Google search and search engine spam • Hacker News Board

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#171

Post by Sephr » Sat, Jan 22, 2011, 1:59 AM UTC

lincolnq wrote: post #115

yellowbkpk wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience is the exact opposite: I am seeing many, many more clone sites in my search results in the last few months. It feels like it increases when I accidentally click a clone site. 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 compute…

Try DuckDuckGo. Gabriel has been doing an aggressive job about removing unsavory domains and I've been fairly impressed. I think that Google probably can't be nearly as aggressive for political reasons.

The reason Google isn't doing the same thing as DuckDuckGo is most likely because manually banning a domain instead of improving their algorithms to avoid unwanted behaviors will only temporarily work, and only in select cases. There will always be new spam and content farm sites.

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#172

Post by Matt_Cutts » Sat, Jan 22, 2011, 2:01 AM UTC

paul9290 wrote: post #156

A recent Google search for the Walmart being built 2 miles away from me led me nowhere. Google listed 2 pages of job sites listing open positions at this wal-mart. I almost gave up my search, but decided to search twitter and in doing so I found what I was looking for!

I'd be curious to know where the Walmart is and what searches you tried.

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#173

Post by Matt_Cutts » Sat, Jan 22, 2011, 2:03 AM UTC

rhwd2003 wrote: post #153

@Matt_Cutts starting around page 4 results for the term [loans] what is with all the .edu sites? This seems to be an error on the ranking side of things for all these .edu sites for a financial related term such as [loans]? All the results are .edu after page 4?

Typically those .edu sites have been hacked at some point.

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#174

Post by zone411 » Sat, Jan 22, 2011, 2:04 AM UTC

ericb wrote: post #98

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…

Wrong. I mentioned this before. Check out AdSense on the NY Times homepage. If you punish AdSense sites, you'll mostly punish smaller business or one-person sites that are not big enough to have in-house ad sales.

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#175

Post by bmastenbrook » Sat, Jan 22, 2011, 2:08 AM UTC

klbarry wrote: post #163

bmastenbrook wrote: post #161

Beyond the flood of SEO spam and Demand Media-style content mills, there's another search quality problem I have with Google: torrent sites. I will frequently search on the exact name of a song or album on Google in order to find out more information about that song or album, but lately most of the results have been links to torrents, including results on the first page. This applies even if I add "review" to the sea…

Google tries to make no judgments about the sites that go the top of their algorithms.

Isn't this the whole problem? 90% of the web is crap. If Google can't deliver the non-crap, I'll be looking elsewhere.

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#176

Post by Matt_Cutts » Sat, Jan 22, 2011, 2:09 AM UTC

mwilton13 wrote: post #155

@Matt I like that you pinpointed some specific here, but is the algorithm going to be strong enough to easily pick up things like this: http://posterous.com/people/YrCushFlSet This single account is feeding 100 different websites alone that all feed hundreds of others. This is helping fuel numerous sites in the plastic surgery niche and it's quite disturbing.

mwilton13, I passed this on to my team when you mentioned it to me on Twitter recently. Have you mentioned the site to Posterous too?

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#177

Post by TillE » Sat, Jan 22, 2011, 2:10 AM UTC

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #140

dpifke wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a similar note, how is the expert sex change site still in your index? They very clearly are serving different content to the crawler (as evidenced by the "cached" link) than they are to people who click through on the SERPs. I though this was a big no-no? For an example (which was submitted as search feedback a month ago), try searching for "XMPP load balancing" and look at the third organic link. (Edit: actually…

As your edit indicates, when we've looking into Experts Exchange, they weren't cloaking--they were showing the same content to users that they show to Googlebot. If they were cloaking, that would be a violation of our guidelines and thus grounds for removal from our search results.

Violation of the spirit rather than the letter of the law, surely. Which would indicate that the guidelines probably need to be tweaked to close such loopholes.

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#178

Post by cosgroveb » Sat, Jan 22, 2011, 2:16 AM UTC

bmastenbrook wrote: post #131

seunpy wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with eHow?

This is HN, so I'll give an example related to my startup. We make a wireless (802.11g) flash drive called the AirStash, which works like an ordinary USB SD card reader on a PC and uses HTML5 for the interface on wireless devices. Here's an example of spam content from eHow that talks about our product: http://www.ehow.com/how_6861903_install-wireless-flash-drive... "Wireless flash drives communicate with wireless de…

I just googled the AirStash and it looks awesome!

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#179

Post by MichaelGG » Sat, Jan 22, 2011, 2:18 AM UTC

pixelbath wrote: post #66

MichaelGG wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure drugstore.com is legit: http://www.drugstore.com/pharmacy/drugindex/rxsearch.asp?sea...

So should we use the "pretty sure" metric of the domain name matching the product we are searching for? What makes this site more "legit" than others?

Nasdaq:DSCM

It seems to me a $200M company offering to sell a product to you via their website would seem more legit than, say, a site you're redirected to after someone hacked some .edu account. (At this moment, the second result on Google for buy viagra appears is a link to www.engineering.uga.edu, but that redirects to some pharmacy site if you click through from Google (but not if you load directly).)

So yes, I'd say there's at least some way to compare the legitimacy here.

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#180

Post by answerly » Sat, Jan 22, 2011, 2:19 AM UTC

kmfrk wrote: post #146

ghaff wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

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

About.com is owned by the New York Times Company, not Yahoo.