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Google search and search engine spam

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Re: Google search and search engine spam

#191

Post by paul9290 »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #172
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.

Jan. 15th I was curious if the walmart was going to be a supercenter so I searched, "fallston md walmart," & "will fallston md walmart be a supercenter." As you can see either result does not show the most relevant and recent info about my query, rather it's littered by prominent job sites. Though on a search for "will fallston md walmart be a supercenter," i see the six result to be http://www.belairnewsandviews.com/2011/01/job-ads-out-this-w..., yet that information to me was weak;. it deduces from all the job listings that yes this will be a Super Walmart. Since I found the results/info lacking I immediately went to Twitter and found an even more detailed article(http://belair.patch.com/articles/fallston-walmart-may-open-b...) that had pictures that I think should have appeared in one of my queries. As you see that article was published Jan. 14th and Google did not point me to the most recent/up to date info rather it favored prominent job sites' listings, yet Twitter did.

Pardon, if this seems nitpicky, but just wanted to share one of my recent experiences where Google failed me(i have another example too but search was personal), while Twitter did not.

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#193

Post by stanleydrew »

lukev wrote: post #27
magicalist wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to be completely fair, the very first link (from the official springsource blog) also appears to answer your question.

True, it does... I just noticed this because I've actually got in the habit of scanning for stackoverflow results, first - they almost always are right on the money, and it's less cognitive overhead to read a site format I'm familiar with, with extraneous discussion well tucked-away. It almost feels like a cache miss when I have to drop down to the official site/documentation, since that typically requires a greater…

If you're looking for SO results why not use 'site:stackoverflow.com'? That would clear out everything else.

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#194

Post by ddemchuk »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #23
ddemchuk wrote: post #16

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"

People can make tens of thousands of dollars a month if they rank highly for certain phrases, so tons of SEOs (and spammers) are trying to rank for phrases like that. Other search engines might hard-code the results for [buy viagra], but Google's first instinct is to use algorithms in these cases, and if you pay attention, the results for queries like that can fluctuate a lot. With a billion searches a day, I won't c…

it just seems to me that there is a gaggle of very obvious failing points that can easily become the focus of your guys' attempts to clean up the serps. Buy Viagra is probably the oldest known keyword to be subjected to blackhat seo techniques in the history of Google, yet it's still littered with hacked edu's and spam sites. If 300k broad match searches a month is something you guys feel isn't worth focusing on, then I guess this is a moot point. But at that kind of volume, I think a little bit more attention is warranted.

The simplest response is that link spam works, has worked for years, and coming into 2011, it appears to be as strong as ever in terms of ranking sites for competitive niches.

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#195

Post by zackattack »

danvet wrote: post #108
bambax wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because that wouldn't solve the problem for clones of other sites, or clones in other languages. Sites that are the victims of content cloning have to be very visible and valuable, so maybe a little manual curating could be relevant. > the Stack Overflow cloners could just make other websites Not really? The point is not to tag the clones but to tag the original; everything that is not the original and that has cop…

That would be a rather awesome feature for evil people: Just copy&paste your competitions content onto SO (or any other specially protected site) and their google ranking will drop like a stone.

Why doesn't Google just count 'original' as whoever published the corpus first...

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#196

Post by zackattack »

omaranto wrote: post #183
richcollins wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If they partnered with Facebook, it wouldn't be too difficult.

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#197

Post by [deleted] »

omaranto wrote: post #183
richcollins wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[deleted]

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#198

Post by Matt_Cutts »

misterbee wrote: post #187
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Someone else already reported this. There's been some weird stuff going on with AWS-type pages, e.g. see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2103401 for example. I don't know the exact cause, but I know the indexing team is aware of this issue and working on it.

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#199

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Google search and search engine spam

#200

Post by jonpaul »

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.

This is a bit pedantic, but true: I didn't state that I "can't", I stated that it was "difficult." Now that that's out of the way, I was referring to customers of AdWords and Google Apps, not users of the search product.
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