Google search and search engine spam • Hacker News Board

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#181

Post by lamnk » Sat, Jan 22, 2011, 3:29 AM UTC

galactus wrote: post #93

nolok wrote: post #5

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.

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.

Not really, a big website can not cover all keywords in its niche, no matter how big it is. The strategy for small sites is to focus on long tail keywords (3-4 terms) and outrank the big guys.

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#182

Post by lamnk » Sat, Jan 22, 2011, 3:37 AM UTC

dhruvbird wrote: post #124

roc wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's no longer true. Short version is: they used to, and got busted for, serving answers to the spiders and ads and pitches to the surfers. So now they show the answer at the bottom of a pile of ads and pitches. But they still suck. Horribly. And are the number one example I hear when people say "I wish Google would let me blacklist domains".

I don't believe no one has created a FF plugin for expert sex change (yet)!! Edit: Even a GM script to remove all the leading spammy divs would do...

FYI:

On Chrome you have Search Engine Blacklist https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/jiicbcimbjppjbck...

On Firefox you can use the filter option of Optimize Google https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/optimizegoogl...

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#183

Post by omaranto » Sat, Jan 22, 2011, 4:06 AM UTC

richcollins wrote: post #154

dustingetz wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

disagree. counter-example: if I google "philly events" and google sends me right to philly2night.com, I certainly want to see ads selling me event tickets.

A perfect search would show the pages that the ad points to as the first organic results if they were, in fact, the most relevant.

Are you seriously claiming that the ideal search engine when given "Philly events" should guess which event in Philly you actually want tickets for and send you to that event's webpage?

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#184

Post by mwilton13 » Sat, Jan 22, 2011, 4:38 AM UTC

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #176

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?

Thank you Matt. I am following up with Posterous and the other sites involved on Monday. We reported one of the content farms on blogger last year too.

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#185

Post by eapen » Sat, Jan 22, 2011, 4:39 AM UTC

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #116

jeremycolins wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey Matt, is there anything y'all can do about the content farm sites where someone buys an old high pr domain and sells 100's of links on it and drops them in between tons of content? Here's a prefect example of that: http://www.dcphpconference.com/ .

That is clearly webspam. We only indexed five pages from that site, but there's no reason for that site to show up at all. Thanks for mentioning it. It won't be in our index for much longer.

Matt - I have a posterous site (which uses a subdomain of my main site) that I mostly use to index some of my favorite articles - same purpose as delicious but I can rest assured that the content will always be there. Since most of the site has dupe content, it may lose the PR (which I dont care for) but will that affect my primary site ranking.

I am not sure if Posterous offers the ability to add a robots.txt file with which I can tell search engines to exclude it, but would that prevent my primary site ranking from being affected?

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#186

Post by hessenwolf » Sat, Jan 22, 2011, 4:54 AM UTC

Sephr wrote: post #171

lincolnq wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There seem to be a small number of large content farms (perhaps suggesting economies of scale are pretty important). In this case, manually killing them will work well for Herr. Weinberg.

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#187

Post by misterbee » Sat, Jan 22, 2011, 7:52 AM UTC

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #31

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'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.

One specific and ubiquitous example of webspam has been driving me nuts this week: An enterprising spammer has won huge on Amazon Web Services (AWS)-related keywords.

For example: https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=aws+s3+emr+p...

Result #4 at the moment is "AWS Developer Forums: Interactions between S3, EMR and HDFS ..." on http://www.hackzq8search.appspot.com/developer...com/...

What's sublime about this example is that:

1. hackzq8search is clone of AWS's websites amazonwebservices.com, aws.typepad.com, etc

2. hackzq8search is hosted on appspot.com, Google's App Engine domain

3. hackzq8search is over quota, so the site doesn't show any content anyway.

Yet this site was the top search result, beating out the site it was cloning, time and time again on my AWS/EMR-related searches this week.

The one mitigating aspect as that hackzq8search's URL naming scheme is easily decodable -- the hackzq8search URL includes the full URL of the cloned URL, so I can write a Greasemonkey script to extract the proper original URL.

I found a glimmer of optimism in that the site has been slowly fading in SEO-success this week: I complained about https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=aws+s3+security+sox+pc... on Thursday, but on Friday the hackzq8search Search Result was gone from the first search result page.

It's still not hard to slam some AWS-related keywords into Google and get these bogus results, though.

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#188

Post by antirez » Sat, Jan 22, 2011, 9:35 AM UTC

jlees wrote: post #165

antirez wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

You do, though. I recently had my AdWords account suspended and got to talk to a human at Google to handle the issue (through normal channels). For Chrome OS, we have an actual call center with real people sitting in it.

That's very good, this way it is balanced as actually nobody with a minimal business idea can expect google to reply 1:1 to normal users that happen to don't find what they want in the search engine or like.

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#189

Post by nolite » Sat, Jan 22, 2011, 10:41 AM UTC

kmfrk wrote: post #110

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess if you find it helpful, nothing. I always skip their results because they're always really shallow. The kind of article you'd expect if you were paying someone $4 to research and write an article on a topic they know nothing about.

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.

Why does everyone keep bashing on about.com? They've been around forever, have excellent content, and I even used their resources to learn a foreign language.

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#190

Post by lhnz » Sat, Jan 22, 2011, 11:46 AM UTC

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #101

huhtenberg wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just downrank the results from the SO clones?

Because that wouldn't solve the problem for clones of other sites, or clones in other languages. And the Stack Overflow cloners could just make other websites. That's why a primary instinct in search quality is to look for an algorithmic solution that goes to the root of the problem. That approach works across different languages, sites, and if someone makes new sites. To be clear: the webspam team does reserve the r…

I agree with what you're saying: there needs to be an algorithmic approach.

But I'd like to say one other thing. Why is Google only doing something about web spam now after people have pointed out how bad things have been getting? Has anybody considered creating a small team to just oversee public perceptions of the search results and try to keep on-top of things in the future?