines' websites for all I know).

Most of the specifications come from the manufacturers themselves. This is to be expected. I also only use images that I have permission to, and to that end the manufacturers do a reasonable job of providing free-for-editorial photos of their products. I use them, but you'll notice that in all cases, they are at least cropped to show the car in as great detail as possible within my self-imposed 300 pixel-wide image size restriction. It's never simply sticking up the manufacturers' images.

Also, there seems to be piss-poor SEO being used (at least the good kind encouraged by the search providers). It appears to be using a simple scripting mechanism to look up cars by numeric IDs in the query string. Putting the car name in the URL and using URL-Rewriting instead would probably be nice, perhaps a sitemap file would be helpful. The main content is listed after all the ads, headers, footers, left and right sidebars, hell, I'm surprised it's not after the </html> tag...

To me it doesn't look like there's that much original content, and content farms are likely to use better techniques to make them look like the authentic source....

There is a lot of original content, well in as far as publishing factual information can be original - the combinations of models, data and the timeframe of the specs - from before the 190s to 2011 - makes the collection as a whole pretty unique. I try hard to make it more useful than a simple collection of html pages with specs on them. You can search for cars having certain characteristics, designed by certain people, etc. Also, during my collating/collecting/researching of data, I often find errors from the manufacturers themselves, which I always bring to their attention. Some acknowledge and fix, and I'm pleased when they do.

The ads - well, I'd love to have no ads, but at the moment that's what I am relying on for my income and to allow me to continue running the site. I am investigating alternative ways of generating revenue, but the ads for now enable me to continue doing what I do.

As for site layout, hey I did the best I can. I'm no designer, nor do I have resources to hire one. I'm not happy to ask for favours either, so I wasn't about to lean on mates who were more "designery" than me ;-)

A sitemap would be useful, indeed. It's on the to-do list.

Thanks for your feedback.

Re:Hit me badly too

[bmo]

Then you need to change your layout.

Because your page seems like it's nearly dead to a newcomer.

First impressions matter. Really. You need some people to give you some feedback on your page. Or at least a book on page design.

--
BMO

Re:Hit me badly too

[zakkie]

Just to quickly address your two specifics - Dodge 2500 is a truck. I sometimes have them listed, but I generally concentrate on passenger cars, as there's more than enough work there to keep me busy for forever, probably.

Then, if you drop the model year from your search, you're likely to find your Maxima. Most year-on-year changes are merely options being added or deleted rather than the actual technical data changing. I do not currently attempt to cover those. With 2 caveats: I'm particularly poor in the mid- to late-nineties era, before car data from the manufacturers was comprehensively published by them and there just happens to be a massive gap in my personal offline collection of hardcopy from the manufacturers around that time. When gaps like this are found and brought to my attention I make extra effort to research and publish that data.

Thanks for your feedback.

Re:Hit me badly too

[zakkie]

A quick search seems to indicate you're being put at the top for searches for your content? I found carfolio on the first five spots on a search for a snippet from your website (which I assume is the one linked as your homepage).

Yup, that';s the one.

For a great many terms i do rank 1st, still. But there are many where I don't. I suspect if you're obviously trying to find Carfolio.com, you'll find the site right at the top. But if you're searching for data on various cars out of the database without consciously trying to get Carfolio.com on top, you'll find copied content ahead of mine. That's certainly been my experience.

Re:Hit me badly too

[zakkie]

I think he was just hoping you didn't mean the site in your Slashdot profile, because that thing is a piece of junk. You aren't updating the main page even monthly and your content seems to consist of freely available information that you've just re-worded into blog posts and put into a database.

Basically, I'm sorry to say it but your site doesn't really deserve a good ranking.

Thanks for your kind words :)

A lot of the content that is now freely available is in fact freely available because I put it up there in the first place. The main page isn't where the updates happen as a rule - if you look at the "Latest Additions" page you'll see the last 250 entries to the database. I doubt that even one was added earlier than March 2011.

Re:Hit me badly too

[zakkie]

if said website is under you homepage in your /. profile, then i am surprised you are able to sustain yourself with it.

The last frontpage update (on what appears to be a car blog) is from fricking february, and the menu structure seems very unlikely to provide me with any kind of worthwhile content, there are multiple car-news sites that are many orders of magnitude more interesting.

The specification part also seems rather non-user friendly to me.

Honestly, spend more time on making your website worthwhile rather then trying to sell what it is now

It is not a car blog, nor a car news site. It is a database of car specifications. The recent activity is almost always in the "Latest Additions" section. That shows the last 250 entries, and I'd be surprised if there is currently anything from before March 2011 in there. The aim of the site is present a searchable, slice-and-dice view onto reams of data that I have researched over years. I'm sorry that you find it hard to navigate around, if you would be so kind as to drop me a line via the feedback form with more details, I'll try and make it work better for you.

Re:Hit me badly too

[bill_mcgonigle]

On my netbook, when I navigate to your site I see two pictures, a couple menus and a bunch of ads on the first screen. I have to scroll down to the second page to even get an idea about what kind of content your site offers. That's very atypical for a good website.

Re:Hit me badly too

[David Chappell]

I think Google have made a massive error here - by saying they can gauge the quality of a website (and its usefulness) algorithmically is arrogant and short-sighted. I hope they figure this out quickly. I really do hate having to sell stuff, even my own work!

You would not want to use the Google search engine if they did not. You see, there are people out there who create thousands of useless web pages filled with words that describe the things that you search for. The only purpose of these pages is to display advertisements. If Google did not have a algorithm which determined that these pages do not say anything anyone wants to read, Google search results would return pages and pages of this junk. For some queries they return pages and pages of junk _despite_ the algorithm. Would you really want them to turn it off?

So, this is not something new that Google is doing. Google has simply refined its algorithm to detect junk that was slipping through the cracks.

Re:Hit me badly too

[Rizimar]

The main page isn't where the updates happen as a rule

Why would this ever be a rule?

Re:Hit me badly too

[Krater76]

Agreed, great looking site. I'm not a car guy but gave a couple click-throughs on a few ads to help him out.

Re:Hit me badly too

[meatron]

Never mind the dickheads. The site doesn't look great graphically or anything but does the job it is intended for. I hope things work out for you. Maybe a face-lift wouldn't be bad though...

Re:Hit me badly too

[Anubis IV]

If the focus is on car specs, as you say it is and as it does in fact seem to be, then why aren't they more prominently featured or mentioned? Even I thought it was a car blog of sorts at first look, and wouldn't have thought it was a repository of specs for various models.

Re:Hit me badly too

[swillden]

Can you provide a sample search that shows this problem? The intent of the change was clearly to do the exact opposite of the effect you're describing. It might be useful for someone at Google to look into why their work has backfired in your case.

Re:Hit me badly too

[goose-incarnated]

Actually he's correct about the navigation; the data itself is a goldmine (thanks). I've bookmarked for later use.

Re:Hit me badly too

[dysfunct]

Just as a second opinion: I agree with the sibling post. Your layout is quite a bit confusing, I got lost in the navigation and your front page has tons of links that might get identified as keyword spam (your link texts are way too good and specific). Also, you might want to try decriptive URLs, i.e. having the car's name as part of the URL.

Re:Hit me badly too

[Draknor]

As for site layout, hey I did the best I can. I'm no designer, nor do I have resources to hire one. I'm not happy to ask for favours either, so I wasn't about to lean on mates who were more "designery" than me ;-)

Understood, but if you are "no designer", have no resources to hire one, and are "not happy to ask for favours", then why do you complain that sites that are better designed are ranked higher than you? I went to some of the copy-cat websites you listed and frankly, their designs are better (at least on the homepage -- I didn't spend THAT much time on them). You may have better content & all the blood, sweat, and tears put into compiling the data, but you still have to present it in meaningful way.

Your front page looks like an abandoned blog; ads on the top, a post from Feb 2011 and then some 2010 posts, and some random search links and car factoids on the right side. In a 3 second glance at your site, I have NO IDEA what this site is about. Some of your copy-cats -- bam, first glance, I know exactly why this web page exists.

Don't take this as criticism about you personally or endorsement of copy-cat behavior (its neither) -- just constructive feedback that your website is not doing your passion justice in terms of presentation, and that some design revamping & appropriate SEO may reap some substantial dividends.

Re:Hit me badly too

[Animats]

you'll find copied content ahead of mine.

Google has a problem with provenance. They can detect that sites A and B have identical or similar text, but have trouble telling who originated the content. Google should at least have reliable techniques to tell who posted it first. Google now scrapes sites so frequently that they should be able to tell from their own timestamps who was first.

Maybe Google should have a "page changed" API that publishing systems could call with a URL, so that after new content goes up, Google gets the first look, before the scrapers find and copy it. Or some kind of signed timestamp scheme.

Re:Hit me badly too

[Kelbear]

Interesting site. Given the feedback thus far it sounds like the main page should be showing the latest additions instead.

Any special site update posts or news should go on a separate news page since these aren't the main focus.

This way the new arrivals are shown the site's value right up front.

Re:Hit me badly too

[tibit]

At least in the U.S., facts (or "information") are not subject to copyright. IOW: as far as U.S. law is concerned, your entire argument is full of shit. So if he went and measured all those wheelbases etc. himself, would it make any more useful? No, and the U.S. law recognizes that busywork does not add any value. If specs for a car are known, there's no point in having it excessively protected from dissemination. His work was in collecting all the information from different sources, categorizing it (a librarian's type of work), and making it available in a concise, searchable form. I applaud such efforts. To think otherwise must imply that you'd much rather not have library catalogs either. It's just a "collation" of "mountains" of "information", and thus useless, and surely libraries are not owning any copyrights over that hahaha. Shut up.

Re:Hit me badly too

[jwhitener]

If I search for automobile technical specification you are the number one hit.
If I search for car technical specification you are the number two hit.

It seems that google is placing you fairly high for certain terms. Perhaps you lost rank when people search for shorter/less specific terms, like 'car spec', but that isn't so much an issue with google, as it is an issue with how your site is designed, how many others are linking to you, how they are describing the links, etc.. seo stuff.

Given that you seem to score really high for specific searches that are related to your content, I'm pretty certain that you can get higher in the ranks for the less specific searches with a little reworking.

Expert Sex Change

[HelioWalton]

They definitely need to tweak it further to get rid of or decrease the number of results from expert sex change.

Re:Expert Sex Change

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because ur post-op doesn't mean other people don't want the information.

Re:Expert Sex Change

[PPH]

I just wanted to know how to block pop-ups.

Re:Expert Sex Change

[HelioWalton]

Except that it is behind a paywall?

Google Cycle 4

[dimethylxanthine]

"Dark spots in giant's search results mark the beginning of the new iteration its search algorithm for the fourth (or fifth?) time since Google's inception - an activity many scientists and internauts feared was dangerously delayed. Owners of previously unknown internet real-estates can expect higher yields of their greens, but protection and limiting exposure to the screen are still advised".

Re:Thank you Google!

[sirinek]

Could be worse... Ehow does have some reasonably good content.... while Yahoo Answers is filled with entirely useless results, many of which are completely incorrect "answers" to the question being posed!

If they are like the others

[Shivetya]

they will adapt their pages and quickly smother google searches. I know the news pages are like this, the day after the first change many sites dropped off of the right side bar only to return within weeks. A great example on the unfiltered news site is Huffington Post, NY Times, and LA Times. All three fell off, the first more than the other two, but now fill the sides up again.

Google can keep tweaking all they want but more people are paid to ensure rankings and page hits than Google has to ensure fairness and correctness of results

Re:If they are like the others

[jmac_the_man]

I know the news pages are like this, the day after the first change many sites dropped off of the right side bar only to return within weeks.

The right side bar in google is paid advertisements. That's different from google's organic search results.

Also, the Huffington Post is not an "unfiltered news site." They're a commentary site. Their writers provide opinion and not objective fact. Now there's nothing wrong with that, so long as you're honest about it. (They are.) A real newspaper can have an editorial page; the Huffington Post is just a bunch of little editorial pages.

Re:Thank you Google!

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

But can Ehow tell you how babby is formed?

like many programmers

[circletimessquare]

i've gotten experts exchange results in google searches forever, and i loathe them

however, not once, in years, have i seen "experts exchange" written in such a way in your post that it makes me think "expert sex change"

so thanks. thanks a lot. for making a bane of my existence somehow even worse. because now i will never look at "experts exchange" in google results again without seeing "expert sex change"

Re:like many programmers

[Abstrackt]

however, not once, in years, have i seen "experts exchange" written in such a way in your post that it makes me think "expert sex change"

Fun fact: it used to be expertsexchange.com, they changed it to experts-exchange.com because of that little issue.

Re:like many programmers

[mysidia]

however, not once, in years, have i seen "experts exchange" written in such a way in your post that it makes me think "expert sex change"

It's obviously a cold cruel jab based on an old gaffe that was their original doman name; Initially the URL of the site was expertsexchange.com, but because of the potential for confusion, the domain name was subsequently changed to experts-exchange.com. Experts-Exchange went bankrupt in 2001 after venture capitalists moved the company to San Mateo, CA, and was brought back largely through the efforts of unpaid volunteers.

The period following the bankruptcy recovery was marked by a rapid growth and expansion of the knowledge base and saw technical advances. Experts-Exchange was chosen as a runner-up for Best web resource for developers award by VSJ on 2006

Re:like many programmers

[Tumbleweed]

now i will never look at "experts exchange" in google results again without seeing "expert sex change"

Well, now just think of the unpleasant things that come to mind when someone mentions the phrase, "amateur sex change". *cringe* :)

Re:like many programmers

[jon787]

Fun Fact: The MS Exchange team thought this was hilarious and named their blog msexchangeteam.com

Re:like many programmers

[Troke]

In all seriousness, I would prefer to have an expert handle the sex change.

Re:like many programmers

[Anonymous Coward]

Expert exchange is actually very useful if you just scroll down quickly to the bottom. The real answers are there, and they are often pretty helpful, they just make you scroll down about 3000 pixels before you can see them.

As annoying as this practice is, scrolling down is a small price to pay for reading a professionally answered solution.

Re:like many programmers

[Anonymous Coward]

I get EE results all the time. I share your loathe for them. Luckily I discovered that if I view the google cached version TEXT ONLY I get the benefit of the answer without any of the crap from their site.

What about...

[O'Nazareth]

What about Expert Village and Yahoo! Answers?

Good EHow sucks anyway

[JohnRoss1968]

You can get better advise from the crazy drunk down at the park.

Re:Good EHow sucks anyway

[JohnRoss1968]

I saw a recipe there once for Jambalaya....One of the ingredients was Jambalaya Mix.
If I had the Mix I would just follow the instructions. Claiming something is a recipe and then saying you'll still need to go buy a premade mix is a cheap ass shortcut. Crappy reporting from a crappy site. If the whole thing crashed and burned it would make me happy

Re:Good EHow sucks anyway

[Maximum Prophet]

I could be wrong about eHow, but there are sites like it that have AI generated articles. (Just not very good AI). Basically they wrote a paraphrase engine, then scoured the Internet for data.

Alternately, they are paying people in low wage countries to write paraphrased articles, then auto spell and grammar checking them.

Re:Good EHow sucks anyway

[hedwards]

As far as I can tell that's how Amazon's Mechanical Turk works. I looked into it when it was new, but found that the prices were low enough that it was basically slave labor, so the only folks that are actually doing the work are either too stupid to know that they're being cheated or from some part of the world where a dollar a day is good money.

I've got more time than money.

[toycoder]

This guy has a legit complaint. I'm not a car guy, but I do have several non-tech related interests and it is damned hard to find comprehensive specs, even on manufacturers sites. As for selling ads vs. selling the content directly, get off your high horse.

Define "intelligent"

[toycoder]

You have it entirely backwards. Google has made the only intelligent decision here, by saying that they cannot possibly gauge the quality of all websites manually, and sticking to their guns about doing it programatically. That way, suing them over your position in the rankings is much more difficult because they can prove a lack of favoritism.

Google is making a smart move from a legal CYA perspective. But their bread and butter is ultimately the usefulness of their results, not the objectivity of their algorithm.

Re:Define "intelligent"

[drinkypoo]

Google is making a smart move from a legal CYA perspective. But their bread and butter is ultimately the usefulness of their results, not the objectivity of their algorithm.

Google cannot serve any search results if they cease to exist.

Was getting useless

[Quiet_Desperation]

I do some fairly technically oriented searches at work, and sometimes the first three pages of hits would be [1] sites that sell (or make you register for) copies of otherwise freely available documentation and [2] pages that are just random titles and snippets of other works without links.

Or there's some paragraph on a message board or in an article that has all the key words, but is useless, and all I get is 50 copies of the same article or posting. Some message board sites seem to be just copies of other sites with different CSS skins.

Re:Was getting useless

[jank1887]

my favorite is when you're searching for a 'how to fix XYZ', and you wouldn't mind a good experts exchange or eHow article, but instead you get the wikiAnswers 'you asked about XYZ, here's a question about XYZ, can you answer it?' crap. get a lot of those.

Re:Was getting useless

[Kyrall]

Some message board sites seem to be just copies of other sites with different CSS skins.

You get different CSS skins? Consider yourself lucky...

Re:Was getting useless

[sys_mast]

I also see the same.

Where exactly is the profit here? I'm seeing so much more of that trash, there must be a last step of profit. Can anyone explain how they profit from hosting websites of trash?

Re:Was getting useless

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Maybe google has an exception to its duplicate content rules built in for forums, since there is often a lot of copypasta being served as people discuss news stories etc?

Re:Was getting useless

[eddy]

Here's a search I did at work today: atomic_cas_int. Totally unhelpfully it changes the query: "Showing results for atomic casting". Wait, what? That's not what I said?! Want to SUGGEST 'atomic casting', go right ahead, but change my query?!

Guess I'll have to add quotes in the future, which inhibits this insipid behavior.

Re:Was getting useless

[Quiet_Desperation]

Happens a lot with gaming sites. I think they share their message board content or something.

Re:Was getting useless

[gmhowell]

I also see the same.

Where exactly is the profit here? I'm seeing so much more of that trash, there must be a last step of profit. Can anyone explain how they profit from hosting websites of trash?

Underpants gnomes, duh!

Kids these days...

Re:Was getting useless

[mr_snarf]

My favourites are Google results pointing to a forum thread where someone is asking exactly what I want to know, and the only answer is 'google it'.

Re:Was getting useless

[satuon]

Same thing happens a lot with torrent sites, if you search for a torrent that's not there you get a lot of results in sites where the page is created when someone searches for that torrent on the site. They usually create the page and then put links to it in a ''previous searches'' section in their site. That way when someone searches on google for that torrent he goes to that page. It's quite ingenious actually, you depend on the users themselves to create the content by asking questions, and then users that ask the same question on Google will land on your site. It's frustrating for me because I land on a page that just says ''no torrents found'', except for the sponsored ''full version''/''high speed download'' crap.

Re:Was getting useless

[TheThiefMaster]

I love searching for "XYZ review" and getting "be the first to review XYZ!" on a billion shopping sites.

Re:Was getting useless

[badkarmadayaccount]

Adding nfpr=1 to the query string parameters ought to fix that. I wish there was an easy to use FF add-on for manipulating per domain query string params.

Re:From eHow2DoIt

[Quiet_Desperation]

Ha! I've found "instructional" sites that are akin to Steve Martin's explanation of how to get a million dollars and never pay taxes.

1. Get a million dollars.
2. Don't pay taxes.

Been there before but Google doesn't know it

[tepples]

Why should i have to go to a site I know I hate in order to get it blocked?

You might not know every site you wanted blocked off the top of your head

Unless you've gone to the web site before while not logged into Google. Or you've gone to the web site through a link from a forum post, which Google might not have tracked because it wasn't from a Google search result. Or you can tell just from the excerpt on the Google search result page that the site is a scrape of some other site.

Re:*sigh*

[Dr. Spork]

Yeah, the same has happened to me too many times. I think that Google needs to ask user input about which aggregators are actually spitting out something useful and which just show you a sentence with the words you searched for, plus an ugly ad. Oh, if only I could turn on some sort of fine-grained rating feature for Google results! I'm sure they're considering it at Google, but I imagine they're worried that someone will game it too. I don't think that we can or should really kill the aggregators, but we definitely should kill the useless ones. There must be a way to do that. This would be a start: for every terrible result generated from a website, that entire domain should take a small ranking hit.

DMCA their behinds

[tepples]

My site is older (they can verify that easily enough) than the scraper sites, has more links to it (the basis of the original page ranking system) and is also quite clearly being duplicated by these sites.

If you own the copyright in non-free works that they are reproducing without permission, send one copy of a signed takedown request to Google and one to the IP address block owner.

What's the problem?

[Larry_Dillon]

A web site has no "right" to a ranking. A previous ranking confers no "right" to a future ranking. Using the "free advertising" that comes with search engine rankings carries a risk that is different from paid advertising. I hope the effected commercial site's prospectus notifies investors that they are at the mercy of web site rankings.

Re:What's the problem?

[GodfatherofSoul]

The problem isn't website publisher expectations; it's user expectations. If I do a search for "fixing motorcycle flat," I expect to see enthusiast links to detailed, dedicated forums on fixing my flat. I don't expect to see a lame eHow recipe, ads for motorcycle products, etc. The problem Google has is over the past few years, searches have become polluted with lots of garbage links that are frustrating users.

But, that's what a profit motive can do. Look at YouTube. You go out and do a search of anything interesting or topical and you'll no doubt return video blogs from some moron trying to farm hits to his channel or an advertiser with a slightly related product. And, if Google doesn't get a hold of this problem they're going to find themselves in the place of the obsolete search engines they supplanted.

I felt a great disturbance in the Force

[Verunks]

I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of SEO cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something awesome has happened

Re:Thousands of hard-working writers

[Andy Dodd]

Really, if you were making a living off of copypasta - well, you get what you deserve.

I don't know how many eHow articles were clear copypasta that were fundamentally wrong. (Like a howto for 2005+ Subaru Outback vehicles that was clearly copypasta'ed from an article on 2000-2004 vehicles - the howto was completely wrong and non-applicable for 2005+ vehicles, but the article specifically claimed it was for such vehicles.)

Google [ site:ehow.com conception ]

[tepples]

But can Ehow tell you how babby is formed?

Soytainly.

Ask eHow

[PPH]

"How can I improve my web page Google rank?"

Re:I rarely see this cruft

[burni2]

Yes I think you are right,

But using advanced googling should not be that tedious. I just wish for a google-cookie DO-NOT-EVER-SHOWN-THAT-SITES-AGAIN,
I don't want to exclude them manually each by each but by clicking the "ERADICATE" link just besides the "chached" link, if google
would analyse those clicks their algorithm would also have a certian amount of NI (native intelligence).

Judging Site Quality is why Google's Important

[billstewart]

The reason that Google is important is that they have good algorithms for judging site quality and showing the interesting relevant sites first. They became the dominant search player because PageRank produced better results than many other search engines when they started, as well as being fast and uncluttered. (DEC's Altavista, the original dominant player, was also fast and uncluttered, but Google's result quality was a lot better.)

If they weren't judging site quality, AdSense wouldn't be producing enough revenue for you to live on either.

Re:*sigh*

[Sigma 7]

They did ask for user input at one point, but they stopped for some reason. As far as I knew, it was a good way of filtering out search results at least for the short term.

Re:Is eHow really that bad?

[stoanhart]

I agree - I dislike most of the content farm results, but eHow has a nice clean design, and gets straight to the point. I wouldn't trust them for any advanced topic, but for many simple questions the answer is clearly presented.

natural order

[Runaway1956]

"the natural order of things"

Who wants to be the first to tell Zakkie that in "the natural order of things" there would be no intartubez? The internet itself is an artifact, and everything about it is artificial. There IS no "natural order".

So, what you are saying is, using some of Google's older models, you were treated well, and you were happy. With the updated algorithms, you are not being treated as well, and you resent it. This has nothing to do with any "natural order" at all. You simply prefer one algorithm over another.

Go Go Google Go

[WaffleMonster]

After being forced to think unflattering things about google in recent months search changes and the ever useful "block all results from this annoying site" is starting to make me like google again.

For the love of god they still need to get rid of live preview or just make it such that accidential sneezes don't always trigger it.

Re:Experts exchange

[hesiod]

I have found usable answers to problems on EE before

As have I, though more often I don't find answers there, just people suggesting the wrong solutions. But I can't say they are any worse than other forum/expert sites.

why does /. think the site is a problem?

Because they want you to pay them money for "answers" that may or may not be remotely useful.

Watch Demand Media try "domaining" next.

[Animats]

Now that Google, following Blekko's lead, is hammering the well-known "content farm" sites, expect Demand Media to respond by spreading their content across large numbers of junk domains. Demand Media owns eNom, the spammer's registrar.

Re:*sigh*

[hesiod]

Maybe people were complaining about sites for the wrong reasons (political/religious), or maybe some site full or jerks (4c) kept sending in tons of notes about legitimate sites... or maybe too few people were using the feature to affect enough change to make it worthwhile. I'd go with the last, but I honestly do not know.

Re:I would be surprised

[hesiod]

I imagine they have a few real pages... about how to sign up for their services, at least.

Re:many hours a day of new research. I am able to

[TaoPhoenix]

Hi there!

Depending on what I may be missing with "free to everyone", care to say what you are researching? I am peeking at all kinds of new topics just to see what is out there, so if Google eats Links, I'll add one for you!

Nope, they suck the blood from

[aussersterne]

unemployed liberal arts majors and other independent workers that are educated but unable to find jobs. The content is generated through sites like Textbroker.com. They pay $1-$5 or something like that per article for "freelance authors" willing to chuck out dozens of 300-500 articles to spec in a day.

Ironically, the list of articles that they are willing to pay for at any moment is automatically generated, and looks something like:

How to pharmaceutically bend gravity
How to ride a celery to the fishpond
How to rocket bravely to the moon
How to blend avocado into guacamole
How to remachine a flange for an ESM-1501X ...

The list runs into the hundreds of thousands of "needed" articles. The hapless contract crowdsource workers then keyword search or browse through them endlessly looking for anything they can chuck out a 300-500 word article for, in order to earn their dollar or two. By writing several thousand words in a day whilst endlessly consulting Wikipedia, one can make something approximating a minimum-wage income.

I know this because as a former managing editor we had several interns in our department that had used this or similar sites (there are several, I don't know if they're all owned by Demand Media) to make extra dollars in college.

Thank you Google

[cdpage]

Thank you

next

alibaba.

Re:Am I the only person...

[cdpage]

then type ehow into your search. problem solved

Content farm != link farm

[Shauni]

Demand Media is a content farm; they pay people to write articles based on their interpretations of the Google algorithm. 95% "White-hat SEO", and no different from what places like HuffPost does. If the algorithm changes, they can make adjustments, do better keywords and content policing, and still make a buck.

Link farms, on the other hand, camp domain names and make a website entirely of Google ads, keywords and algorithms, usually by exploiting flaws in the rankings system that would normally discriminate against this kind of thing, aka "Black-hat CEO". They don't tend to have IPOs though, because anyone with half a brain knows they won't last once the loophole is fixed.

I agree, but there are better alternatives

[Travoltus]

There are content providers who produce for private clients. These include QualityGal, ContentDiva, etc.

These companies are not like AssociatedContent or DemandMedia, they produce for actual clients. Things like articles, press releases, a variety of work, and it's all original content.

Content mills will overpopulate and die. Their business model is limited to how many how-to's people want to look up. The market will get saturated. But press releases, technical articles, website design, client articles and white papers will never go away.

Not really a solution...

[Shauni]

To places like Demand Media, buying new domain names is cheap. And Demand is only one of many content farms out there; if you just block domains you'll be playing Whack-a-Mole forever. Only making it so that these places can't turn a profit will have any long-term effect at all.

Re:Thousands of hard-working writers

[tibit]

Nevertheless, parent has a point. eHow is a drain on bandwidth and not much more. The SNR is so bad that I just can't depend on the site at all as it'd waste too much time, that means I may miss higher quality nuggets there, but that's collateral damage so to speak.

Re:Am I the only person...

[Urza9814]

Well sure, but if I already knew ehow had an article that was exactly what I was looking for, I would go to their website, not type it into Google...

Re:Am I the only person...

[cdpage]

you'll find it is often faster to find what you are looking for in a site through google.

try searching for a youtube video in youtube or google, sometimes its easier in google, just have youtube in the search.

in your case, try looking for what you need... if you don't find it in the first pass, add ehow to the end of your quarry.

Yeah no...

[Shauni]

This isn't going to be a popular opinion, but here goes: just because you work for a company that (ab)uses SEO, doesn't mean you have no work ethic and copy-paste everything. Content that is copied word for word does worse on rankings than content that isn't, so eHow actually does try to screen it out via an automatic plagiarism checker. They also have quality standards, haphazardly enforced as they can be.

That doesn't mean that everyone knows what they're talking about, and that bad content doesn't get through. But assuming that if you're a member of a company that employs thousands of people, you must be making a living off copy-pasting is quite ignorant.

See also: this article; it's admittedly a bit out of date.

Google new content notification

[Compaqt]

>Maybe Google should have a "page changed" API that publishing systems could call with a URL, so that after new content goes up, Google gets the first look, before the scrapers find and copy it.

I assume you don't know about Google Sitemaps. It's a file (sitemap.xml) that lists your old (and new) URLs. There's a mechanism for informing Google of a new sitemap, too. Many sites send a new sitemap notification every time they post a new article.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=40318

Not to toot my own horn, but I cover this kind of stuff on my blog--stuff which some/many people know as common knowledge but which others haven't encountered just because there's so much to absorb, anymore.