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Search engines and SEO spam

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Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#81

Post by xnx »

birken wrote: post #5

The funny thing is that if the people who worked on spam at Google were free to talk about it, I'm sure it would become evident that they know more about spam and anti-spam efforts than anybody else in existence. It's a ridiculously hard problem, especially when people are targeting you directly. But they aren't free to talk about it, because if they did it would just give more assistance to the spammers, and make th…

A lot of people forget that one of the inputs to the Google ranking algorithm is input from human quality raters who work off of an extensive, 172 page, guide that Google publishes and updates for anyone to read: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh...

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#82

Post by ben7799 »

It'd be really interesting if Google allowed upvote/downvote on search results... but it'd be super hard to imagine them every taking the votes into account much versus ad revenue.

And the upvote/downvote would be very tricky to implement in a way that the SEO crowd couldn't just game it horribly.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#83

Post by abakker »

mjr00 wrote: post #58
abakker wrote: post #47

I have a version of fixing this that I would personally enjoy a lot. Leave google alone, let it crawl the web, prioritize what it wants to via algorithms. But, give me a version of that which ONLY surfaces results from discussion forums (including SO, Reddit, HN, etc). For most of the stuff where I am actively searching and not just looking stuff up, discussion forums of motivated, self-selected contributors have the…

My current solution for this is to just tag `site:reddit.com` to the beginning of Google searches. A Google search for `site:reddit.com best miter saw` has a lot of relevant results. Marketers/SEO people are starting to infiltrate this as well, but since they can't control and SEO the content on Reddit nearly as much, this still works pretty well for now.

Of course! this is a tip I got from HN years ago. it gets old to add Reddit, PracticalMachinist, Fine Woodworking, etc. I really want a proxy for user generated content where nobody got paid to write it.

Fun story: I knew a person who worked for a home building website part time. She got paid to write stories on home renovations. She had never done _anything_ she wrote about. Mostly, she gathered up other blogspam and recycled and rewrote it without citation. Sometimes she went to forums, sometimes reddit, sometimes youtube. But, the universal part of it was that she had to produce 2x pieces of content per week endlessly. Just for a local LA builder. Most of the content wasn't "wrong" but, it also wasn't exactly incisive and didn't include any details that would have been useful. Instead it was just filler. The worst part is that it consistently improved that company's search ranking.

Content farming needs to die.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#84

Post by techdragon »

abakker wrote: post #47

I have a version of fixing this that I would personally enjoy a lot. Leave google alone, let it crawl the web, prioritize what it wants to via algorithms. But, give me a version of that which ONLY surfaces results from discussion forums (including SO, Reddit, HN, etc). For most of the stuff where I am actively searching and not just looking stuff up, discussion forums of motivated, self-selected contributors have the…

How can they tell it’s a discussion forum? Does the scraped search spam that copies stack overflow content look enough like a discussion it fools their heuristics? Is it a manual process (in which case you can bet it “doesn’t scale” and won’t be built) this is the problem they face. Literally nothing is simple given the size of their dataset, the scope of their user base, and the adversarial nature of the very world around them generating new data they must work with in order to do the job.

There’s definitely an element of “we got our profit so fuck it” with respect to the search engine advertising business and Google’s incentives to make search quality better, but that doesn’t change the difficulty of the underlying problem. If I wanted to pay Google $5 per search for super high quality results, even $50, they can’t just make this product better to get my money, they are fighting an ongoing war against adversarial SEO which prevents this from ever being better than stalemate at best or more likely due to economics, the slow slide into declining quality we see due to the SEO side having more money with which to pay for engineering brainpower.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#86

Post by [deleted] »

hammock wrote: post #9

>This may not just be a problem with Google but possibly also the recipe for beating Google. A startup usually has to start with a niche market. Why not try writing a search engine specifically for some category dominated by SEO spam? >You might need to do a lot of manual spam fighting initially. That could be both the thing-that-doesn't-scale, and the thing that differentiates you by being alien to Google's DNA. (Th…

[deleted]

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#87

Post by behnamoh »

birken wrote: post #5

The funny thing is that if the people who worked on spam at Google were free to talk about it, I'm sure it would become evident that they know more about spam and anti-spam efforts than anybody else in existence. It's a ridiculously hard problem, especially when people are targeting you directly. But they aren't free to talk about it, because if they did it would just give more assistance to the spammers, and make th…

Most comments focus on the technical side of things, whereas I'm sure there are also legal restrictions involved in this. If Google delists a website on the grounds that it's a copycat of stack overflow, or because they have low quality content according to Google's taste, there might be lawsuits filed against Google, claiming that the company is discriminating.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#89

Post by yumraj »

If I remember correctly, it used to be called About.com - with categorized and human curated links.

It was big during the dot com days, but withered after Google.

Interestingly, I do think that that model may need to be revisited.

Edit: I feel that Reddit is filling some of this need, at least for things like Vaccuum and Espresso machines with dedicated spaces.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#90

Post by noduerme »

birken wrote: post #5

The funny thing is that if the people who worked on spam at Google were free to talk about it, I'm sure it would become evident that they know more about spam and anti-spam efforts than anybody else in existence. It's a ridiculously hard problem, especially when people are targeting you directly. But they aren't free to talk about it, because if they did it would just give more assistance to the spammers, and make th…

How hard is spam, really. If you're Google? Here's what I would do as a heuristic (uh, not evil?): We know everything about you and everywhere you've visited and everyone you've talked to in the last 60 days. We know all their phone numbers and email addresses. We even know the girl's phone number you met at the bar, who didn't give you her phone number. So if any of those people email you, we'll categorize that as "not spam". Also, if it's your boss or a coworker, "not spam". If it's a major company that's existed for more than ten years, not spam. Everyone else, spam. Done.

This is hyperbolic, right? But they can solve spam in a split second, if they just admit they're watching you all the time.

[edit] /s thx for reading to the end, folks.

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