51–60 of 223 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you provide a query where that is still the case ? It hasn't happened for a few weeks for me, since stack overflow changed their title seo.
Yes but it sucks Stack Overflow had to add that to the title to fight the spammers because it is often distracting to see it the search results.
Metrics-shmetrics. Once I stop seeing StackOverflow clones listed above StackOverflow's original pages I will gladly believe that Google's search quality is "better than ever before."
I've been tracking how often this happens over the last month. It's gotten much, much better, and one additional algorithmic change coming soon should help even more. I'm not saying that a clone will never be listed above SO, but it definitely happens less often compared to a several weeks ago.
Metrics-shmetrics. Once I stop seeing StackOverflow clones listed above StackOverflow's original pages I will gladly believe that Google's search quality is "better than ever before."
I've been tracking how often this happens over the last month. It's gotten much, much better, and one additional algorithmic change coming soon should help even more. I'm not saying that a clone will never be listed above SO, but it definitely happens less often compared to a several weeks ago.
This happens for more than StackOverflow clones. Mailing lists, Linux man-pages, FAQs, published Linux articles, etc. all have clone pages that are obvious link farms (sometimes they even include ads that attempt to harm my computer) that rank higher than the "official" (or at least less-noisey) pages.
Ideally, I'd like to completely remove domains from result as has been discussed elsewhere on HN. Hopefully this upcoming push for social networking that Google has will reintroduce a better-implemented "SearchWiki" feature...
Curious though what the metrics they use to evaluate effectiveness against spam are. It could have just as much (or as little) spam indexed as it had 5 years ago, and in some comparisons that would be valid, but what if much of the spam had moved from being evenly distributed throughout results to being distributed in the top positions? Then, one could say spam was even lower than ever in total quantity, but it would…
I actually feel quite comfortable with our metrics. Back in 2003 or so, we had pretty primitive measures of webspam levels. But the case that you're wondering about (more spam, but in different positions) wouldn't slip past the current metrics.
Personally I tend to find what I'm looking for by adding a few more words, but in the case of reviews and tech stuff it doesn't always work and I often have to rewrite my query one or more times to get something valuable.
Metrics-shmetrics. Once I stop seeing StackOverflow clones listed above StackOverflow's original pages I will gladly believe that Google's search quality is "better than ever before."
Can you provide a query where that is still the case ? It hasn't happened for a few weeks for me, since stack overflow changed their title seo.
Stackoverflow comes in at number 8 while clones are 6 and 10
Am I the only one who was really hoping for some specifics about what they're doing and plan to do about content farm rankings? Without that, the article is virtually devoid of content other than "we're really not so bad!" Edit: By specifics, I don't necessarily mean implementation details, just anything more informative and plan-of-action than acknowledging the problem.
Since google wants to do everything with algorithms rather than hard coding (some of) the offenders, the minute they give you specifics the "fix" will be circumvented in some way.
It doesn't appear that Cutts & Co. are looking to address any of the more popular blackhat link building methods that all popular SEO bloggers continually say "work but you shouldn't use them yourself because they're bad". Until the keyword "buy viagra" isn't littered with forum link and comment spam and parasite pages, Google's algo is still not "fixed"
I think that's a bad example. AFAIK you can't legitimately buy Viagra online, so what results should Google be returning? Where are the awesome web pages about Viagra that you want to see? They don't exist, so the query comes back with spam.
http://www.drugstore.com/pharmacy/drugindex/rxsearch.asp?sea...
Am I the only one who was really hoping for some specifics about what they're doing and plan to do about content farm rankings? Without that, the article is virtually devoid of content other than "we're really not so bad!" Edit: By specifics, I don't necessarily mean implementation details, just anything more informative and plan-of-action than acknowledging the problem.
Our policy in search-quality is not to pre-announce things, but we did give some pretty strong hints about planned improvements to search quality in that post (e.g. talking about scraper sites). I'll be happy to talk more about them soon when they launch.