Google Is Planning To Penalize Overly Optimized Sites

tekgoblin writes "This is an interesting move by Google but not completely off the rocker for them. Last year they blocked search results from the co.cc domain because they believed they polluted the search results. Google plans to penalize overly optimized sites because they want to level the playing field for other websites who do not concentrate on such efforts. From the article: 'Google Engineer Matt Cutts explains the following: “We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect.” The search engine at Google is about to go through a major overhaul and de-prioritizing sites with heavy SEO is just a small part in the big picture to bring better search results. The changes to the search engine will be coming in the next few months.'"

Comments

Good

[heypete]

Too many site owners are worried about SEO strategies rather than producing good content.

Re:Good

[davester666]

How about somebody mentioning to Google that we also don't want Google+ crap spamming our results...

We shouldn't have to hit page 2 before we start getting useful results.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen. And here's to hoping for a swift death to those bottom feeder SEO hacks.

Re:Good

[green1]

It used to be that good content was what search engines were looking for. And by producing good (and well organized) content you automatically ended up at the top of the search rankings.
Unfortunately search bots don't actually know what "good content" is, so all they can do is try to work with the bits that they can figure out, and that led to SEO which really ONLY exists to game those algorithms.
This is a good move on google's part. I think one of the big failings of all search engines recently is that they have mostly been accepting SEO rather than fighting it. This leads to lots of garbage sites with good SEO grabbing all the top spots, and makes it very difficult to find really good sites. The smarter they can make GoogleBot the better, I long for a day when the only way to do SEO has the side effect of having to make useful information for human visitors too...

Re:Good

[buchner.johannes]

Too many site owners are worried about SEO strategies rather than producing good content.

Surely the reaction to this will be producing good content, and not employing more SEO gurus to circumvent the new weights by dodgy techniques.

Re:Good

[slimjim8094]

See the globe next to the person icon, the one that says "Hide personal results"?

Re:Good

[JaredOfEuropa]

Or any content at all. I hope Google will at some point figure out a way to promote sites with original content over ones that just repeat content of others. There are still way too many link farms, forum "aggregators" and faux search results pages ("Top results for how do I insert a server farm into a link farmer's rectum") on the first page of many types of Google queries.

Re:Good

[green1]

If I had mod points this would be +1 Funny...
SEO is the business of circumventing the proper weighting of search results by "dodgy techniques", it always has been, and always will be.
SEO didn't exist until people realized that bots had specific things they were looking for, and people started putting only those things in instead of writing good content that happened to include those things (what the bot writers originally assumed would be found)
I hope this is the start of a new war by google against the SEO business, one where humans benefit by being able to find sites that are actually relevant.

Re:Good

[RajivSLK]

This is great.. I have been running a web application company for the past 14 years. Now days we are drowned out of the search results for certain terms by jackass SEO optimized competitors. The competitors at the top of search results are simply there because that have done things like exchange links with a completely unrelated site. They have a list of 12 or so links in their footer and each of the 12 other sites do the same. None of the sites have anything to with each other. It is surprising that with the amount Google spends on optimization that this would work but it has so far.

With google being pretty much the single dominant search engine this has impacted our business. I was recently considering that we would have to play catch up in this game but now I am just going to wait and see what happens.

Re:Good

[Yetihehe]

The smarter they can make GoogleBot the better, I long for a day when the only way to do SEO has the side effect of having to make useful information for human visitors too...

If they can pull it off... http://xkcd.com/810/

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

I have accidentally +1ed so many things. I hate the dratted thing.

Re:Good

[toriver]

Yes; to people doing searches, SEO is more often an euphemism for Search Result Pollution.

Re:Good

[Tablizer]

Now days we are drowned out of the search results for certain terms by jackass SEO optimized competitors.

It may be cheaper to buy Google's keyword ads than pay for link fudging efforts to compete. The keyword ads appear on the right side of their usual search results and marked as ads. You "buy" a keyword and a frequency amount (higher frequency = more costs). I used to use this service, and it was relatively effective. (Lately they've moved them to the middle in tan sometimes if a low number of matches.)

Re:Good

[93 Escort Wagon]

How about somebody mentioning to Google that we also don't want Google+ crap spamming our results...

I mentioned it to them in the "why are you doing this?" box when I deleted my Google+ account.

Re:Good

[buchner.johannes]

I hope this is the start of a new war by google against the SEO business, one where humans benefit by being able to find sites that are actually relevant.

The core of the problem is really that people don't want to hear that their site/content is not relevant on a search term, because for them it is relevant. So they will search for ways of "correcting" this picture, and demand creates supply.

Re:Good

[bickerdyke]

Hmm.. if you have too many people in your circles recommending too much crap, you should consider a reorganization of your contacts.

Re:Good

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Surely the reaction to this will be producing good content, and not employing more SEO gurus to circumvent the new weights by dodgy techniques.

Or, in other words, when the best SEO practice ceases to be the best SEO practice, another one will logically spring to the top. "Punishing best-SEO sites" seems to be a logical contradiction.

Re:Good

[rtb61]

The best way to do this is a catch 22. In order to gain better search results you have to give up search privacy. Using Google 'manage blocked sites' you can start killing off those SEO sites that crud up you search results one by one, catch is you must be logged in.

Google can of course compile those blocked sites, sites that users have decided to permanently toss in the search waste bin and start putting those sites further and further down the results list (associated with broad users types).

Google can even publicly shame offending sites by publishing lists of the most blocked web sites, really sticking it to the SEOs who get carried away with crapping up search results.

To get really good search results, search companies just need to provide the core, the starting point and then allow logged in registered users (no privacy, suggestion here use 2 search engines, one for private and one for public searches) as a distributed effort to rate good and bad results, for general rankings and specific user type rankings

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Or have more than one popular search engine, each with a ranking algorithm that is different from the other, different enough that optimizing a site for one search engine would cause that site to get demoted in other search engines. Well I can dream can't I?

Re:Good

[nbauman]

It's like judging teachers by their students' results on standardized tests.

Re:Good

[snowgirl]

Too many site owners are worried about SEO strategies rather than producing good content.

It took me getting half way through the article to realize that they were talking about SEARCH ENGINE optimization. I was like, "why would they want to down rank pages that load quickly and efficiently?"

It's like when someone says that they're an awesome programmer, and can do magic, when all they do is write HTML, and CSS. No, you don't program just because you can write in a formatting markup language.

Re:Good

[Samantha Wright]

Not a contradiction, just an arms race. If Google remaps the current scoring algorithm so that the best scores are in the middle of the range and high scores are considered garbage, then as long as the field of SEO has to constantly reinvent itself to keep up with Google's mood, you can bet that the vast majority of link farming sites won't be able to keep up. As a result of this, some may even give up, and certainly unmaintained sites with currently-good SEO will become useless. Eventually, of course, Google will have exhausted the twists and turns they can make without compromising utility, but they will have deterred more than a few system-gamers along the way. As long as Google's changes are still useful for humans seeking legitimate pages, this will have a net positive benefit.

Re:Good

[Anthony Mouse]

I hope this is the start of a new war by google against the SEO business, one where humans benefit by being able to find sites that are actually relevant.

I can propose a tactic that might work pretty well: Whenever Google figures out the latest spamming method the SEO people are using, make a list of all the sites that currently do that (ideally in the way that only or primarily the SEO people are doing it), and then give all those sites a long-term decrease in ranking, even if they stop doing that thing. Make it two years before you can get your site back into the higher rankings.

Soon enough everybody will realize that "get SEO" is a synonym for "get your site removed from the first page of results for the next two years" and then finding methods of fooling the Googlebot in the short-term won't matter anymore because no one will be willing to attempt it if they can get slapped with a long-term penalty.

Re:Good

[PopeRatzo]

How about somebody mentioning to Google that we also don't want Google+ crap spamming our results...

We shouldn't have to hit page 2 before we start getting useful results.

I've seen this complaint here before, but still haven't seen any "Google+ crap" in my search results.

What are we doing differently that is causing you to get all this "Google+ crap spamming" your search results and I don't get any? Maybe there is some setting you've missed or something else you've changed?

Re:Good

[houstonbofh]

I mentioned it to them in the "why are you doing this?" box when I deleted my Google+ account.

You mean "Disabled your account." You don't actually believe they deleted a damn thing, do you?

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

He's signed up for G+ and +1ed some stuff. This means friends sharing stuff and 'relevant' links similar to what you +1ed. This can be easily disabled with a click of button somewhere close to the search field.

Re:Good

[__aaltlg1547]

For the too many keywords issue, male the not only use the first N (maybe 20?) keywords. It would be a trivial change.

Re:Good

[datavirtue]

And how in the hell can you function without a Google account? Seriously.

Re:Good

[datavirtue]

Oh, never mind....G+, my flub.

Re:Good

[datavirtue]

Not really, now that people have been gaming the system those with good content now have to practice SEO to stay afloat/visible.

Re:Good

[martin-boundary]

Sorry, that's just blacklists all over again for web spam instead of email spam. It won't work in the long run, and I'd rather not give Google a blank check on privacy out of desperation for "relevant" hits.

Re:Good

[Armakuni]

The first thing I will do then is buy a number of spammy links to be sent to my competitor's otherwise entirely white-hat site that currently ranks in 1st, thus making sure his excellent site never troubles me again. Meanwhile, he's too honest to do the same to my site, so I benefit. This is called negative SEO and is not new. It's the reason Google haven't done what you suggest.

Re:Good

[Trax3001BBS]

You folks logged in when you use Google? I never log in and I never get Google + results. Testing this just now
I searched for "how to sing" not one Google + result and I went in 6 pages.

I'm also not a Google + member (none of the social sites) but that shouldn't matter.

I log in to my Youtube account anytime I need to do anything, then log out. I have one video that's seeing 50000 views a week
and the info on people (those who have logged in or never log out) is quite interesting; allowing one to specialize their spam

BTW: The video mentioned is on a different account, 5 seconds long, and nobody likes it, but it's doing rather well :}}.
Not one item of spam, not even a link to my other site have I placed (outside of the description).
-Citation: youtube search for "How to get a Mob Spawner" by badactorEP, I've left the basic statistics open.

Re:Good

[Psychotic_Wrath]

I think there are those that game the system, and there are those that do it right. I have seen several sites that have too many keywords. They have always been against keyword stuffing. Google tries to focus on getting good results that are relevant to the search. Spam is something that is difficult to filter out. The places that do SEO will still get their business on the first page of Google because they will just work inside of Google's new paramaters.

The places that get penalized, for the most part will get back up on Google simply by changing their tactic. Backlinks are always important, and they will probably just build more backlinks.

There is also a good chance that they will get more involved with social media, like facebook or twitter. Some will post youtube videos and optimize them for their business.

There is no way to keep spammers out but hopefully this reduces it.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

The smarter they can make GoogleBot the better,

Unless we end up with the GoogleTerminator....."Don't click back!"

Re:Good

[93 Escort Wagon]

You mean "Disabled your account." You don't actually believe they deleted a damn thing, do you?

In this instance, we're talking about Google+ results polluting one's Google search results. I really couldn't care less whether or not they deleted my Google+ circles or whatever - I'm not getting stupid Google+ stuff interjected into my search results, which was my intended goal.

My Google account is still active.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

And this is why I'm eating your lunch right now... it's this attitude, I build a website and the users will magically show up, which makes your comment laughable. As long as you write good content, but don't pay any attention on how your potential visitors will search, which keywords they use, and if your content is findable, dream on to a great success of your website. In the mean time, I'm getting your traffic :)

Re:Good

[eeek]

They'll just figure out new ways to game Google's system.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Really..? You know how easy it is these days to hire an army of people in third world countries to massively down vote the websites of the competition... Then what..?

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

The last site I pushed to production gets 24 million uniques a month. You aren't getting my traffic, you just think you are.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Speak for yourself. I've actually had some great Google+ results on searches. Have you ever actually seen this at work, or are you just speaking out of ignorance? It's pretty wonderful in practice.

Re:Good

[Surt]

Bleah, I'm lucky if I can find what I'm looking for before page 5 on Google these days. I remember when it was almost always in the first 3 results.

Re:Good

[Surt]

How about one search engine with multiple algorithms, giving you the first N hits based on different ranking algorithms.

Re:Good

[Barbara, not Barbie]

And this is why I'm eating your lunch right now

So you're the one stealing yesterday's leftovers from the fridge. Time to make a chocolate-exlax cream pie.

Re:Good

[rtb61]

I know, it's a real catch 22. The block let's you block up 500 crap SEO web sites and the more that participate the more SEO web sites that die. I already use http://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/, obscure usage (it makes many more searches than I do) and I use more than one search engine (search engine specific to data type) but when you are in a hurry and want the best results to come up on the first page. Not wanting to fuck around for 10 minutes (sometimes far longer) wading through crap you're not interested in, you don't really end up with many options, devil and the deep blue sea.

Google is also very conscious and nervous about blocking results companies who are paying to advertise with them ie blocking ebay (if I want results from Ebay I will search Ebay). I want my search engine blacklist, you don't want it you don't use it but I am already appreciating it.

Re:Good

[mug funky]

maybe my mojo is superior, maybe not, but i have g+ and am logged in when i search, and still i don't get g+ spam. i do get heavy amounts of SEO shit though, so i applaud their move to make their engine harder to game.

their strategy is probably that nobody gets a free lunch. if you want priority listing, you have to pay them. SEO will get you nowhere.

Re:Good

[Barbara, not Barbie]

Without link-backs, it's only you who would get penalized, since what you're doing falls under the "dodgy SEO" criteria.

Re:Good

[Barbara, not Barbie]

Or they could just ignore all metatags and links to outside content, and ... you know ... evaluate the content based on its' own merits.

Add to that a negative-only modifier for keyword stuffing, bad descriptions, and too many links to crap.

So, with pagerank out the door, no more link farming, and no more meta-tag foolishness, content becomes king again, all those doorway pages disappear, and everyone but the seo scumbags is happier.

Re:Good

[Samantha Wright]

How exactly do you evaluate the merits of a webpage's contents? Are you proposing that Google performs exhaustive semantic parsing on every page in their index? Their natural language processing stuff is good, but not that good. The elements that SEO exploits came about solely because analysing pages is ridiculously hard. PageRank was Google's original silver bullet to this problem.

Re:Good

[tqk]

And how in the hell can you function without a Google account?

Is that a serious question, or do I get a "whoosh"? I'm missing the point, I think.

Re:Good

[green1]

Luckily for me, my current slate of sites is all highly specialized and catering to people who are specifically sent to the site from other places (usually not online) and not to people who need to search for them.

The last site I ran that had any reliance on search engines showed up in the top 5 results for the appropriate search terms, and that was strictly through content and proper tagging (nothing shady at all) Mind you that was also about 5 years ago, so who knows if the same would be true today. I wasn't gaming the system, but I was using it to full advantage (if talking about a specific subject, make sure that subject is a keyword even if the text misses that specific word, make sure all images have proper alt text, and there's text describing the scripts, etc.)

Re:Good

[thetoadwarrior]

I agree and in my mind Google's results have been pretty rubbish for certain things mainly because content farms have SEO down to a fine art.

Re:Good

[Anthony Mouse]

I'm not sure how effective that would be against what I'm describing.

The idea is that you give the SEO bastards some time to come up with their latest successful strategy for increasing the rank of a site, then you make a list of the sites that have done that, then you blacklist all of them in one shot for a long period of time. The second it comes out that people who use that tactic get blacklisted, the sites are all already blacklisted. It's a one shot deal, so you can't figure out which tactic they're going to punish you for ahead of time. The only safe play is to not do any of them.

And then at the same time as you punish the people who were doing that, you fix the algorithm so that the tactic in question doesn't work anymore -- which means you don't have to punish people for using it ever again, because it no longer works. That prevents asshats using the tactic against competitors, because the punishments for using it are over as soon as you discover they exist.

Re:Good

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

I know of a small family plant nursery business/garden centre who wanted to redo their website. They mostly sold flowers, trees, landscaping plants, etc and also ran vegetable classes.

Anyway, the developer they hired insisted that Google gave higher priority to the words "fruits" and "hedging", and proceeded to throw up a website containing essentially nothing but content about fruits and hedges. Trouble was, they didn't do a lot of hedging and I don't think they did fruits at all. When questioned on this, he came back with some nonsense about "hits" and "looking professional".

He basically wrecked their site through SEO best practices.

Re:Good

[thetoadwarrior]

You could have always disabled personal results. It's not rocket science.

Re:Good

[tqk]

You folks logged in when you use Google?

I don't use Google.

I log in to my Youtube account ...

I've never logged into youtube. Why do you have to do that? To upload?

I have one video that's seeing 50000 views a week ...

Kudos.

I'll just go and play in the corner over there ... Don't mind me.

Re:Good

[thetoadwarrior]

It would be nearly impossible to pull off (or at least be really expensive) but for the time being I think really the only way you could defeat the SEO abusers is to have the results manually inspected by humans. But in order to do it in a timely fashion you'd needs tons of people and pay them well so they actually care about their job.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm. So it seems that Google is creating a walled garden... a curated collection of "best content" according to their own criteria.

How novel! I can't wait to hear all of the reasons walled gardens and results curation are amazing, novel, and wonderful when Google does it, but when any other company does it, it's totally evil, antisocial, and awful.

I love that google thinks for me. Now I just have to find a way to get them to pay me a salary without having to work, and I can retire in style.

Re:Good

[hairyfeet]

I only use my Gmail for a spamdump and don't use it for anything else, so what EXACTLY am I missing here? In what way, shape, or form is a Google account supposed to "help" me in any way? I have ABP so frankly i don't care how accurate their ads are as i never see the damned things, don't use social crap (only use FB to log into sites i don't give a crap about) so no need got Google+, sow hat exactly is great and wonderful about a Google account? if I closed mine tomorrow i could just have a Hotmail spamdump just as easy, it doesn't really matter who gets all the website registration spam and I prfer yahoo for real mail, so what great thing am i missing out on?

As for TFA that's why I use Yahoo Search now, damned SEOs ruin Google search results playing buzzword bingo with keywords. I've found Yahoo Search (yes i know the backend is Bing but I hate the Bing UI, the Yahoo UI is nicer IMHO) actually lets me find what i want without SEO spam. Sure its classic functionality by obscurity in that the SEOs don't pound bing's engine like they do Google, but as long as it works i couldn't care less.

Re:Good

[green1]

The thing about google's "walled garden" is that it doesn't have any walls, sure they curate what they deem to be actual content instead of spam ridden ad farms. But there's nothing to stop you from going to the span ridden link farm if you so choose.

Compare that to other well known "walled garden" approaches that prevent you from accessing/installing specific content, even if you specifically choose to do so, and the difference should be obvious.

Re:Good

[lee1]

I suspect Google doesn't actually want all the spam sites to vanish from their results, because they profit from them: these sites are designed to entice you to click on ads, which leads to revenue for Google. I feel that the ease with which crude spam pages can still rise to the top of the search results is some evidence for this. The old (pre-IPO) Google would of course know that this is not a good long-term stragegy. Today's Google? It wouldn't surprise me.

Re:Good

[Zamphatta]

Set it to show 50 or 100 results, makes life more efficient if you can do it (i realize slow internet connections might not feel so efficient with that length to load)

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that supposed to be a serious question?

You can use computers without using any Apple, Google or Microsoft products, you know. Seriously.

Re:Good

[Kaenneth]

You seem to think the small business owners that this would hurt would know about it.

Re:Good

[symbolset]

The horror! Have you sought counselling for the trauma? Are you finding the injury disabling?

Re:Good

[93 Escort Wagon]

You could have always disabled personal results. It's not rocket science.

If I'd found Google+ to have any intrinsic value, I might've done that. As it is, in my opinion nothing of value was lost.

Plus I felt like the whole move on Google's part was bone-headed and ham-handed. Deleting the Google+ account was really the only way to send them a message that we're not going to just blindly accept anything they choose to do.

Re:Good

[tpstigers]

I used to be the same way. Just on general principles - and out of good security habits - I never kept myself signed in to anything. Then I thought about it and realized I was wasting a ridiculous amount of time signing in to and out of various things. Now I just stay signed in to everything. I figure I'm sitting at my own desk in my own office in my own house - what's the risk? That I might die while signed in to everything? So what? I'll be dead.

Re:Good

[Jason Levine]

Sadly, some spammers actually do this. I'll get a comment on my blog that reads like the person actually read my article and put some thought into commenting... and then I see the link to some "secret to whitening your teeth" or "buy herbal viagra" website. So I can either delete the spam comment, keep the comment and remove the link, or keep the comment and link and be linking to a spam site. The latter's not really an option. The middle one's ok, but I mostly take the first path.

Re:Good

[Ihmhi]

And on top of that, when you're signed in they have that whole useful "never see links from this site again". If you type in $BAND $SONG lyrics, you're bound to get sites that use shitty flash apps, annoying ads, etc. They are erased from my personal search results, and now I only see relevant ones.

Re:Good

[Barbara, not Barbie]

They are heading in that direction. After all, they want to be able to compete with Siri. Who, what, when, where, why, and how. If your page doesn't answer one or more of those, it gets tossed.

Every iPhone4 sold means Google looses $20 to $100 a year - every year - and Apple is selling lots of iPhones - almost neck-and-neck with Android.

Google generates 37 billion a year. for every 10 million iPhones sold, Google loses between 200 million and 1 billion in annual revenue. Given that they're selling between 30 and 40 million units a quarter!, that's going to mean a loss of projected revenue of between 2.4 billion and 12 billion. Say only 6 billion - that's a huge change in projected revenue.

Throw in that Apple no longer uses Google Maps - so there's another "lock-in" that's now unlocked - and that advertisers consider queries from iDevices to be worth paying more for than regular users, and the real fight is between Apple and Google, not Bing and Google.

Throw in the relatively unprofitable developer model for Android (too fractured), the failure of Google+ to generate any sort of "stickiness", and Google really has to pick up its game. And this is a good thing - it's about time they removed all those "doorway pages" and other crap from the search results.

Re:Good

[geminidomino]

This is why slashdot needs to display the IP of AC posts.

I'll give 2:1 that said the above post came from inside Google.

(Get out! The call is coming from INSIDE THE HOUSE!!"

Re:Good

[wagnerrp]

Did they refuse payment?

Re:Good

[Anthony Mouse]

The ones paying any attention would know about it. And the result of that would be that most of the SEO companies would go out of business and the remainder would be selling pure, unadulterated, more-harm-than-good snake oil.

It's also worth pointing out that as long as the targets are only the ones who actually used SEO in the first place, they're only getting what they deserve. Screw anybody who thinks polluting everyone else's search results is a good idea.

Re:Good

[FirephoxRising]

This. I've been seeing this getting worse and worse, so I say good on ya Google!

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

it doesn't have any walls

Oh good, because I thought that Google was going to be trying very hard to keep me from seeing things that they feel isn't relevant to what I want. I'm glad to know that their stated intention of eliminating heavily optimized sites will mean that my search results are unchanged, and I'll still see all the sites, regardless of whether or not Google thinks I should.

Compare that to other well known "walled garden" approaches that prevent you from accessing/installing specific content

So, with Google's approach, you can go directly to a site and see its content if you want, but you won't find links to that site from Google itself.

With other approaches, you can go directly to a site and see its content if you want, but you won't find links to that site from the relevant company's sites & storefront, itself. (Fun Fact: I can watch porn all I want on my Apple device. Fire up browser, go watch porn.)

Yes, I can see how this difference is totally clear. Google's curation of a walled garden is good, Apple's curation of a walled garden is bad. Hooray for openness!

the difference should be obvious.

In fact, it's very much non-obvious. Google is telling users, "We know what's best for you, we're going to make your search results more relevant!" Refresh my memory, because I forget - is their page ranking algorithm open source? What? It's not?! It's a patented secret sauce?! Well, I NEVER! Oh well, I guess we're just supposed to blindly trust in the output of a black box, if Google has constructed it. Because they've demonstrated their trustworthiness and responsibility so frequently of late.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would anyone use such worthless services? Facebook, Google+, all worthless.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

or fix your blog so comment links aren't followed and it'll contribute *nothing* to anyone rankings (and make
that policy known so spammers won't waste their time.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

You would be more convincing if you were not a well known Microsoft shill hairy

Re:Good

[hobarrera]

Yeah, and I've to click it every time I do a search. Or reaaally often if not every time.

Re:Good

[hobarrera]

Plenty of people don't have google accounts.
I've no need for a G+ account, or any other service. I can use google search without any sort of account.

Re:Good

[hobarrera]

I dont' *have* a google account, yet, every once in a while, I get "personal results", and pictures of people I know who have google accounts. That's scary!

Re:Good

[TheLink]

At one point of time the stupid thing was often on the same Google search page there was the option to hide some sites (which I found valid from search results), but not the link spam sites!

BTW the block sites stuff doesn't appear to work well for me any more. I did this: go to google trends, pick two unrelated trending keywords/phrases, search for them. Click on spam site, click back, block the spam site. Repeat. Go to manage blocked sites, no sites show up- this is even when I'm signed in to Google.

FWIW Google could use a similar method to automatically block such spam sites (there would need to be some checks but some of these sites are so obviously spam that even a simple program should be able to figure it out.

Re:Good

[green1]

I don't think apple has ever been accused of taking a walled garden approach to their web browser, so the fact you can access porn on it isn't really relevant to the discussion. The "walled garden" criticism is referring specifically to their method of application loading on stock iphones and ipads. And there is where the obvious difference lies. Both Apple and Google curate their respective "gardens" (marketplaces) however Google doesn't force you to use their marketplace, or even use any marketplace at all if you want to install your own applications. (A garden without walls, come and go as you please)
Contrast with Apple who build walls around their garden to try to prevent users from installing any application not in the "garden" (the fact that some people have found holes in the wall (jailbreaking) does not negate the fact that the wall was built in the first place)

Re:Good

[PopeRatzo]

He's signed up for G+ and +1ed some stuff.

I don't do "+1" (whatever that is). That's probably why I don't get a lot of junk in my search results.

Another example of how my willful disregard for the conventions of social media have protected me from negative consequences.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I don't. Well, maybe it's because I'm not logged in and do not want to be logged in for simple searches. Maybe it's because I look at Google.com in English.

Tried search settings. On the settings page, there is a link to 'block unwanted results', and that's probably where I could hide personal results, but unfortunately I have to log in to change that setting.

So, for me, I cannot hide those results.

Re:Good

[BitZtream]

Yes, I do, because until I see evidence to the contrary they (Google) has never outright lied about what they are doing.

They've had some mistakes and accidents.

They've done some stuff that was PERFECTLY reasonable, then felt others might see it that way, told everyone in the world what they did, how they fixed it ...

Google never really lies about their intentions so I really have no reason to not trust their actions.

I may not always agree with them, but they aren't liars. Its not Microsoft.

Re:Good

[Trogre]

Do your videos randomly get 30-second un-skippable advertisements placed in front of them as well?

I can put up with ad banners on pages (I don't use ad-blockers) but forcing them into the media stream, well, it's just evil.

Re:Good

[BitZtream]

I'll just go and play in the corner over there ... Don't mind me.

We wouldn't mind you, except you felt the need to point out that you don't play with others and want to be left alone.

That generally translates to mean that you're feeling lonely and seeking attention. Your actions speak far louder and betray your words.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

did you even read the reply?

woosh

Re:Good

[shaitand]

"I prfer yahoo for real mail"

Baffling, it really is. I have a yahoo account I don't use for anything, not spam crap, not anything. It gets several hundred spam a day that fly past the filter.

Re:Good

[BitZtream]

Every iPhone4 sold means Google looses $20 to $100 a year - every year - and Apple is selling lots of iPhones - almost neck-and-neck with Android.

How do you figure? Do you think Google (or Wolfram or any other search engine they use or might use is letting them perform millions of queries a day for no charge? I don't think so.

Re:Good

[BitZtream]

Really? On a scale like Googles it actually works pretty well. You see one you have millions and millions of users you notice trends REAL quick. Gmail + postini seem to be pretty much perfection. I haven't used any other webmail providers but I'd imagine they can't be too far behind if at all.

I was discussing this gmail issue with my wife the otherday, they move data for a lot of people on gmail ... AND a lot of completely unrelated domains including governments, schools from small to large, corps, and individuals like me with my family's email on there. It doesn't take much for a few humans to watch patterns develop and trend in real time and stop massive amounts of spam that couldn't be done otherwise. Throw in just a few helpers to narrow down what the people have to actually look at and you can process billions of messages with just a handful of staff and almost no spam.

Take that same hand full of people, same software, equipment and everything, but put them on a domain with 5k users and they won't be able to keep up. Scale makes it easier here as trends show up faster.

Re:Good

[Barbara, not Barbie]

Apple isn't just using Google for their Siri stuff. They also pull from Yelp, Bing, Yahoo, Amazon, etc.

The simple fact is that everyone wants to continue to be the engine behind each search, because that is still sellable data (what's hot, what people are looking for in such-and-such a city, etc). So yes, they'll continue to give it up no charge.

Re:Good

[The Wild Norseman]

Do your videos randomly get 30-second un-skippable advertisements placed in front of them as well?

No, they don't. I think it's because I use a fairly comprehensive hosts file though, but I'm not 100% certain.

Re:Good

[Neil Boekend]

I see them sometimes aswell, here on /.. While it may be low-paid humans doing this (to get through the captcha, perhaps) I alwais have the feeling they copy some random bits of other posts in order to give an seemingly informing post. Proof (here on /.) would be an unrelated part of a side-thread (they can be very unrelated here) in an otherwise only slightly misformed sentence.

Re:Good

[bragr]

>Google could use a similar method to automatically block such spam sites (there would need to be some checks but some of these sites are so obviously spam that even a simple program should be able to figure it out. Yeah we'll throw together a couple hand wavy "checks" and it will all work, just like that! Easy!

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

So as they can aggregate the blocked sites from personal preferences, you've got me thinking that them not doing this is to consciously degrade the public non-personalised search result (full of spammy sites) just to encourage us to login (and get more targeted adverts).

Google good feeling is slowing eroding for me.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not that hard. Give me $$$$$ and I'll do it.

Google has probably already started doing something similar recently, since I'm getting fewer link sites at the top.

Re:Good

[PaladinAlpha]

You're talking about writing a program that not only can meaningfully parse the syntax of every English webpage -- and we're not even to that yet -- but is enough of a general expert on every subject on the internet as to be able to determine to a statistically significant degree of accuracy how useful the provided information is. That's 100% impossible for the foreseeable future; we'll have strong AI long before we have that.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow the Google shills are out in force today. Whatever happened to the Slashdot of old blah blah blah.

Re:Good

[Barbara, not Barbie]

You don't need strong ai. You don't need a program that can extract meaning. There are plenty of ways to get such apparent emergent behaviour without the code actually understanding anything, same as mechanical translation gives you the words in another language without the computer having a single clue as to what the words and phrases mean in either language, or even a volt-ohm-meter telling you how much current is in a circuit - the meter doesn't "understand" what an ampere is.

Re:Good

[Raenex]

Now I just stay signed in to everything. I figure I'm sitting at my own desk in my own office in my own house - what's the risk?

Cross-site scripting (security) and user-tracking (privacy).

Re:Good

[Raenex]

Just delete it. The useful part of the comment has been copied from elsewhere.

Re:Good

[Kupfernigk]

Your point is well made. The human eye does a lot of visual pre-processing (e.g. edge and pattern detection) and passes on to the brain a kind of summary data. The eye doesn't know there is an oncoming car, but it alerts the brain by reporting on a movement in peripheral vision, and we can act on it.

In effect you're saying we need correlates for content quality. I imagine there are several of these: word frequency, especially based around clusters might do for a start. What would be really good is something that could produce an analysis of the use of technical words and meta-technical words, which would go some way to differentiate useful content from sales and marketing fluff.

Re:Good

[ArsenneLupin]

Soon enough everybody will realize that "get SEO" is a synonym for "get your site removed from the first page of results for the next two years" and then finding methods of fooling the Googlebot in the short-term won't matter anymore because no one will be willing to attempt it if they can get slapped with a long-term penalty.

No one, except the spammers, that is. The spammers won't care, because they'll just open a new site under a new domain.

Re:Good

[ArsenneLupin]

Without link-backs, it's only you who would get penalized, since what you're doing falls under the "dodgy SEO" criteria.

The perp would not do these links from a site that he cares about, but he'd set up a farm of throwaway domain spefically for the purpose.

Re:Good

[ArsenneLupin]

... and really, this way, for an outsider both of the following situations are indistinguishable:

• A number of strange sites apparently unconnected to a "reputable" shop link to him, pushing him up (in the short term at least). But in reality, it's the shopkeeper who set those "unconnected" domains up as a way to do SEO.
• A number of strange sites apparently unconnected to a "reputable" shop link to him, pushing him up (in the short term at least). But in reality, it's one of the shopkeeper's competitors who set those "unconnected" domains up in order to get the target bitchslapped in the long run

Re:Good

[Patchw0rk F0g]

Or you can do what I do: don't add people to your circles in Google+. Huge positive side effect: no friends = no G+ results muddying up my searches.

Sometimes it pays to be a misanthrope! :-D

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, not being able to write childish comments on YouTube really hurts.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Logging in to youtube is mostly useful if you want to follow the output of certain accounts: You can turn the frontpage into "recent uploads by those you subscribe to". It's kind of neat.

Re:Good

[bmd256]

And there's more! There is also the verbatim search option available. http://googlesystem.blogspot.ca/2011/11/google-verbatim.html

Re:Good

[Anthony Mouse]

No one, except the spammers, that is. The spammers won't care, because they'll just open a new site under a new domain.

Opening a new site on a new domain that "suddenly" has a ton of links to it is pretty easy to detect algorithmically. You throw in a couple more things like "same IP blocks as the previous spammers" and you've got a short list of sites for immediate blacklisting.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

No joke, Yahoo mail interface is the biggest steaming pile I've used and the search is an abomination against a loving god. I dread anytime I need to retrieve a message sent to my now spam email from before I switched to a different client.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

...but if they do that I won't be able to buy a "Saturn V rocket" on Nextag or Alibaba!!!

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish I could repost your comment all over the web, and force news stations to devote a full day to it. I too have said this, and no truer internet words have been spoken.

Re:Good

[hairyfeet]

Screencaps please? Because i've been using it for years and haven't seen any more spam than what google gets, in fact I'd say all three, Hotmail, yahoo, and google are about even on that respect. Sure it gets lots of spam in its SPAM folder but that is what spam folders are for but in the actual interface itself i don't get anything i didn't sign up for. Are you sure you don't have one of your "friends" signing you up for spam for shits and giggles? Because if its an opt in newsletter type deal then yahoo will rightly treat it like what it is, something you signed up for.

So lets see those screencaps, otherwise its just another case of "all go to hell except cave 76!" fanboi bullshitting.

Re:Good

[Barbara, not Barbie]

You missed the point - incoming links will no longer change your search rankings. The original PageRank algorithm is dead (but we already knew it was dying long ago). Google indicated as much, without saying it plainly, when they bought a company specializing in data-mining to answer questions, and expanded their topic database from 20 million to 200 million.

So forget about SEO, and forget about Online Reputation Management (pushing others down in the rankings). Those days are coming to an end.

Re:Good

[tpstigers]

I'm sorry. I thought it was clear that I was asking a rhetorical question.

If I was actually looking for a response, though, I would have been looking for something more along the lines of risks that could actually impact my life, rather than just the usual internet bogeymen.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Google search major overhaul? Getting rid of spam sites is a very good start. My other suggestions:

* Get rid of vertical search--it doesn't give me what I want, it still mixes sites with forums, youtube videos, etc. Sorry, but the best search results for me are no Google content returned except for possibly maps. Anytime I get Google content as the first hit, I leave and use another search engine. Instead, leave the categories, but get rid of "Everything", change that to just "Websites". I know that vertical search was someone's dream, but I want the original Google search experience back, but with the added filter categories to drill down to what I want to find.
* Please don't try to personalize my search results--it breaks relevance. What I want to search for one day may not reflect what I want to search for the next day. I find myself using Bing, StartPage/IxQuick, Blekko, and DuckDuckGo because of Google wanting to personalize results. (Bing only changes relevance due to search history.)
* Filter out review sites that don't have any reviews--just contain the keyword "reviews".
* Filter out discussion sites--the discussions category allows me to search focusing on just discussions, but I don't want them in my main search. Some of them are unanswered questions, others are long debates or flamewars, still others only have one or two replies that still don't answer the questions. This includes, but is not limited to, Experts Exchange, Google Groups, in fact anything with "forum" or "forums" in the address should not appear in the websites link.
* Also fix what you've broke. Old Google Groups was a clean text interface. Before Groups 2. Before Groups 3. Before new Google Groups. Please revert the interface, also fix the relevance so that flame wars and advocacy debates are not the first results just because they have the most posts. YouTube was far better without the animated ad on the main page, without embedded ads in the videos.

Thank you.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone that makes a living trying to optimize websites, i can tell you that isn't the case. Heavily optimized sites with little to no content and all ads are just garbage. People don't click on the link and they leave quickly. People want useful content and that's what the internet needs as well - not the Indians and Chinese working for pennies who can barely speak English, writing content. Google wants to see what converts and the spam filled sites are the equivalent of crappy pollution keeping them from making money.

Re:Good

[SEWilco]

No problem. Flubber is very popular.

Re:Good

[Raenex]

I'm not sorry. You posted a public comment and I replied publicly. Cross-site scripting and privacy aren't "internet bogeymen", they're realistic concerns that transcend how secure the office in your house is.

2011 CWE/SANS Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Errors shows cross-site scripting at #4 and cross-site request forgery at #12, bugs that big sites like Facebook have been vulnerable to.

And while lots of people are apathetic, there are plenty of those who care about privacy.

Re:Good

[SEWilco]

SEO is the business of circumventing the proper weighting of search results by "dodgy techniques", it always has been, and always will be.

Nope. SEO also includes designing a site so search engines can find the content (ie, don't hide it in Flash slideshow images), finding what people are searching for, and guiding the creation of content which is relevant to customers and search engines. The owner of the web site might not know that people are searching for "widgets that don't break", and adding a phrase to the description about the strength of the widget can give useful information to both the customer and the search engines.

There is good SEO, and there is evil SEO. Don't do evil SEO.

Re:Good

[shaitand]

Maybe it gets better with training?

My greater concern is the massive volume of spam coming in given the fact that I've never used the address. It seems like yahoo's account list must have been compromised.

Re:Good

[kiwimate]

My anecdote, equally baffling - I have a Yahoo account I use for everything, which is all over the place on old mailing lists where I didn't bother to obfuscate it. I've had it for about, ooh, 15 years, I think.

I get a handful of spam mails that makes it past the filter. As in perhaps one or two a month, maximum. I use it for personal e-mails, to sign up for mailing lists (literally hundreds, over the years that I've had it), registration on technical bulletin boards, everything.

I get more spam at my work account which I've had for a shorter period of time, isn't nearly as publicized as my Yahoo account, and is protected by a regiment of anti-spam software on our servers.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Love that feature only for blocking expert-sex-change. WTF fail URL is that anyways?

Re:Good

[RalphTheWonderLlama]

I sort of agree, but what about for site owners that don't "produce content" but they use their web site as a mostly static site for their business and related information?

Re:Good

[PaladinAlpha]

Yes, we've had success for years with those techniques -- in specific domains.

What you're talking about is the ability to do that, definitively, for every webpage. As the other responder noted, this could include classification of technical words -- but what is a technical word?

You've got someone that searches for "foobaz". Most webpages that have "foobaz" in the h1s or repeated frequently also mention "fizzbang", "barbar", and "carslop". Some have different ratios of those words or omit one or two of them. How do you decide which one has "good content"? That's the problem you're attempting to formulate.

Re:Good

[shaitand]

Presumably my example is repeatable and not merely anecdotal since it should be the same experience found by anyone who creates an account and doesn't use it.

I hypothesized elsewhere that the difference might be the training that you've done where I've done none. It doesn't explain how spammers got my never used account information unless yahoo account lists have been compromised at some point.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone please elaborate on this "never see links from this site again" link? I have NEVER seen it, even when I'm logged in. Does that fact that I'm in Canada play into this? I would really like to use this feature.

Re:Good

[jhoff]

I suspect Google doesn't actually want all the spam sites to vanish from their results, because they profit from them: these sites are designed to entice you to click on ads, which leads to revenue for Google. I feel that the ease with which crude spam pages can still rise to the top of the search results is some evidence for this. The old (pre-IPO) Google would of course know that this is not a good long-term stragegy. Today's Google? It wouldn't surprise me.

I work at Google on Search Quality, and we really do have a firewall between the Search Quality and Ads departments. We make changes that we believe will help our users find better results, so they'll keep coming back to Google for years to come. We don't answer to Ads.

Re:Good

[Barbara, not Barbie]

You don't need to do it for every web page - not even nearly every web page. Do it for a couple hundred million - which google has done, btw, and you can answer almost every query people would want.

After all, nobody goes beyond the first 1,000 results (most people don't even go beyond the first page) - so your initial premise - that they have to apply this to every page in their index - is mistaken.

They've spent two years compiling 200 million topics. If your query cannot be satisfied by those, they'll then put it on the "TODO" list for further data mining. As time goes on, new topics will become fewer and fewer, and the task will then be just to continually make sure that each of the currently listed topics is still giving the best results in terms of actual content.

They will also reap significant energy savings, since they won't have to send the same query to 40 different nodes and then triage the results of those that return answers the quickest.

Re:Good

[PaladinAlpha]

Which "couple hundred million"? The, as you imply, current top? But the very premise of the article is the "top" results are poisoned by SEO pages. If you use that as your standard set, then you're canonizing all of those obviously content-free sites -- already significantly reducing the information content of your supposedly comprehensive set.

And what about ambiguity? I can google "cream" and my top result is a band, not a dairy product. Which one is more informative? Which one is more relevant? How about if the band had half as many fans? Twice as many? What about in twenty years when they're much less popular? Who decides that? Google employees? How? By counting links to the band?

Beyond that, you're suggesting there will never be a new popular search topic? Suppose a new plague hits. Search terms spike and new literature is published. A network-based search engine (present-day Google) can respond very rapidly. A search engine that puts new topics on a "TODO" list, as you suggest, will be left in the dust.

You've already outlined that, although you may not have realized that -- you state outright that the basis of such a "network-free" search engine should be the results they've built by being a networked search engine. How do you think new topics could reach consensus without that same treatment?

Put another way, the whole point of search engines was to remove the need for manual human classification, since there's simply too much information out there for that to be practical. Remember the web directories of the 90s?

Re:Good

[Barbara, not Barbie]

No - they bought a semantic search company that had already compiled a list of answers to 12 million topics 2 years ago - these are NOT poisoned by SEO. Google has spent the last 2 years expanding on that base - they now have specific answers for 200 million topics. Think "Google Siri".

And no, link counts are dead. Forget about them - they're obsolete. They can not increase a pages' visibility any more - just decrease it if you do stupid things like keyword stuffing and irrelevant links to other sites. Similarly, it makes it a lot harder for someone to ruin a pages' rank by creating hordes of low-quality links to a target page - topic analysis ignores incoming links and focuses on context, content, and questions.

You supply the context, based on your search history. The web pages referenced by the topical indexes supply the content, and this is how the topical index itself supplies the answers.

The "TODO" list will be handled mostly in almost real-time, as there will be much less server load for regular searches. Worst-case scenario, they revert to doing a search the old way for that query. 5 minutes later, a new query with the same context will return a much better result from the updated topical index.

The analysis is relatively easy - how many of the questions "who, what, when, where, why, how" that can be constructed from each page are answered on that page or related pages from the same site? If the page has the words "Abraham Lincoln", does it also have information on where he was born, when he was elected, who shot him, what he accomplished, where he lived, an analysis of why he waffled on the slave trade, etc.

That last one is interesting, because one site might not have anything on that, so the question isn't even asked - another one might go into a lot of detail on that and other questions generated from the content, so it will get better ranking. No human intervention required. In other words, the sites that ask and answer more questions related to a topic are better, same as in human terms.

Re:Good

[tqk]

We wouldn't mind you, except you felt the need to point out that you don't play [well] with others and want to be left alone. That generally translates to mean that you're feeling lonely and seeking attention.

Huh. Guilty on all counts. Are you a psychiatrist or a psychologist? Actually no, not really seeking attention; not today at least. I've bigger problems to deal with today. You know that bit in "Forest Gump" when he feels like going for a run? That's me today.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, this would make it so anyone can anonymously destroy someone else's business. Competitor causing your business problems? No problem, just buy some bad SEO on their behalf!

Re:Good

[hairyfeet]

How do I train it exactly? I don't think I've flagged spam a dozen times since i opened the account in 2005, no different than google or hotmail. Do you have a really easy to guess password? Or use Firefox? as there is an exploit that if you look at a video site, usually of the "hot and nekked' variety in FF they can open a hidden iFrame and use FF's auto-login to grab your account and spam with it. Do you have a bunch of friends on FF that have penises? as that is frankly the ONLY time I see spam in Yahoo. I actually find it kinda funny as it instantly tells me who has been spanking the monkey.

I wish i could explain more but I'm not an HTML guy I've just figured it out from customers complaining "How come I'm sending spam when i don't have a virus?" and here is how I found out basically what it does, feel free to try this yourself. make two dummy accounts in Yahoo, call them shit and bird for example. Use a portable FF (For safest results I'd suggest setting up a new account on your PC so that it won't be able to access your real FF profile) and take the shit account and in its address book ONLY have the bird account. I didn't think to do this part and some of my buds got a spam from me when i was first testing this so you really don't want ANY names in your yahoo address book. Then make sure that FF has the auto-login info for the shit account and start looking at some pron, be sure to randomly click on links to other video sites. XHamster and Xnxx are two good places to start. If you do this for about 30 minutes then use a separate portable browser, say QTWeb to load the bird account sure enough you WILL see spam. you see the reason it is able to get around the filters is its sent from an actual user and since it only sends a single email for each address in the address book per "hit" it doesn't look like a spam attack, it just looks like one person popping off a couple of email to another.

Anyway this trick ONLY works in FF, nobody else. Having ABP doesn't seem to help either and in fact the ONLY way to stop it in FF is to have a master password set up and if you do that you'll quickly see how many sites now carry this bug, its just nuts. But I bet my last dollar if you're getting a bunch of spam in yahoo its from your friends using FF and looking at porno. Now when i get one of those I simply forward it to the person who "sent" it and explain why they shouldn't use Firefox and send them a link to Comodo Dragon, Chrome, and safari and tell them to take their pick. I've managed to get all of my old school buds and acquaintances switched over and now not a single spam. just one more reason not to use FF sadly.

Re:Good

[green1]

I think you missed the lack of a wall part...
in the search engine, just go to another search engine, or enter the URL manually.

In the apple app store just go to another app store... oh wait, you can't... well that's fine, just load the app manually... oh wait, can't do that either.

See, they both have curated gardens, but only one has a wall around it.

Re:Good

[lee1]

Can you provide some insight into how an utterly crude attempt to spam Google works so spectacularly, after all these years of tuning your algorithms to detect just this kind of thing?

Re:Good

[tpstigers]

Like I said - bogeymen. I'm assuming you've read the Mitre list and know what its intended purpose is. It's not supposed to be a list of the most dangerous threats to my personal security. It's intended to supply guidelines for software and IT professionals to help them build more secure systems. It's not so much saying "Cross site scripting is an epidemic problem among today's computers" as it is saying "Cross site scripting is a vulnerability you can easily guard against. As a professional, you should do so". But thanks for pointing it out. I'd be worried if I was still using Netscape Navigator.

And I'm glad you're so concerned about privacy. So am I - we just have different ideas about what constitutes a threat to it. I know what user tracking is and I know how it works. I just don't feel threatened by it.

Let's say Google (or whoever) is carefully tracking my every move online. Let's say they're tracking me as I go about a typical evening spent browsing the interwebs. I check my email (3 new stupid jokes from my brother-in-law), I order a couple of books from Amazon, I research some stuff on Wikipedia for my kid's school paper, I stop by FriendFace to see how my people are doing, watch a few dramatic squirrel videos on YouTube, and round out the evening by looking at some boobies on some porn site. The assumption is that at the end of my evening, Google (or whoever) now has a bunch of data about where I have gone and what I have done. I understand why the tinfoil hat wearers would be terribly concerned about this state of affairs.

What I don't see is how - exactly - Google's (or whoever's) possession of this data is going to negatively impact my life.

Re:Good

[Jason Levine]

I get those (copy/paste spam) too. Often copy/pasted from another comment on the exact same blog post. As if I won't notice 2 people saying the exact same thing (one not a spammer and one a lazy copy/paste spammer). Actually, for some reason, my blog is VERY popular with the spammers. Thank goodness for Akismet!

Re:Good

[Raenex]

It's not so much saying "Cross site scripting is an epidemic problem among today's computers" as it is saying "Cross site scripting is a vulnerability you can easily guard against. As a professional, you should do so."

Bullshit. They publish the list because these are the worst bugs in computer security, which has always been pretty terrible. From Wikipedia:

"XSS vulnerabilities have been reported and exploited since the 1990s. Prominent sites affected in the past include the social-networking sites Twitter,[3] Facebook,[4] MySpace, and Orkut.[5][6] In recent years, cross-site scripting flaws surpassed buffer overflows to become the most common publicly-reported security vulnerability,[7] with some researchers in 2007 viewing as many as 68% of websites as likely open to XSS attacks.[8]"

But thanks for pointing it out. I'd be worried if I was still using Netscape Navigator.

The problem is mostly on the server end. Every site has to take care not to be vulnerable.

And I'm glad you're so concerned about privacy. So am I - we just have different ideas about what constitutes a threat to it.

Good for you, but again, this is a public board. Most people who profess to care about privacy would find the idea of their every move online being tracked and compiled into databases a violation of their privacy.

Re:Good

[bandy]

Good idea, and I used to get that when I hit the back button after inadvertently going to some sort of site like ExpertSexChange (ooh, they hyphenated), but I haven't seen the "Never see these bastards again" link/button in a very long time. (And yes, I'm logged in) I'm not an iGoogle user and I usually go in via the search bar on Firefox.

Re:Good

[Acaeris]

Videos that get the ad banners usually have them for one of two reasons.

• There was copyrighted material detected in the video and the agreement that YouTube have with the copyright holder requires them to pay for the video so that do this through the advertising at the beginning of the video.
• The video is published by a YouTube content creator and pays them for content creation. I know that there is almost always adverts at the start of TotalBiscuit's and the Yogcast's videos for instance yet there are videos in my favourites lists that never have an advert show up.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you provide some insight into how an utterly crude attempt to spam Google works so spectacularly, after all these years of tuning your algorithms to detect just this kind of thing?

I haven't had a chance to debug this unusual result myself, but I've forwarded it to the webspam team. Thanks. FYI, in the future you can help us by reporting spam here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you provide some insight into how an utterly crude attempt to spam Google works so spectacularly, after all these years of tuning your algorithms to detect just this kind of thing?

Another Googler figured it out. yellowpagesgoesgreen.org actually bought hitchensweb.com, which used to be an authoritative result when Hitchens blogged there. Then they redirect it to yellowpagesgoesgreen.org, and they hid the words "Christopher Hitchens" in the alt text of some images on the page, which also fools our snippets. Pretty sneaky!

You can read more about the problem of distinguishing legitimate and illegitimate domain acquisition and redirection here:
http://searchengineland.com/do-links-from-expired-domains-count-with-google-17811

It's a tricky problem but we're on it.

FYI, in the future you can help us improve by reporting spam here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport

Re:Good

[lee1]

Hitchens never "blogged" there or anywhere else. But the domain acquisition does, no doubt, explain it. If you try to go to hitchensweb you do indeed get redirected to the yellowpages site. I haven't yet read the link you provided, but it seems strange that someone should be able to buy reputation just by purchasing a domain and redirecting it. It sounds like a recipe for spam.

Re:Good

[jhoff]

Sure it's used by spammers a lot, but legitimate companies change their domains too. Off the top of my head, at some point thefacebook.com bought facebook.com. :-)

Not a very good wingman...

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Last year they blocked search results from the co.cc domain because they believed they polluted the search results

So now Google is officially a co.cc blocker.

Re:3rd Parties Need not Apply

[Anonymous Coward]

Got a source on that, FUDmonger? Or are you just trying to spread the myth that Google's results are up for sale?

ha

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean content is more important than SEO? Now that's just crazy talk.

Re:ha

[TheRaven64]

Does 'content' mean 'number of Google AdWords'?

content not ads

[chrismcb]

People want to find the best content, not the best ads. But they shouldn't be penalizing people who have "good seo" such as decent keyword lists. Rather they should be penalizing people with poor content.

Re:content not ads

[dmomo]

Good SEO often comes at the expense of good content. I don't think this latest development is absolutest. In the end, they want to improve their search results. This is just one piece in that.. among countless other factors.

Re:content not ads

[Anonymous Coward]

They should be penalizing people for even saying "SEO". Call it what it is, spam.

Re:content not ads

[Anonymous Coward]

seem there is good correlation between the two, (too) good seo leading to crap with no purpose except gaming the system

Re:content not ads

[Overzeetop]

If you have good content, SEO shouldn't be necessary. People have found that you can enhance your ranking by inserting fake or misleading content in the form of keywords, links, and activity which does not increase the actual value of the page. This causes the accuracy of the Google search bot to go down - though it increases the hits on optimized pages. The net result is poorer searching, and good searching keeps eyeballs in front of advertising, which pays the bills to provide better searching.

I'm surprised they're telling everyone about it and not just coding around it, but it could be a social engineering attempt to reduce SEO, making the highly optimized sites easier to spot and flag as less valuable in searching.

Re:content not ads

[green1]

The problem is that there is no way for googlebot to know what "good content" is. SEO isn't some magic thing that makes bad content appear as good to a search engine, instead it's a way of gaming the mechanism that the bots use to try to determine genuinely good content (which is what the bot really is trying to find, it's just not smart enough to know the difference). The only solution is a smarter google-bot, and this is something that I think google really needs to work on, (and this seems to be the first step)
I look forward to the day when the only way to game the system is to make a page that ends up being useful to your human visitors too...

Re:content not ads

[muon-catalyzed]

There is a problem with this concept, the bad content means people actually click on ads to escape it.., the worse the page is the better click through rate. Google benefits too.., but in this case some junk-web-farmer dark lord probably went over the edge with extreme SEOing so Google decided they might even do something about it.

Re:content not ads

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you! People get irked about SEO, but I have a site with valuable free content and it was hell getting the proper ranking in search results. The algorithm is already screwed up and needs fixed. People with good sites have trouble getting found because the algorithm still weighs VERY heavy on external links to your site. That dependence is the weakest link (sorry pun). Also, if you have a bunch of link farms pointing to your site then your rankings should suffer. But there is a problem. I, and many others, have to use link farm networks to gain proper traction since everyone is doing it--i didn't do it a service did it for me. I'm not a spam site, or an ad park--I offer free software, and getting ranked higher has helped a lot of people out by being able to find my software. Before, I was washed out by sites targeting my users who didn't really offer free software at all (trials and SaaS)--they use link farms too, everyone does in the commercial arena. The "link farms" are rather sophisticated and have content as well, so automated filtering is impossible. A lot of the links are rotated dynamically as well. Even reputable major corporations are using link-farm SEO.

Honestly, I think Google is just spreading FUD to help salvage their search. I doubt there is much they can do or they would have already done it. Google admitting their algo is swamped is like MS admitting that Windows is insecure. They have to acknowledge the problems but they will never admit it is totally fubar'd. Besides, they are so intertwined that to start dinking with it too much will fuck up their revenue from ads in addition to triggering other bombs.

Re:content not ads

[Barbara, not Barbie]

I, and many others, have to use link farm networks to gain proper traction since everyone is doing it--i didn't do it a service did it for me. I'm not a spam site, or an ad park--I offer free software, and getting ranked higher has helped a lot of people out by being able to find my software.

You're part of the problem. Go DIAF - slowly. And shove your hosts file up your rectum.

Re:content not ads

[Anonymous Coward]

They should be penalizing people for even saying "SEO". Call it what it is, spam.

SEO=Spam Everything, OK?

Re:content not ads

[Anonymous Coward]

They should penalize when seo trumps content which typically happens when seo is your first concern. If you are basing you content off of a keyword list your writing will be awkward, I've seen this time and time again.

Oh this is too good.

[chr1st1anSoldier]

HAHAHAHAHA! I love this! The company I work for makes every employee write blog articles and in turns makes our sales team write eight comments a month on those blog artles for the sole purpose of increasing their google standing in search results. You have no idea how much this makes me smile.

Re:Oh this is too good.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just curious.... Has it improved your company's rankings at all?

Re:Oh this is too good.

[Anonymous Coward]

Now you can do 2 blogs and 32 comments on OTHER sites pointing to yours...

Or whatever else ovecomes the anti-gameing... That is what you will be doing. Dont think otherwise... You probably will continue to do what you are doing now too...

Re:Oh this is too good.

[chr1st1anSoldier]

I will be honest with you, I have no idea this practice has as I sit at the bottom of the totempole. Our upper management seems to think this works because I have been dragged into the owners office over a blog article(which is an interesting story). I do know one thing, if you type in "CCTV Camera" into a google search the company I work for is in the top 3.

Re:Oh this is too good.

[Tablizer]

This is a job we American citizens have an edge up on our Asian outsourced competitors: their limited knowledge of English and American cultural will give them away.

Thus, if you are fired as a programmer to be replaced by a PhD in India that earns $6/hr, you can always become a fake blog spammer.

Re:Oh this is too good.

[Anonymous Coward]

You work in wikipedia? wow.

Re:Oh this is too good.

[Anonymous Coward]

> I have been dragged into the owners office over a blog article(which is an interesting story).

Please share!

Re:Oh this is too good.

[__aaltlg1547]

That may be illegal under prohibitions against shilling.

Re:Oh this is too good.

[Anonymous Coward]

That would explain the forced article creation.

Re:Oh this is too good.

[locopuyo]

The chief sits at the bottom of the totem pole because he supports everyone. Unless you're the CEO you're doing it wrong.

Re:Oh this is too good.

[gmhowell]

This is a job we American citizens have an edge up on our Asian outsourced competitors: their limited knowledge of English and American cultural will give them away.

lol! u think were betr ritrs than azns?

Re:Oh this is too good.

[Anonymous Coward]

hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha ... "prohibition against shilling" "illegal" ... what world do you live in?

Re:Oh this is too good.

[Yvan256]

...their limited knowledge of English and American cultural will give them away

I don't see much difference.

Re:Oh this is too good.

[Tablizer]

He he, I better focus on programming I see.

Re:Oh this is too good.

[Camel Pilot]

Well now you have an excellent subject (as per the OP) to write about for this month blog entry.

I imagine the SEOs are rubbing their hands now

[Molt]

All this is doing is changing the rules on which sites will be rated more highly, this changes what needs to be done to a site to gain artificially high ranking- maybe making it more difficult- but it'll still be done. I can imagine the SEO service sellers being delighted about this, new customers will still be buying their services to gain ranks and since old approaches will now be penalised they can start to sell again to those who'd bought their services before the change.

Re:I imagine the SEOs are rubbing their hands now

[Bogtha]

I can imagine the SEO service sellers being delighted about this, new customers will still be buying their services to gain ranks and since old approaches will now be penalised they can start to sell again to those who'd bought their services before the change.

Companies that provide SEO tend to work for a monthly retainer, not as one-off payments. I doubt many of them will like this because it eliminates one of the things that differentiates their service from simply "build a good site and add good content". The people who don't "over-optimise" make more money by simply doing a good job of building websites, and they have no need to define themselves as SEO companies.

Re:I imagine the SEOs are rubbing their hands now

[Mr. Underbridge]

That's one way to look at it. However, if Google changes its algorithm rapidly enough, then they can price most of the bottom feeders out of that market. For instance, how much am I willing to pay to be able to game the system for a week when all I'm optimizing is a parked domain, aggregator, or other crap site? If I have to spend full price every week, the value isn't there.

To me that's the major benefit, that it will increase cost the most for those who truly are gaming the system (eg, domain parkers) as opposed to those who legitimately are in the top handful of sites for a given search result. From a consumer's standpoint, if it cleans up the first page, that's enough - I don't care as much about which legit companies spend a lot to keep jockeying for position.

And as long as it returns the search for the word 'Santorum' to where it belongs, I'm good. Speaking of scumbags using SEO to alter results for evil...

Re:I imagine the SEOs are rubbing their hands now

[Anonymous Coward]

This. They can't prevent people from figuring out the algorithm. Their incomes depend on abusing it almost entirely, in some cases.

The smarter ones will figure it out and get all the attention.

Admittedly Google could just look at all the popular keyword searches and check a bunch of sites and censor them, but that'd break their entire system, so that ain't going to happen.
Oh, wait, didn't they just block an entire TLD? ...oh well.

Re:I imagine the SEOs are rubbing their hands now

[lightknight]

Indeed. Got a friend who was into the SEO business (did everything in my power to convince him to drop it), and if I am remembering correctly, they reverse engineer Google's ranking algorithm from their patents. If this is true, and were I Google, I'd keep my new implementation off the books, or at least have the USPTO seal it.

Re:I imagine the SEOs are rubbing their hands now

[Mr. Underbridge]

Interesting. If my knowledge of patents serves, you never put the real "secret sauce" in the disclosure. I'd bet Google does exactly what you mentioned - keep the 'Coke formula' kind of stuff off the books.

Re:I imagine the SEOs are rubbing their hands now

[John Hasler]

Anything you don't put in the patent disclosure is not patented.

Re:I imagine the SEOs are rubbing their hands now

[lightknight]

Exactly. A patent of this nature will give some specifics, and leave other things vague.

Still, it does give the troublemakers a head start.

About time....

[Lumpy]

The SEO scumbags have been polluting search sites everywhere.

When I can search for 4 different unrelated terms and have the same site show up in each, you know that SEO is only a scumbags game.

Re:About time....

[Anonymous Coward]

The SEO scumbags have been polluting search sites everywhere.

When I can search for 4 different unrelated terms and have the same site show up in each, you know that SEO is only a scumbags game.

Or you're searching for information and all these shopping sites come up. That's what the "shopping" link is for.

Re:About time....

[Bogtha]

When I can search for 4 different unrelated terms and have the same site show up in each, you know that SEO is only a scumbags game.

I know. There's this one scumbag SEO company that comes up for an absolute load of unrelated terms, it's that obvious, I don't know why Google haven't blacklisted them yet. The SEO company even has a silly name, Wiki something I think.

Re:About time....

[Anonymous Coward]

Because we know, deep down, you are really seeking a larger penis. Its the basis of all human endeavor.

Re:About time....

[Anonymous Coward]

As the guy that runs www.stopforumspam.com all I can say is that its a good start. Google Mail need to pull their finger out of the ass now and do something about the amount of spam accounts that they host.

Re:About time....

[Anonymous Coward]

Speak for yourself.
Apparently a cervical impact is an instant mood-killer for all but the most hard-core masochists.
Also, it may put things out of commission for several days if you were being at all vigorous.
Even if you just barely touch it, this can make certain positions a non-starter.

So there is a definite point where bigger is *not* better.

Re:About time....

[KozmoStevnNaut]

Length is overrated, it's all about girth, baby.

Hence, the ideal penis must be shaped roughly like a soup can.

semantic web

[Anonymous Coward]

as the web becomes less semantic-based, html/css is slowly eroding in value as a searchable medium. for websites worth visiting, the default html structure that the googlebot loads is little more than a placeholder for dynamic content, with css styles used to declare javascript event listeners for a given element. clicking on said element loads the dynamic content.

people are finding things in different ways now: one example is via word-of-mouth (viral, etc) via social networks. who honestly thinks that fine tuning their website's keywords will help them obtain more visitors? does anyone actually believe this will help their website gain popularity? especially given the billions of webpages already in various search engines' databases? in this day and age?

as a web marketer, you are better off promoting a website through as many social networks as possible. dont waste time fine-tuning keywords; nobody cares anymore.

its about people helping people find information, not some algorithm helping you.

Re:semantic web

[Tablizer]

Marketers are polluting social media also now, posing as fake friends.

Re:semantic web

[lightknight]

Politicians first, then Lawyers, then Marketers.

Anyone else with me?

Re:semantic web

[Anonymous Coward]

people are finding things in different ways now: one example is via word-of-mouth (viral, etc) via social networks. who honestly thinks that fine tuning their website's keywords will help them obtain more visitors?

No, they all use google.

as a web marketer, you are better off promoting a website through as many social networks as possible.

Social networks are for getting you to hand over your information. They need to google you first.

dont waste time fine-tuning keywords; nobody cares anymore

These delusions are what happens when trend nazis drink their own poisoned coolaid.

its about people helping people find information, not some algorithm helping you.

That was the case when gopher was still widely used. Now it is all about who can throw who into their ad laden privacy invading cesspool first.

Re:semantic web

[Anonymous Coward]

So, you're saying no-one uses search engines like Google anymore, that instead everyone bugs their friends on Facebook to enable them navigate the web?

Your points on HTML/CSS were interesting, pity you quickly started spouting utter nonsense.

Re:semantic web

[voidphoenix]

Lawyers first. That takes out a lot of politicians too. Add lobbyists and bankers to the list.

Re:semantic web

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you have any real data to back up what you just said?

Yeah yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

Haven't they been doing this "aggressively" for the past 12 years or so?

Just like Congress and the administration have been aggressively targeting waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer money...

LOL Link farms...

[Anonymous Coward]

Goodbye Phoronix, nice knowing...er well, just goodbye then. But seriously does this mean we'll have less link spam on forums/wikis/anything that someone can enter a URL in?

Re:LOL Link farms...

[Lunix Nutcase]

Don't worry. eHow will find away around this to boost it's page rank.

Re:3rd Parties Need not Apply

[walkerp1]

softpedia.com

arstechnica.com

redsauce.com

The phrase is "off their rocker" ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... and I don't think that would make sense here, unless you want to emphasize that Google is old.

Re:3rd Parties Need not Apply

[tibman]

I read your first two links and they had exactly zero to do with paying google for search relevance.

Keywords up the wazoo

[Tablizer]

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Re:3rd Parties Need not Apply

[walkerp1]

I read your first two links and they had exactly zero to do with paying google for search relevance.

Directly? No, that would never stand.

From An Insider: Good!

[deweyhewson]

As someone who provides SEO, among other things - shameless plug alert: www.uvmanagement.com - I see this as being a welcome change.

It is frustrating trying to provide what I deem "honest" SEO - focusing on marketing the content, rather than creating content which is marketable, for example - when so many other providers out there use all the tricks in the book to increase page rankings without actually having content worthy of where they end up. I very well could engage in such tactics, but I'm a nerd before I'm a businessman, and I'm not particularly happy with how "cluttered" the web has become over the past decade as more and more people have learned how to exploit holes in its system.

It can be incredibly frustrating trying to find something on Google (or any other engine), when the first several pages are filled with worthless or ultimately irrelevant links.

Re:From An Insider: Good!

[Yvan256]

You should update your G+ button in the footer.

Penalize? I don't think so.

[Xtifr]

It doesn't sound to me like they're trying to penalize anyone; it sounds to me like they're trying to improve their search results. The people who spend so much time and effort trying to artificially boost their rankings may feel like they're being penalized, but that doesn't mean they are. You might as well say that a thief forced to return the goods he stole is being penalized for the value of those goods. While "stealing rankings" may not be a crime, per se, Google is doing little more here than trying to return rankings to their proper owners.

In google's interest

[nprz]

A lot of the SEO sites have very low actual value in them. They are avoided by any humans with 10% of a brain.
This dilutes Google's actual value as a search engine.
If they change how sites are rated to raise usable content-rich sites, then people are more likely to view the site and maybe actually click on an ad and maybe buy something.

define "better search results"

[Mister Liberty]

"Better search results" is a matter of perspective.
Which is it -- the website's or its visitor's?

Re:There is a term for this

[MyFirstNameIsPaul]

We have a winner.

Oblig Stephen Jay Gould reference

[Kupfernigk]

Gould was always very keen to make people understand that evolution does not necessarily involve greater intelligence, strength or complexity as part of "fitness". Google is doing a kind of environmental step change will will result in rapid forced evolution among system gamers. It will be interesting to see which way it turns out: ever more complex strategies trying to game the system, or a reduction to simple but crude techniques.

SEO is bullshit

[evanism]

I have always hated SEO with a deep passion.

I despise the SEO marketing idiots who glamorise themselves with "arcane knowledge". They end up using basic tools that any illiterate monkey could. Knowledge that could be written out on a 2 pages, in a big font.

They act like Chiropractors, alternative medicine quacks and ponzi fraudsters. Wizard of Oz stuff, "Ignore the man behind the curtain". They all get caught out, simply because what they espouse is rubbish.

The sooner Google allows the entire internet population to have a "This Is SEO Bullshit" button, the better.

Re:SEO is bullshit

[richman555]

I completely agree. I have been working in ecommerce for 15 years and SEO is largely made up. These so called SEO experts will have you rewrite your website which normally is a tremendous cost for those who own them.

Re:SEO is bullshit

[evanism]

touche! I'm 18 years with hard core skills (c, c++, Java, perl, RoR, PHP, Oracle, etc).

SEO is entirely made up. Guesses, estimations and black magic.... and as this article points out, a changing field.

Its pure charlatanism. Look at the average "SEO expert", they are the jokers even the marketing department rejected.

I use Google's very own...

[pongo000]

...SEO optimization guide on my websites. Will I now be penalized for doing so?

Re:I use Google's very own...

[thetoadwarrior]

Probably not but people who buy and sell links on other sites to boost ratings, repeat key words more than what is necessary and other such tactics will probably take a hit or so I hope.

Re:I use Google's very own...

[Anonymous Coward]

SEO means two different things. For Google and honest people, it is an activity which focuses on optimizing sites for crawlers. For the SEO industry, it is an activity focused on boosting rankings. Thanks to the SEO industry the word is no longer useless for the former definition. It has becoming synonymous with boosting rankings.

I look forward to the day when the SEO industry dies.

Re:I use Google's very own...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hasn't this been the case since Panda?

Re:Penalize? I don't think so.

[aflag]

The way I see it the criminal is being penalized indeed. Perhaps he really should be penalized, because stealing is not good for society, but it's a punishment, nonetheless. A robber may even be arested as well, which is yet another punishment.

Re:Penalize? I don't think so.

[phantomfive]

While "stealing rankings" may not be a crime, per se, Google is doing little more here than trying to return rankings to their proper owners.

Excellent. We should call SEO what it is, stealing rankings.

Assess the content quality I say

[SpaghettiPattern]

Assess the content quality I say. Favor well written articles over boring long stretching articles by bean counters. Sure roseindia has many Java related articles but ill written ones. Every opportunity I had with that site ended in frustration and I always found hugely better written material elsewhere.

Doing that is rather tricky at best as natural language is difficult to interpret by non-humans. Finding out if an article is well written is even tougher. Finding indirect hints -e.g. style, vocabulary, spelling errors, reputation of referring sites, etc...- as to articles are well written is likely to be more effective.

Improve the results. Concentrate on best articles first instead of worst articles last.

At least they are competent with it

[Anonymous Coward]

They should penalize themselves for search results with malware. I would like to have anti-virus, anti-spam and anti-advert filter on my google search results - and with no pirated content at all.

Re:Penalize? I don't think so.

[sjwest]

A big problem in my humble opinion is how google categorize things by the mba's in google's ad sales - motorbikes in x, is that only one customer for x location for google? The rare baseball/sports cards example seems also to assume that people are trying to search for specific cards for shopping sites. We are not retail, and our thing is not specific to one location.

Another is that term 'something' has a quality end and an junk end. We get envelopes with codes from google that go straight to the recycle bin. Google probably do list way down it but the low quality end stuff gets top rating. It looks crap and it appears to be an problem not just for us - Not sure if google in its categories decided to ignore products and sevices the mba's found hard to sell or don't understand.

People do find us but google it appears does not help them and thats why paying google is not a priority or is seo (seo'ers also have no clue about our custom sector of the industry)

 

Old SEO joke

[s7uar7]

How many SEO experts does it take to change a light bulb, lightbulb, light,bulb, lamp, lighting, light switch, lightswitch, switch, energy?

Re:Old SEO joke

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the laugh.

Moving the ads to Google properties

[Animats]

This may be about moving ads to Google properties. With AdSense ads, Google has to share revenue. With ads on Google's own pages, they don't. Google is putting more ads on their own search result pages now, and adding their "social" (i.e. brand related) results at the right. Look up "cars" and you now get "People and Pages on Google+ related to cars", which are Ford, Nissan (with logos) and "cars.com".

Google has been trying to drive traffic to their own properties for a while, and the pressure is increasing. Top results for popular searches are increasingly Google's own content, or something they scraped from somewhere else. (You can stop Google from scraping your site. The price is total disappearance from Google searches. News Corp. did that for some of their newspapers. Few others dare.) "Videos" as a search option has been replaced by "YouTube". And, of course, there's "Google+"

Anything Matt Cutts says about "cracking down on SEO" has to be viewed with skepticism. He's Google's promoter to the SEO community. He speaks at the big SEO conferences. His position is "SEO is not spam.

Re:Moving the ads to Google properties

[Tacvek]

It is important to understand though that what Google means by SEO is things like having an XML Sitemap, ensuring each page has a unique title that reflects the content of the page, providing alt text, using descriptive anchor text (i.e. not "click here"), and providing friendly urls. Those things are easy, and most of them also inherently improve the quality of the site for humans too.

What all too many people understand by SEO is things like getting more pages to link to your site, making sure every imaginable keyword appears on every page, and similar tactics that do nothing to improve the page for humans, nor do they really help Google determine if your site is relevant for a given query.

Re:Moving the ads to Google properties

[Todd Knarr]

The problem is that there's a disconnect between Google (and most people) and the SEO industry when it comes to what SEO means.

To most people, and to Google, SEO means designing pages and metadata so it's easy for the search engine to figure out what the page is actually about so it can rank it's relevance to the search the user entered. This is good. It helps deliver search results that the user will find useful.

To the SEO industry, SEO means designing pages so that they rank highly for a specific set of searches regardless of how relevant to those searches the pages are. This is bad. It makes the search results contain things the user wasn't searching for. And frankly it's bad for a site because when I find out that xyz.com was at the top of the list for searches when it's not relevant, I'm going to remember xyz.com as a fraudulent site. And when it gets returned when it's really relevant, I'm going to see that domain and go "Oh, them again." and skip right past them.

Re:Moving the ads to Google properties

[adamdoyle]

I tend to agree with you, as your reason is more aligned with Google's interests. However, Google+ doesn't have ads (right now, at least). It seems to me as though all of Google's products start out ad-free while Google throws all of its resources at them to make them successful. Finally, when their place in the market is secure, they start plastering ads all over them. The Google+ search results are probably part of the strategy to help Google+ gain some ground against Facebook. I don't know how they're going to overtake Facebook, but I don't think it wouldn't surprise me.

If you think about back when Google search overtook its competitors, the product wasn't really that much better than any of the other search engines... and yet somehow "google" turned into a verb for "web search." Same thing with Gmail. Gmail wasn't really any better than any of the other email providers. Sure, it had significantly more storage, but I don't think that was really an issue for most people. Could all of this really have been a result of the Google brand name? I have a hard time coming up with any other reason for all of this success. Really good marketing and PR combined with engineering talent (which they got by providing the best perks).

Re:Moving the ads to Google properties

[Animats]

To most people, and to Google, SEO means designing pages and metadata so it's easy for the search engine to figure out what the page is actually about...

Not "most people".

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.' 'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.' 'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master -- that's all.'

Stop trying to tell us what you think we want

[crossmr]

About two months ago I was searching for something, and I remember being annoyed enough with the results that google was posting to go try searching on Bing *shudder*

The problem was, despite using quotes, google was not searching the exact term I had entered. It was two months ago so I don't remember the exact term, but the problem was of the nature where it was modifying the end of the word. In that case it was making a significant enough change that I wasn't remotely finding what I wanted, despite the quotes.

I think in the near future google is going to start to find out they're not immortal. They've really been going downhill..

Another big annoyance is a removal of the timeline from the news archive searches. I used to find that extremely useful. You could easily search for a term, then narrow down the date visually by clicking the year, then the month.
Now you've just got raw results that you can only sort ascending or descending, but you've got no idea where clumps of stories may occur or anything like that.

Re:Stop trying to tell us what you think we want

[thetoadwarrior]

I think you're right in that Google's results are going downhill. The problem is, in my mind, no one else is improving. I'd consider Bing if the results were better. Duck Duck Go is pretty good but still comes nearer Bing than Google and more importantly, searching for non-US content can be a pain even when specifically using identifiers like UK in the query.

I very much appreciate the whole idea of non-personalised results, the lack of bubbling, etc but in the case of DDG it's only really convenient if you're living in the US.

Re:Stop trying to tell us what you think we want

[Cyberllama]

Quotes should be sacrosanct. I've been in a similar situation where Google "corrects" what I've got in quotes and as a result can't find anything relevant. It drove me NUTS. There's just no work-around for it For the life of me I couldn't find a way to get results for my actual search query. Thinking you know what the user wants better than the user is a Microsoft-style blunder. Apple gets away with that shit because they have a niche market that *wants* it. Google should be better than that.

If anyone wants a specific example, go to image search and try to search for "suchi". Wikipedia claims this is how you spell the name of the monkey from Captain planet (IT CAME UP, OK?). Google, however, ignores my quotes and searches for "Sushi" every time. There seems to be no way around this. In fairness, there probably are next to no results--but if that's the case, tell me so. I've had similar issues with the web search as well. There are situations where it will say "There were no results for xxx, did you mean xxx?" and that is absolutely fine! If there are no results, then by all means show me what you think I may have met.

Also I sometimes do a web search in quotes and it will return "Showing results for Someshityoutotallydidn'ttypebutwethinkyoumayhavemeant to type. Did you mean "Shityouactaullytyped?" Search for "Shityouactaullytyped instead" and I have to click to get my results. Screw you Google. It's one thing to second-guess me and offer me the alternate search if you think I didn't mean to search for what I wanted to search for--but you should NEVER EVER show me a different search result if there were results for my actual search. I don't need my search engine assuming I'm an idiot.

Re:Stop trying to tell us what you think we want

[DamonHD]

Just tried an unquoted search for suchi and did indeed get a "Search instead for suchi" link having been offered as sushi search instead, but the "search instead" link did what you and I would want it to.

Generally providing that the answers to what I actually typed as the query are only one click away I'm pleased to have have G unmangle some of my typos and speeeeling erors and save much frustration.

Rgds

Damon

Re:Stop trying to tell us what you think we want

[Neil Boekend]

Genuinly curious: was there a line

Showing results for quantum mechanics
Search instead for kwantum mechanics

as in my search for Kwantum Mechanics? If a combination has X times as much results with a slightly different spelling Google assumes you made a typo, but gives you a link to force the results.

Re:Stop trying to tell us what you think we want

[crossmr]

I've searched before for something and gotten a recommendation for alternative spellings.
In the case where it gave me the "did you mean xxx?" I clicked it and it gave me only 4 results. While my original search gave me well over 200. I can't fathom the logic behind that one.

Re:Stop trying to tell us what you think we want

[Jiro]

I just tried it. (Remember, image search, not regular search). Whether I put quotes around it or not, it mixed up suchi and sushi in the same page as well as providing the link asking if you meant sushi (if you're providing a link for if I meant sushi, why are you also putting sushi results on the main page as well?)

suchi is actually pretty common since it's an Indian name; most of the legitimate hits are of that.

Re:Stop trying to tell us what you think we want

[SEWilco]

About two months ago I was searching for something, and I remember being annoyed enough with the results that google was posting to go try searching on Bing *shudder*

The problem was, despite using quotes, google was not searching the exact term I had entered. It was two months ago so I don't remember the exact term, but the problem was of the nature where it was modifying the end of the word. In that case it was making a significant enough change that I wasn't remotely finding what I wanted, despite the quotes.

...

A few months ago, Google decided to ignore quotation marks. Ick. The tool you want is Verbatim Search, but to reach it you have to do a search, click on "More search tools", then click on "Verbatim".

Re:Stop trying to tell us what you think we want

[jhoff]

Quotes should be sacrosanct. I've been in a similar situation where Google "corrects" what I've got in quotes and as a result can't find anything relevant. It drove me NUTS. There's just no work-around for it For the life of me I couldn't find a way to get results for my actual search query. Thinking you know what the user wants better than the user is a Microsoft-style blunder. Apple gets away with that shit because they have a niche market that *wants* it. Google should be better than that.

If anyone wants a specific example, go to image search and try to search for "suchi". Wikipedia claims this is how you spell the name of the monkey from Captain planet (IT CAME UP, OK?). Google, however, ignores my quotes and searches for "Sushi" every time.

Also I sometimes do a web search in quotes and it will return "Showing results for Someshityoutotallydidn'ttypebutwethinkyoumayhavemeant to type. Did you mean "Shityouactaullytyped?" Search for "Shityouactaullytyped instead" and I have to click to get my results. Screw you Google. It's one thing to second-guess me and offer me the alternate search if you think I didn't mean to search for what I wanted to search for--but you should NEVER EVER show me a different search result if there were results for my actual search. I don't need my search engine assuming I'm an idiot.

I work on this sort of thing at Google. I'm sorry you've had bad experiences where we misunderstand your intent.

Words and phrases in quotes are indeed sacrosanct. In the case of image searching for "suchi," there's a simple problem -- websites that misspelled "sushi"! Look at the sushi roll from directorio.inforito.com: it's titled "suchi.jpg". This is the sort of challenge we have to work on. How do we tell the difference between "suchi" that is a spelling error and legitimate instances of "suchi," e.g., Indian radio personality "Suchitra, known affectionately as Suchi"?

Also, I hear your frustration on Google auto-correcting your query. Our statistics show that we get our users their results faster millions of times a day by "showing results for" the corrected query when our spelling system is extremely confident. Of course, the system is not 100% accurate. So it's a tradeoff. We tune the precision-recall curve aggressively in favor of precision to minimize the frustrating experiences.

Last year, responding to feedback from users, we introduced "Verbatim" mode, which disables all spelling/stemming/synonyms. You can find it under "More search tools" on the left.

If you ever have a search where we're misunderstanding your intent, and you'd like to help us improve, click the "Give us feedback" link at the bottom of the results page. My team will get it.

Using Google

[Taco Cowboy]

You folks logged in when you use Google?

I use two browsers

One (let's say FF) I logged in my Google Account (gmail or something)

And on the other browser (let's say Chrome) which I've made sure that I've logged off from all my Google accounts - I use Google search on it

I do not know if my strategy works or not

I do not know if Google logs me in via my IP or not

Re:Using Google

[PGGreens]

Sometimes I use private browsing for this, even if I don't need the privacy part of it, just because it separates the session data. So, I can be logged out of my account in the new window/tab or logged into a different account without logging out of my primary one. Still couldn't tell you about the logging via IP.

Re:Using Google

[GameboyRMH]

I do the same thing using Multifox, it's like splitting one instance of Firefox into two (or more).

Google won't log you in by IP, with so much NATting going on an IP doesn't mean much and doing so would cause huge security problems, although they might be able to track you behind the scenes using a combination of your IP and browser fingerprinting. You can use FoxyProxy to redirect all traffic to Google through a separate proxy if you want to be sure.

Let's start with TekGoblin

[afabbro]

Seriously, why not link the source instead of some spammy blog?

Re:Let's start with TekGoblin

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure what's funnier:

a) You calling tekgoblin a spammy blog and then claiming cnet is better; seriously, load them both side by side, if you're browser doesn't crash in angst you'll notice they are almost identical in layout and just as spammy.

b) The fact that cnet isn't even the original source.

or c) This was modded +5 Informative.

Re:Let's start with TekGoblin

[SEWilco]

Seriously, why not link the source instead of some spammy blog?

Because if we don't link to the spammy blog, the spammy blog doesn't get a boost in search engine rankings.

Damn BB spamming

[Anonymous Coward]

When google whacks sites that pay spammers to post links in bulletin boards the net will be a better place.

On the other hand, posting a link to your competition on bb could whack their ranking... ripe for abuse

And then...

[SuperCharlie]

1. Everyone in SEO gets a call as to why the client site went down the page listing.
2. SEO people re-SEO to be like the top listings.
3. Profit!

Every time Google changes the search algorithms and shuffles results, the SEO people make money. As long as there is an automated function directing sales traffic, the game will remain the same.

Let's hope

[Anonymous Coward]

I manage around 350 sites. Daily I get calls from Seo companies that claim to have a "relationship" with Google. I fight tooth and nail to have our mantra be "when someone clicks a link in search, they aren't sorry they arrived at one of our sites" It is disheartening when we are evaluating our search results that we find the first page littered with sites that are keyword packed. with 100's of back links from sites who's only reason for existence is for seo. I hope Google is serious about this. Good, relevant content and a well designed site should trump everything else. Don't get me started on the "cherry pick" and automated review services like Demand Force" That is another thing Google needs to get on their radar.

Prosecute SEO scam artists

[Compuser]

SEO activities should be treated as slander in the sense that they bring down ratings of more relevant content. Google should lobby Congress to make such things punishable by several years in maximum security. And if more than one person are involved then this should be prosecuted under RICO and carry even stiffer penalties (ideally 25 to life). Google should work with the FBI to aggressively uncover and prosecute such activities.

Re:3rd Parties Need not Apply

[psiclops]

did you even read the articles you linked?
from the first Article:

Of the claims above, the one that is going to get the most attention is the one referring to organic search results ranking. Google has long maintained that it does not in any way alter algorithmic search results and it does not favor anyone.

Many of the claims in the lawsuit sound more like a disgruntled competitor than a legitimate illegal action. Google hiring people remotely connected to buySAFE is not illegal. Nor is it trying to find more about the business.

Offering its product for free is not illegal either and neither is requiring customers to use Trusted Stores exclusively. Considering the current climate surrounding Google, this should be an interesting lawsuit to watch.

Google is over.

[mcmonkey]

Google has passed it's Howard Hughes inventor, producer, philanthropist, most interesting man in the world phase,and entered its Howard Hughes locked in the penthouse, saving nail clippings, drug addict phase.

Today I was sending an email through Gmail, and a prompt asked if I needed to attach a file, which confused me because the email involved no files. It took me a while to figure out it was because I had the word "attached" in the body of the email.

What's next, chrome wipes my hard drive because I do a web search for "format"?

Re:Google is over.

[magsk]

are you kidding me, that is one of my absolute favorite things about gmail. SO many times i do want to send an attachment and in my hurry forget to actually attach the file but because of the intuitiveness of gmail i am saved from looking like a fool (for that instance) and sending a blank email .

Re:Google is over.

[Lazy Jones]

Today I was sending an email through Gmail, and a prompt asked if I needed to attach a file, which confused me because the email involved no files. It took me a while to figure out it was because I had the word "attached" in the body of the email.

The same "you are an idiot"-type message exists in recent versions of Thunderbird... Sure, some people always forget their attachments but that's probably because they are not shown inline when messages are composed and generally barely visible when present.

Re:Google is over.

[mcmonkey]

are you kidding me, that is one of my absolute favorite things about gmail. SO many times i do want to send an attachment and in my hurry forget to actually attach the file but because of the intuitiveness of gmail i am saved from looking like a fool (for that instance) and sending a blank email .

I am not kidding you. I want tools that help me do what I decide to do, not tools that decide to think for me. It's one thing to do a search and get "do you mean...," it's another thing to do a search and get, "Yeah, I know you typed in X, but I'm going to show you results for Y."

Yes, I've sent out emails and forgotten to add attachments. But I knew I forgot the attachment because I know when I intend to attach a file to an email. The folks at google do not know when I intend to attach a file to an email. People make mistakes. If that makes me look the fool, so be it.

I recently had to replace my android phone. When I downloaded my contacts to the new phone, android decided my wife Catherine and her friend Kate were the same person and combined their entries in my contact list.

How does that make sense? I created 2 entries in my contacts, but the folks at google know I meant to create only 1. And the person I know as Catherine, who sometimes goes by Cat, who happens to be my wife, who has never gone by 'Kate' the folks at google know better than I that the caller ID on my phone should display Kate when she calls.

It's one thing to have a good idea that hasn't had the perfect implementation. Turning computers from tools that help us doing anything we can think of to digital overlords that do the thinking for us is not a good idea.

The latest version of IE has progressed past "are you sure you want to run this download, it looks iffy" to "I don't like this program, I'm not running it."

Maybe you want Microsoft to decide what programs you can run and Google to decide what email you send, but I prefer to live and think and even make mistakes for myself.`

Im in SEO and this makes me happy

[magsk]

I am a partner in a small SEO company and I feel dirty for it, but of course the money is good. Whenever I meet someone from google or Microsoft search I tell them how I long for the day they make my job obsolete. The net effects of of SEO are that search results are corrupted and instead of showing the most relevant or best source of original information, they show results of companies who have bought to most links and paid for the most fake blog and forum posts. SEO is about as bad for society as CDO and CDS trading by financial companies. SEO is robbing society of good information and knowledge.

Revolving algorithms?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish google did a revolving algorithm.

It'd drive SEO experts up the wall. Imagine, each day, your page gets a different rank.

How about they just fix the damn search results?

[Anonymous Coward]

Google has gotten really bad in the last few years. Lately when I search it doesn't even return sites that matched what I typed in. Google has gone in the toilet.

So much that I'm actually considering alternate search engines.

Dislike

[Anonymous Coward]

SEO in and of itself is a scam. Its a slimy business invented by marketers. That being said, I don't like the idea that sites have to conform to Google's rules. What has happened to the free internet? I think it is about time Google get some competition.

Ad Revenue

[rbrandis]

This is not the first time Google has made such efforts. I believe in the SEO industry this is referred to as "Google Dance". I think this is an effort to protect their pay-per-click advertising revenue.

Let's hope this concerns keywords in URLs

[Lazy Jones]

Google basically ruined short URLs by paying too much attention to keyword-ridden URLs. Everyone now has stupid long URLs like http://www.site.com/article/12345-hi-google-this-is-keyword-spam.html or even totally pointless subdomains containing keywords...

Re:Let's hope this concerns keywords in URLs

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't believe you. At least, not wholly.

I like long URLs. They tell me things. If nothing else, your example tells me what the article is titled so I can have some clue of what it's about. Furthermore, I know it's an article (and not a FAQ page, or a personal profile, or a sitemap or something) because it says "article" right there in the URL. I can mouse over a link to site.com/articles/topic/some-mildy-informative-thingy and know roughly where the hell I'm going without having to give it a pageview (no adviews, I've got Adblock+ for that). Wheras if you give me a short obtuse link to something like imgur, all I know is that I'm about to see an image. Being informed about the content of a web page is freaking important.

Re:Let's hope this concerns keywords in URLs

[DamonHD]

I've been using long URLs since before Google existed, to help SEs, and to help humans looking at their address bar decide if they might be in the right territory. Indeed, I remember the as-yet-unheard-of Google flattening my leased line while spidering my site with long URLs and me having to send them a polite email asking them to tune their bot and not just open another connection when they didn't get 1Mbps throughput (over my 64kbps line).

Rgds

Damon

Re:Let's hope this concerns keywords in URLs

[Johann Lau]

Nobody said long URL's should be removed utterly. It's simply that search engines should stop caring about them: once they are useless to game search engines, they can *only* be used for the purposes you mentioned.... so without realizing it, you actually backed up what you thought you were arguing against :P

Furthermore, I know it's an article (and not a FAQ page, or a personal profile, or a sitemap or something) because it says "article" right there in the URL

The same would apply to http://www.site.com/article/12345, which is the version of that URL without the stupid bloat. You use case is for clicking random links in forums; why not interact with people who actually explain what they're linking to? It's not hard to provide decent anchor text etc, and when you searched for a phrase, it matters even less. And search is what we're talking about.

Re:Let's hope this concerns keywords in URLs

[Johann Lau]

That's great for you, but really doesn't constitute an argument why search engines should take URL text into account :P

Re:Let's hope this concerns keywords in URLs

[Lazy Jones]

your example tells me what the article is titled so I can have some clue of what it's about

The anchor text should tell you that, not the link itself, especially when the "hi-google-..." part is completely ignored by the Web server and can be changed by anyone (into something that could fool you into clicking on the link). Try this one for example.

So . . . Status Quo?

[Cyberllama]

Has there ever been a time when Google wasn't actively trying to de-emphasize the impact of SEO? They've been at war with SEO for as long as I can remember.

The source

[Anonymous Coward]

Little reason to link to CNET when you could just link CNET's source:
http://searchengineland.com/too-much-seo-google%E2%80%99s-working-on-an-%E2%80%9Cover-optimization%E2%80%9D-penalty-for-that-115627
"CNET's content" includes direct quoting from that web page.

profit

[Anonymous Coward]

If people still wants to use Google, let them use Google and expect bad search results. Profit for Google and profit for the ones who likes Google.
Profit for those who doesn't like Google.

Re:How about they just fix the damn search results

[Neil Boekend]

That is the goal of this action. Rank SEO'd sites lower so they don't muddy the search results.

Why is anyone still using google for search?

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, here goes.
With google's recent privacy policy change, why is any sane person who values their privacy even a little bit, still using them directly?
Has the world gone mad?
Try using anyone else - yahoo (bing), Bing(bing), startpage (anonymous google search), they all seem to work about the same.. I use google about 1 out every 10 searches (and even then, I don't have a google account to log in to), and that's only when I can't find something by using startpage. It works fine for me..

Of course I don't have fb, twitter, myspace, google+ and any other "social" crap sites either. I don't have the time. I am on linkedin for professional reasons, but that's about it.

Google is not as relevant as it once was.. can you say "has been"?

Re:Why is anyone still using google for search?

[neminem]

Because google gives you relevant search results, and bing doesn't. Therefore, yahoo also doesn't, nor does duckduckgo, because they use bing. I tried duckduckgo a few months back - I liked their philosophy and their UI, but their actual results were usually crap. While google -is- looking less and less not-evil over time, the fact is, there really isn't any other alternative to google searching at this time (I notice that your supposed alternative still uses google results, just through a proxy.)

To be honest, I don't even really care if google knows what I'm searching for most of the time. On the rare occasion that I do care, I just log out. And the rest of the time, I find it often actually does give me more useful results by their supposed privacy-invasion (example: prioritizing results from sites about games I play). It bothers me to no end when scuzzy sites try to obtain information about me without my consent and without giving back anything in return, but google -has- my consent, and I -do- get personal benefit from the exchange.

I do agree the whole social media push is dumb, though. But I just turned that "feature" off.

I only have two words to say

[Anonymous Coward]

FUCK GOOGLE.

Better Late Than Never

[Mana Mana]

SEO wacking are we, Google? 'Member when JC Penney was playing you a while ago, well you'd better check on the dailymail.co.uk

For the past month I have noticed that local! LOCAL! NYC crime/news stories---not that big DSK scheisse, but just the petty shiz---from dailymail.co.uk are receiving #1 placing. WTF.

SEO anyone? anyone?? anyone??? Get on it.

Re:Better Late Than Never

[Mana Mana]

Sorry to self-reply. I forgot to include example. Search for, as example, "John Laubach", recently murdered in Manhattan and the dailymail.co.uk will be #1 with a SEO bullet. Keep searching for petty crime and you'll see them rise.

I know no one in NYC who links for local NYC shiz to a British paper. Not even rarely.

Re:Good and Better

[Anonymous Coward]

Presenting search results for "male not use 20": http://overtwodozenlesbians.com/ http://only21yearoldlesbians.com/

Measure Ads

[Anonymous Coward]

Then, measure the proportion that advertising takes on the pages. Any site that uses SEO only to get hits makes money on third-party ads. A "first party" business site should be able to use SEO to mark its relevance in the marketplace.

Of course, Google can't do that without cancelling its main source of revenue. In fact, the FTC would come after them for filtering only other third-party ads. So, we won't see then filter against advertisements.

css styles for js listeners ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would like to learn how to use css styles to declare javascript event listeners, do you have any documentation on that ?

Mediocrity across the board celebrated by Google??

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a sad day for intelligence & trying to better than your competition...

Re: Evil SEO vs. Allegedly Good SEO

[billstewart]

People use search engines to find interesting sites. Search engines use robots to model what's interesting, because it's not possible to scale using actual humans. "Search Engine Optimization" is telling the humans that your site is more interesting by adapting your site to a model of what the robots are doing, so they'll read your website instead of the one they would have read.

• Some people do this by fixing your website so that the robots can easily find it. You can describe how to do it in one or two screens of instructions, but some businesses find it more effective to hire consultants to do it instead of doing it themselves. The consultants who do this don't usually call themselves "SEOs", they call themselves "web designers" or "software testers", or occasionally "software engineers who tell your people to stop writing everything in Flash".
• Some people do this by making their websites actually more interesting to humans. Consultants who do this don't call themselves "SEOs", they call themselves "editors" or sometimes "web designers" or "Web 2.0 buzzword buzzword buzzword consultants".
• Some people do this by adding features to their websites that actually interesting websites use, as opposed to really developing better content. Hey, some people don't have much to say, but sometimes they'll get lucky and a user comment section will be popular.
• Some people do this by lying to the robots so they'll lie to the humans. Consultants who do this call themselves SEOs. We call them "scum" or "spammers".

Mod Parent Up, Please

[billstewart]

That's the point of SEO. They want you to look at their web page instead of a more interesting web page, and they don't care if that wastes your time.

SEO is a dishonest substitute for content

[billstewart]

Google uses robots to model what websites humans find interesting, so they can deploy the interesting links first. SEOs model what Google's robots are doing so they can lie to the robots and promote their uninteresting site, and have you waste your time reading it instead of some site that would have what you want.

Google's in a constant arms race to figure out how the SEOs are lying to the robots, so they can get the robots to ignore or downrate sites that do that. They've already done a lot to fight link farms, which exploited Google's original key insight (which was that people link to websites they're interested in, so websites that lots of people are interested in will have lots of links to them.)

Re: Adding Content to Boost Ratings

[billstewart]

There are two reasons to add content like this - because it's actually interesting content, or because it's statistically similar to interesting content. Getting people all over your company to write content is going to get a lot more variety and currency than having the marketing department (or whoever) write it, but it'll be a lot less focused, and may not be as well written, and it's likely that a year or two from now many of those pages will be out of date with no plan for updating them. If you're doing it to make the site more useful, fine; if you're doing it because Google tends to rate sites highly if they're always adding new content, that's sort of spammy. I certainly run into enough corporate websites that provide lots of content on the current product, but don't keep up the pages on their older hardware, so it's really hard to find good information on the old stuff (which is what's out there in the field.) Random-employee content doesn't always help that, but it's sometimes the best you can get.

Penalizing Search Spammers is Fine Too

[billstewart]

SEOs lie to search engine robots so the robots will lie to humans about how interesting a website is. If Google finds a new way to detect SEO cheating, that means that there are websites which have been getting ranked as more interesting than they really are, so it's perfectly fair to give them lower-ranked results for a while to balance that out, and the fact that they were hiring an SEO to boost their results is good evidence that either they were a pretty uninteresting site to begin with, or that they were dumb enough to hire a liar, and therefore also probably weren't very interesting.

Beyond that, though, it's worth it to everybody if anybody who tried cheating search results gets spanked hard enough not to do it again. Spank the websites so they'll stop hiring SEOs, and spank the SEOs so they'll stop using that method of cheating, and maybe go out of business.

Re:SEO is bullshit on purpose

[billstewart]

The purpose of SEO is to make Google's robots think your website is more interesting than it actually is, so humans who use Google will waste their time reading it instead of some site that would have been more interesting to them. Frankly, I don't care if following their advice costs you a lot of money to implement - if you're hiring them, it's because your site isn't interesting enough to humans to get you the advertising revenue you hoped it would, and if what you're doing is changing the structure rather than improving the content, you're still wasting the time of anybody who reads it, because what you care about is your revenue, not the value you're providing to the readers. Even if they can boost your rankings temporarily, don't be that guy who hires them.

Why no more tomhudson, barbara?

[Anonymous Coward]

"tomhudson's ethics" (GOOGLE), which is u, had u change ur name here I see http://www.google.com/search?sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&site=&source=hp&q=tomhudson+site:slashdot.org&btnG=Search&gbv=1&sei=Hd9oT83vGojbsgLxyLGtDQ to Barbara not Barbie. 3rd result shows why you did it too. Seems your stalking others by anonymous posts and telling others to join you in it, which is a violation of this site's policies and the law itself mind you, did you in. Think twice about taking on your betters by less than honorable means scumbag next time. You won't have to hide yourself like you do now obviously.

Re:Why no more tomhudson, barbara?

[Barbara, not Barbie]

Well, well, well - looks like one of my 3 cyber-stalkers is getting lonely and wants me to give them another kick in the head. Sorry, fatso, you'll just have to go back on your meds.

I am really confused what is over optimization?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am really confused what is over optimization?

I dont think that google can adopt this kind of update.

Last time when google introduced with panda 1 update whats happen every one knew it well.

If google comes with this kind of update then its spam in its self. If over optimization refers to target more then one link on any page then its spam of keywords we all already know that. and if this update comes with exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect then its very easy to penalize our comparators which comes with cider crime. So i dont think google can come with any such update.