Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A guide to the latest Mahalo spam techniques

smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 47 posts

Re: A guide to the latest Mahalo spam techniques

#31

Post by Isofarro »

mvandemar wrote: post #26
tzs wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Hey Bob! I found the answer to that Star Wars question we were discussing at lunch yesterday on this great site, generalsite.com/topics/starwars". A couple days later, Bob wants to go there to check out another Star Wars question. All Bob remembers is "starwars", and fails to find the site. Compare to "Hey Bob! I found the answer to that Star Wars question we were discussing at lunch yesterday on this great site, st…

There are 14 questions on a site with 308 indexed pages, such as: http://www.starwarsanswers.com/travel-how-tos http://www.starwarsanswers.com/language-how-tos http://www.starwarsanswers.com/health-how-tos http://www.starwarsanswers.com/home-garden-how-tos http://www.starwarsanswers.com/wedding-how-tos http://www.starwarsanswers.com/dance-how-tos http://www.starwarsanswers.com/black-belt-test http://www.starwarsanswe…

These are all empty pages. They look characteristic to pages that were not designed to be there or linked to. A bug rather than a feature.

How do you navigate to these pages from the starwarsanswers.com homepage? I don't see any of those listed on the right hand margin. Sure, they may have been exposed because of a deployment error early on that has now been fixed.

Looks to be a basic website error than something attributable to malice.

Re: A guide to the latest Mahalo spam techniques

#32

Post by ddemchuk »

frossie wrote: post #30
shadowsun7 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with ryanhuff. Recently I spent time searching for camera reviews - smaller, entry-level ones where there's less press. About 70% of the sites I got were these dumb contentless websites plastered with camera ads and affliate links (to stores like Amazon and Adorama). That's well and good, but after a couple of tries I began to be really pissed off at the lack of useful information. I see the same issues while…

I wish Google will address this, and soon. I wish anybody would address it, and if they did, I would switch all my searching to them in a heartbeat. There is no doubt in my mind that search quality has gone downhill in the years since Google first came on air, and these pseudo-sites have a lot to do with it. A lot of people switched from Altavista (remember them?) to Google overnight - because of better search result…

"There is no doubt in my mind that search quality has gone downhill in the years since Google first came on air, and these pseudo-sites have a lot to do with it."

Wait...what? Come on, you don't honestly believe that, do you? Google's algo is a huge step up from the days when you can stuff your meta keywords to get up to the top of the previous SE's.

It's in Google's best interest to find the best content to return for given keywords. Now best to techies implies high quality, unbiased, trusted content. Good to an SEO implies highly optimized, well targeted content. Good to Google is high converting, ad-serving and user-clicking worthy content.

It's not as simple as serving perfect, good quality content for Google. They have an ad network to cater to first, searchers come second.

Re: A guide to the latest Mahalo spam techniques

#34

Post by jpenney »

ryanhuff wrote: post #22
jellicle wrote: post #12

Google, for whatever reason, thinks that a very light touch with regard to spam sites is appropriate. (Although Cutts is right that an inurl: or site: query doesn't show anything - he's saying, "Show me a real-world query that has nothing but spammy results and then I'll do something"). I think and have thought that a Google competitor could come along and beat them by having a heavy hand against spam sites. If it's…

What's the best way to pass a site over to Matt Cutts? This site has GOT TO GO! http://www.codeweblog.com/ It is polluting my Google search results. As an example, search for "android intent activity pass". The search result titled "android intent pass variable activity" looks promising, but clicking on it brings you to this site, which contains machine generated nonsense content!

I submitted a spam report about that site the other day. I've been getting up to scratch on ruby and a lot of searches for gem names return that site. I have gotten so used to trusting the top results in Google that I never think to check the domain - I need to stop that.

Re: A guide to the latest Mahalo spam techniques

#35

Post by thaumaturgy »

epi0Bauqu wrote: post #29
jellicle wrote: post #12

Google, for whatever reason, thinks that a very light touch with regard to spam sites is appropriate. (Although Cutts is right that an inurl: or site: query doesn't show anything - he's saying, "Show me a real-world query that has nothing but spammy results and then I'll do something"). I think and have thought that a Google competitor could come along and beat them by having a heavy hand against spam sites. If it's…

I do this at DuckDuckGo, that is crawl, identify and delist over 60M domains. I think it works pretty well and is certainly a value add, but it is not immediately obvious to new or even many old users.

Just a heads-up for you, and I'm sure you get this all the time, but I'm a new DDG fan.

The first time I tried it some months back, it was eh-OK, but not compelling enough to pull me away from Google. In the meantime though, I've gotten more and more frustrated with Google's results -- due in part to link-spamming sites -- that DDG has become a lot more compelling. It's my default search provider now.

One question though: I commented to a good old friend of mine that search was starting to feel like the old AltaVista days again. I spent a lot of time trying to find a site that I had seen just a couple of weeks previously, and no amount of Google-fu (or Duck-fu) could locate it. I kept getting completely generic results that weren't helpful at all. I finally found it by remembering where I had seen the link, and using a custom search feature on that site in particular.

So ... is there a way for a search engine to rank pages by "freshness"? i.e., some combination of recently-updated and recently-mentioned?

Anyway, thanks for DDG.

Re: A guide to the latest Mahalo spam techniques

#36

Post by thaumaturgy »

frossie wrote: post #30
shadowsun7 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with ryanhuff. Recently I spent time searching for camera reviews - smaller, entry-level ones where there's less press. About 70% of the sites I got were these dumb contentless websites plastered with camera ads and affliate links (to stores like Amazon and Adorama). That's well and good, but after a couple of tries I began to be really pissed off at the lack of useful information. I see the same issues while…

I wish Google will address this, and soon. I wish anybody would address it, and if they did, I would switch all my searching to them in a heartbeat. There is no doubt in my mind that search quality has gone downhill in the years since Google first came on air, and these pseudo-sites have a lot to do with it. A lot of people switched from Altavista (remember them?) to Google overnight - because of better search result…

> I wish anybody would address it, and if they did, I would switch all my searching to them in a heartbeat.

Honest question, because I'm a recent DDG convert (and I'm not exactly an "early adopter" of anything) ... what do you think of its search results for this?

A DDG search of "camera reviews" gave http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/ for its top hit, and the site actually seems pretty useful to me.

Re: A guide to the latest Mahalo spam techniques

#37

Post by jraines »

ryanhuff wrote: post #22
jellicle wrote: post #12

Google, for whatever reason, thinks that a very light touch with regard to spam sites is appropriate. (Although Cutts is right that an inurl: or site: query doesn't show anything - he's saying, "Show me a real-world query that has nothing but spammy results and then I'll do something"). I think and have thought that a Google competitor could come along and beat them by having a heavy hand against spam sites. If it's…

What's the best way to pass a site over to Matt Cutts? This site has GOT TO GO! http://www.codeweblog.com/ It is polluting my Google search results. As an example, search for "android intent activity pass". The search result titled "android intent pass variable activity" looks promising, but clicking on it brings you to this site, which contains machine generated nonsense content!

This site was killing me just last night! (I was looking for info on CKEditor plugins)

Re: A guide to the latest Mahalo spam techniques

#38

Post by prawn »

ddemchuk wrote: post #32
frossie wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish Google will address this, and soon. I wish anybody would address it, and if they did, I would switch all my searching to them in a heartbeat. There is no doubt in my mind that search quality has gone downhill in the years since Google first came on air, and these pseudo-sites have a lot to do with it. A lot of people switched from Altavista (remember them?) to Google overnight - because of better search result…

"There is no doubt in my mind that search quality has gone downhill in the years since Google first came on air, and these pseudo-sites have a lot to do with it." Wait...what? Come on, you don't honestly believe that, do you? Google's algo is a huge step up from the days when you can stuff your meta keywords to get up to the top of the previous SE's. It's in Google's best interest to find the best content to return f…

What point are you actually arguing?

That MFA sites are wrecking Google's search quality or that they're not? You seem to push both points in the one post which is even more confusing given "Wait...what? Come on, you don't honestly believe that, do you?"

Re: A guide to the latest Mahalo spam techniques

#39

Post by derefr »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #35
epi0Bauqu wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do this at DuckDuckGo, that is crawl, identify and delist over 60M domains. I think it works pretty well and is certainly a value add, but it is not immediately obvious to new or even many old users.

Just a heads-up for you, and I'm sure you get this all the time, but I'm a new DDG fan. The first time I tried it some months back, it was eh-OK, but not compelling enough to pull me away from Google. In the meantime though, I've gotten more and more frustrated with Google's results -- due in part to link-spamming sites -- that DDG has become a lot more compelling. It's my default search provider now. One question th…

Google exposed some sort of recency-based filtering UI with their latest update, although I'm not sure how it gets its results.

Re: A guide to the latest Mahalo spam techniques

#40

Post by benologist »

ryanhuff wrote: post #22
jellicle wrote: post #12

Google, for whatever reason, thinks that a very light touch with regard to spam sites is appropriate. (Although Cutts is right that an inurl: or site: query doesn't show anything - he's saying, "Show me a real-world query that has nothing but spammy results and then I'll do something"). I think and have thought that a Google competitor could come along and beat them by having a heavy hand against spam sites. If it's…

What's the best way to pass a site over to Matt Cutts? This site has GOT TO GO! http://www.codeweblog.com/ It is polluting my Google search results. As an example, search for "android intent activity pass". The search result titled "android intent pass variable activity" looks promising, but clicking on it brings you to this site, which contains machine generated nonsense content!

My favorite is bigresource.com and others that are scraping forums ... fucking hate those sites so much, reported them but of course those emails go nowhere.
Post reply on HN