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Google search and search engine spam

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Re: Google search and search engine spam

#141

Post by Matt_Cutts »

jsherry wrote: post #70
jonpaul wrote: post #20

You know, sometimes it really makes me mad that it's difficult to get into contact with a person at Google for support of their products. But, I've got to hand it to them. They could have issued a non-personal public statement like most companies and signed it with "Google Search Team" But instead there is a personal touch. It's public statements like these that add just a bit of personal touch that makes people love…

The reason you can't in contact with people at Google is because you're not the customer. Paying businesses are the customers. Not just trying to sound snarky - it's true.

No, the reason why it's difficult to contact people at Google is that 1 billion+ users visit us each week, and we only have ~20,000 Google employees. Even if every single employee did nothing but user support 24/7, each Google employee would need to do tech support for 50,000 users apiece.

Likewise, there are 200,000,000+ domain names. Even if every single employee did nothing but webmaster support 24/7, each Google employee would need to do tech support for 10,000 domains apiece. The same argument goes for supporting hundreds of thousands of advertisers.

The problem of user, customer, and advertiser support at web-wide levels is very hard. That's why we've looked for scalable solutions like blogging and videos. I've made 300+ videos that have gotten 3.5M views: http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleWebmasterHelp for example. There's no way I could talk to that many webmasters personally.

So we haven't found a way to do 1:1 conversation for everyone that has a question about Google. That's not even raising the back-and-forth that some people want to have with Google. See http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=... and http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?fid=... to get a glimpse at the sort of prolonged conversations that people want to have with Google. In short: it's a hard problem.

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#142

Post by Matt_Cutts »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #39
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google also has a decade+ of track record of choosing the right long-term thing for users instead of short-term revenue: 1) not running annoying punch-the-monkey banner ads in the early days when everyone else was doing it. 2) not running pop-up ads when everyone else was doing it. 3) little-known fact: if the Google ads aren't ready by the time your search results are ready, you just don't see ads for that query. We…

Regarding #3, why are these two things coupled in terms of page load? With all the js stuff you guys are doing now with instant, it seems like you could load up the ads on the right a split second after the search results and no one would notice or care...but I'm guessing you've tried this and it didn't test as well :)

Great question. The "don't wait for ads" policy has been around since ~2001, way before AJAX became common. In theory you could make it so that the ads loaded when they were ready, but that could also generate a visual "pop" that I imagine would annoy many users.

My preference is just to enforce a hard time deadline. If the ads team starts to miss that deadline and revenue decreases, then they're highly motivated to speed their system up. :)

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#143

Post by andrewljohnson »

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."

I'm a programmer, and I'm as annoyed as you about the SO clones. But keep in mind the vast, vast majority of Google users couldn't care less about StackOverflow.

Moreover, the unique licensing around SO content, along with its mass, presents an interesting edge case for Google. They should of course fix it, but it's not indicative of the average or mode experience.

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#144

Post by antirez »

What sounds odd of all this is that I think the spam sites and "content farms" are generating a lot of ad clicks for Google. Will they really take appropriate actions against this sites if this will mean a significant cut on the earnings?

I played with adsense a lot in the past, and if you did too you should now how spam sites generate a lot more clicks than sites where the user is actually focused on reading content...

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#145

Post by Matt_Cutts »

snewman wrote: post #43

To me, the most interesting aspect of this situation is the conflict between Google's view and the blogosphere's view. On the one hand, "...according to the evaluation metrics that we’ve refined over more than a decade, Google’s search quality is better than it has ever been...". On the other hand, you can't open an RSS reader today without tripping over someone griping about content farms polluting the search result…

We do have some data on this. I'll ask about whether do some comparisons of "Google today" vs. "Google three years ago."

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#146

Post by kmfrk »

ghaff wrote: post #135
kmfrk wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are content farms - plain and simple. You might consider throwing about.com in there, too. They're made to earn the employers revenue, not help out people with the particular queries.

The about.com example shows how hard distinguishing quality algorithmically gets at the margins. You do actually find stuff on about.com now and then which is pretty decent--not great but decent. You might even say the same of ehow, albeit at a much lower rate. So you don't want to just say "these are spam."

On Quora, the former owner of eHow recently wrote[1] that when he handed over the keys to the people who bought the site, it had an excellent quality of content. This gave it a good 'credibility' on Google. When it was taken over, it was turned into a content farm, but the atrophy of credibility is possibly to disproportional to the spam parameter variable, which leaves it in Google's results. At least according to one of his listed explanations.

I recall about.com as a decent site a while ago, but I believe it was acquired a while ago by ... Yahoo!? Go figure.

I think that might be what makes it so complicated. [1]: http://www.quora.com/Why-doesnt-Google-push-down-low-quality...

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#147

Post by Matt_Cutts »

theoretical wrote: post #8

I'd be interested in a further explanation of "Google absolutely takes action on sites that violate our quality guidelines [...]". Does that mean that Google manually decrease rankings of spammy sites that their algorithms haven't caught? Does this entail decreasing the rank of the entire domain, the IP? Does blacklisting ever happen? I ask since Google have previously[1] said they don't wish to manually interfere wi…

"Does that mean that Google manually decrease rankings of spammy sites that their algorithms haven't caught?"

Although our first instinct is to look for an algorithmic solution, yes, we can. In the blog post you mentioned, it says

"I should add, however, that there are clear written policies for websites recommended by Google, and we do take action on sites that are in violation of our policies or for a small number of other reasons (e.g. legal requirements, child porn, viruses/malware, etc)."

As the quote mentions, we do reserve the right to take action on sites that violate our quality guidelines. The guidelines are here, by the way: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#148

Post by antirez »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #141
jsherry wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason you can't in contact with people at Google is because you're not the customer. Paying businesses are the customers. Not just trying to sound snarky - it's true.

No, the reason why it's difficult to contact people at Google is that 1 billion+ users visit us each week, and we only have ~20,000 Google employees. Even if every single employee did nothing but user support 24/7, each Google employee would need to do tech support for 50,000 users apiece. Likewise, there are 200,000,000+ domain names. Even if every single employee did nothing but webmaster support 24/7, each Google…

Of course not everybody should be able to contact Google 1:1, but at least all the people that were subject to an action that required human intervention from Google.

Example: I get my adsense account or site banner in a non automatic way since there is some problem with the content: so not into an automated way, but because somebody looked at my site.

I should, in that case, have a chance to communicate with Google. This is inherently scalable as everything started with a 1:1 action.

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#149

Post by Matt_Cutts »

bambax wrote: post #112
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do you measure your own performance regarding spam? If the measurement system is able to detect spam, why is spam not removed in the first place, before it has a chance to show up in the metrics...?

I don't want to leak our eval methodology to competitors, but you can take subsamples and get those samples hand-rated by experts.

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#150

Post by drm237 »

jmount wrote: post #69

Google AdSense for Domains ( http://www.google.com/domainpark/ ) really makes a lie of not wanting useless content. The designed a revenue source for parkers/squatters.

How often have you searched Google and been sent to one of those pages?

They don't want useless content in their serps. If someone goes directly to the domain, that's in no way related to search quality.

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