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Google search and search engine spam

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Re: Google search and search engine spam

#91

Post by jacquesm »

space-monkey wrote: post #51
bkaid wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed. My ideal search engine wouldn't require real websites to play in the SEO arms-race to beat out the junk sites.

That ideal search engine would find itself quickly the target of people that would try to gain an advantage by figuring out how it works.

And then another SEO cycle would start. Don't forget that before google came along nobody was trying to 'game the system' with backlinks and other trickery, the fact that that google is successful is what caused people to start gaming google.

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#92

Post by dpifke »

fname wrote: post #80
dpifke wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That used to be the case, but the complete page as it appears in Firefox to me now: http://i.imgur.com/Lw0Mh.png . The indexed content is blurred out and there's a big ad overlaying it, with no close button or other method to display the content, other than the Google cache link.

So, here's the difference that I found. If you're coming from Google SERPs (the referrer is Google) the answer is shown near the bottom. If you copy and paste the link into a browser (empty referrer) I get the results you show in your screenshot.

That screenshot was most definitely taken with Google as the HTTP referer. (I'm too lazy to cut-and-paste the URL from the search page into the browser, I just clicked the link.)

Clicking the link again shows the additional content at the bottom of the page as you described. So there's some other algorithm at play.

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#93

Post by galactus »

nolok wrote: post #5
eps wrote: post #3

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.

What I find seriously bad is that even a huge site like stackoverflow has to optimize its search engine strategy to fight the problem. Little web sites are doomed.

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#94

Post by aristus »

mmaunder wrote: post #11

"we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content." "As “pure webspam” has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to “content farms,” which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. In 2010, we launched two major algorithmic changes focused on low-q…

This will be interesting. Most of the stuff on my site are replays of articles I write for other venues. I wonder how the rankings will shift.

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#95

Post by [deleted] »

dpapathanasiou wrote: post #9

And yet Mahalo is still tolerated, somehow. E.g., this query -- "travel agent vermont" (which I got from this post complaining about Mahalo spamming the web and Google not enforcing its own qc standards http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com/2010/03/08/mahalo-com-m... ) still returns a Mahalo result in the top 10.

[deleted]

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#96

Post by noibl »

abrahamsen wrote: post #61

Google have two strong incentives to weed out AdSense drivel sites in the search results. 1. They diminish the value of Google Search as an advertising platform. And Google Search is likely the most valuable virtual estate on the net. I more often click on ads in Google Search than I click on ads on all other sites combined. This is because when I'm on Google Search I'm actually searching for something, so I might cl…

I'm guessing this is in response to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2128263

1: One of Google's major weaknesses is the concentration of its revenue around a few large websites. Having the most popular advertising network on the web (AdSense) is an important asset for pretty much anything else Google wants to do.

If what you said were true, the greatest threat to the Google Search page would be a strong AdSense market with high quality content which everybody finds using organic search.

2: AdSense does not compete with Content Network because it is long tail. The value for advertisers is in reach and diversity.

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#97

Post by trevelyan »

noibl wrote: post #47

One misconception that we’ve seen in the last few weeks is the idea that Google doesn’t take as strong action on spammy content in our index if those sites are serving Google ads. That's not quite what I've been reading. I believe the more common claim is that Google has a disincentive to algorithmically weed out the kind of drivel that exists for no other reason than to make its publisher money via AdSense. It's abo…

I agree. Also interesting to see that Google defines webspam as "pages that cheat" or "violate search engine quality guidelines." By this definition, scraper sites are not spam at all. Nor are the spammy sites in my field which super-optimize for keywords in ways that make it difficult for legitimate content to rise to visibility.

If Google did not operate AdSense, it seems hard to believe the company would not have penalized this sort of behavior ages ago. A love for AdSense is probably the single largest thing spam sites have in common worldwide.

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#98

Post by ericb »

While I applaud the direct personal response, I feel like the content says "we don't see a problem." If users see a problem and you don't, smaller competitors can eat your lunch. I'm kind of hoping for some competition in the field.

In terms of adsense, if you really think about it, adsense content on a page should probably be a slightly negative ranking signal (not just not a positive signal). The very best quality pages have no ads. Think of government pages, nonprofits, .edu, quality personal blogs, etc. If no one is making money off a page (no ads) then whatever purpose it has, it is likely to be non-spammy.

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#99

Post by mssfldt »

Spam is not only in the organic search but also in the image-search. I observed a site that steals 140.000 (!) images by hotlinking (also some of my pictures). First the pages itself seems to be "clean". They only set hotlinks to blended search images, and they got a lot of traffic, that sure. Then they switched the site: on the top there are two porn-ads (it was xslt*us) I wrote a spam report and posted it an webmasterforum. But it took about 10 days until the site was removed. Hope this gets better... And: hotlinking is a great problem.

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#100

Post by PaulHoule »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #40
PaulHoule wrote: post #33

This reads just like the nutrition label on Nestle products: the ones that boast that the product has "3 vitamins AND minerals", and, on a distant part of the package, lists two minerals and one vitamin and what the health benefits of them are. They'd be a lot more credible without the corpo-speak junk in the first paragraph.

I've got the results of a test run of search results I did in October 2000 sitting on my computer. The Google search results from today are much better than from October 2000. I do think it's fair to make the point that overall Google is much better--and overall spam is much lower than 5 or 10 years ago--before we drilled down into responding to the blog posts from the last couple months.

Matt,

     I'm sure that Google does better than it did in October 2000.  They'd be something horribly wrong if that wasn't the case.  That's not relevant to the specific concerns people have about what's happening here and now.
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