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Search engines and SEO spam

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Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#91

Post by jrockway »

To some extent, I worry that the problem with search engines is that there isn't any data worth returning. Yesterday's thread talked a lot about reviews. Writing a review is hard work that requires deep domain expertise, experience with similar products, and months of testing. If you want a review for something that came out today, there is no way that work could have been done, so there simply isn't anything to find. Instead you'll get a list of "Best TVs 2021" or whatever, with some blurb and an affiliate link, not an actual review. That's what people can make for free with a day's notice, so if you write a search engine that discards those sites, that's fine, you'll just return "no results" for every interesting query.

I guess what I'm saying is that if you want better reviews, you probably want to start writing reviews and figuring out how to sell them for money. Many have tried, few have succeeded. But there probably isn't some Javascript that will fix this problem.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#92

Post by dageshi »

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…

I said this in a similar thread yesterday, but I think this is an unsolvable problem because much of the content either no longer exists in website form or is old.

To put it simply, a new generation of the people who used to make the reliable niche websites that not just answered your questions but also helped you learn a particular topic have moved to youtube instead.

Google search is hollowing out as a result with the meat going and the SEO'd fluff that kinda answers the question but ONLY the direct question being asked with none of the wider expertise that more educated people in what they were searching for.

Of course google owns youtube as well.. so perhaps they just see it as an inevitable transition.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#93

Post by padastra »

phsource wrote: post #24
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…

This 100%. In travel, we see Google constantly tweaking its algorithms, and compared to Bing, Google surfaces a ton more small, well-written travel blogs [1] Not only that, Paul and Michael have seen plenty of startups, and at least in recent memory, the number of vertical search and consumer startups that Y Combinator has funded hasn't been that high As a consumer startup, I know this issue firsthand. Paul and Micha…

Hi! I used Wanderlog to plan a recent month-long group trip, which was definitely the most complex vacation I've had to plan. For context I am very active when traveling (e.g. multiple activities each day); so not sure how my experiences map to others.

The best part of it was (going to a foreign country) being able to find / identify all the attractions relative to each other, so I could go to cluster A on Monday, cluster B, on Tuesday, etc.

The hardest part of it (and why I needed to create a separate google sheets anyways) was--once I figured out opening hours of different locations, hard-to-book activities with limited reservations--the ease of moving things around more fluidly e.g. cluster B on Monday, cluster A on Tuesday, etc. and having a more information-dense view so I could see larger portions of the itinerary at once.

It would be cool to have an "input everything" --> "input time restrictions / unmovable things" --> output planned activity cluster type workflow.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#94

Post by coldpie »

paulgb wrote: post #77
acdha wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your point is good but I'm not sure I'd say very good given how easily the same SEO spam domains can stay at the top of search results for ages simply by scraping someone else's content. What I'd be most interested in knowing is what their success metrics are defined as — for example, how much of a problem does Google's management consider it if someone searches, finds the answer they were looking for on someone's St…

Yes, I've noticed this particularly with technical results. A lot of sites seem to have scraped StackOverflow and GitHub issues, put a crappy ad-loaded interface around them, and somehow out-rank the original SO/GitHub content. It's like the bad-old-days of ExpertsExchange, which somehow was never delisted by Google for its shady SEO tactics.

You just have to look at Google's profit motive here. Their motive isn't to provide quality search results. Their motive is to show users ads, either in the search results themselves or on the destination sites via their ad network. The SEO spam sites aren't a bug, they are a feature of Google's profit algorithm. Google's search quality will never improve so long as their motivation is to show you ads. Why should it? Competition may help here, either by an outsider like the OP suggests, or via breaking Google up with anti-trust enforcement, or both (my preference).

As a user, your best personal and ethical move is to install an ad-blocker, to make ad-based business models less viable, which will help promote business models that don't abuse the customer.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#95

Post by nefitty »

curiousllama wrote: post #10

Good idea. You could start with fitness. Lots of high-quality information out there that’s entirely, 100% inaccessible via google. Over COVID, I did the whole fitness thing from a few different angles (overhauled diet, trained for a marathon, now lifting weights a lot). I found I could only find good info by going directly to a trusted source - literally, typing http://www . like I’m in the 90s or something. This is…

This is a problem I'm working on.

What sorts of unique things did you do that Google failed at? Maybe you read through discussion sites or got tips from books or something like that

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#96

Post by joshuaissac »

judge2020 wrote: post #15
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…

Also, i'd be very surprised if they didn't have tens of thousands of workers aiding in spam review already. The hard part in all of this isn't finding and stopping spam - it's defining what spam is. Are all the pie recipes where there's a 2000 word essay about their grandma at the top 'spam'? They still have the recipe, and Google Home devices pick up the recipe instructions just fine so people end up not reading it,…

> The hard part in all of this isn't finding and stopping spam - it's defining what spam is.

This is one area where Google could use personalised results to provide a better experience for the user. Let me decide what spam is for me. Let me mark results as good or bad, so that the algorithm knows what kind of pages should be prioritised or filtered out the next time. Google SearchWiki was a step towards this but they killed it off.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#97

Post by eitland »

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…

https://search.marginalia.nu has a very interesting approach to this:

Use tracking especially and JS generally as a weight in ranking so sites that contains much of any of these needs to be exceptionally high quality to float to the top.

This means sites with limited ads and tracking, typically enthusiast driven pages float to the top.

Now always when someone discusses a novel way to combat webspam someone will immediately counter: if this becomes popular SEO hackers will immediately start doing this.

Well - if reducing page size and removing tracking becomes a leading SEO trick I can deal with a bit of SEO hacking :-)

Yet for some reason I feel Google won't start using this very simple metric :-)

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#98

Post by rightbyte »

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…

Really? I don't think the bureaucratic bloat at Google cares and the original authors of the search engine in its current incarnation are probably long gone. It is maintenance mode and I don't think they dare touch too much.

It takes time and effort to build up a spam site's ranking but it is trivial to blacklist those who get to the top.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#99

Post by techdragon »

_xnmw wrote: post #34

Interestingly, Google Maps doesn't suffer as much from the issues with Google Search. Maybe because it has those community-driven curation features that PG is talking about? Google Maps is fantastic at finding places to go to (and getting you there). Also, why hasn't Apple built a search engine yet? It baffles me that they chose to go head-to-head with Google on Maps, yet outsourced their search engine. I would've li…

It’s much harder to get SEO spam style content to maps given the geographic region limits involved… But it happens my favourite example is searching for suppliers of something basic, say structural aluminium extrusions, big and heavy and you ideally don’t want to ship it far so it’s an ideal thing to search for a local supplier of. In Australian results is basically a given that I’ll get results for my city because they will list it as a delivery area they supply to however when you actually try to find them on the map as a pin, nope it’s either not their or just is a sales office not a warehouse or workshop, so they have tricked the system into listing them as local to my area in a way that pollutes my maps search results.

But this only works for certain industries. It’s much less common to see this kind of tactic if your searching for say a coffee shop because they sheer number of local results let’s Google be “hyper local” with these kinds of results.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#100

Post by ok123456 »

thewarrior wrote: post #74
curiousllama wrote: post #10

Good idea. You could start with fitness. Lots of high-quality information out there that’s entirely, 100% inaccessible via google. Over COVID, I did the whole fitness thing from a few different angles (overhauled diet, trained for a marathon, now lifting weights a lot). I found I could only find good info by going directly to a trusted source - literally, typing http://www . like I’m in the 90s or something. This is…

Could you share your trusted sources ? Human search engine :P

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