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Search engines and SEO spam

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Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#121

Post by 8ytecoder »

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 agree it’s a hard problem. I don’t agree it’s “really really good”. I regularly encounter obviously scammy websites. With Google’s js execution capabilities I’d assume they can detect that. I’m talking about the VPN install pop ups and so on. Right now there’s a whole bunch of GitHub.Io hosted sites that’s doing that. It’s not even porn. It’s home decoration stuff.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#122

Post by skilled »

behnamoh wrote: post #54
awillen wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK the 2000 word essays in recipes are Google's fault - it prioritizes pages with a lot of content, so you have to add that junk to the top in order to rank highly. While I'm sure there's more going on behind the scenes than I'm aware of, it does seem like the rules could be altered on a category-specific basis where a lot of text isn't necessarily a positive.

Years ago I wanted to pursue micro blogging, but this "feature" of Google search stopped me from doing it. What's the point of writing succinct, to-the-point mini articles about problems and solutions if nobody finds them on Google?

This is largely because micro-blogging means less content, and less content means you could write five 300-word blog posts instead of one 1,500-word post.

I've done blogging for the last 10+ years, and many of those I spent as a freelancer working with startups/brands/editorials. Everyone is after "word count" and I absolutely hate it.

Whenever I work on articles for my own blog, I just don't consider word-count at all. I think if your content is great and informative, then readership will be natural.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#123

Post by curiousllama »

nefitty wrote: post #95
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

Social media and trial and error. I knew a bit, and asked some friends for advice. I used that to find people who said stuff I thought made sense on Quora, Tik Tok, and Instagram (ie they agreed with what I knew to be true and false, so I could assume the other stuff they said was likely to be true as well). I tried what they said, found what worked, and went all in when I saw results.

Importantly, this was bottom up: it was largely recommendation engines suggesting people I then filtered through for what I wanted (running, bodybuilding) vs didn’t (traditional weight loss). I couldn’t specify what I wanted, or it would be garbage SEO spam.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#124

Post by ErikVandeWater »

numbsafari wrote: post #117
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…

The problem isn't that Google doesn't employ these people or invest in their activities. It's that Google has destroyed their own search results in order to continue to expand their revenue opportunities. If Google: - Enabled downvoting on results, like YT videos. (Has its own spam problems, just like YT) - Allowed you to block certain domains from your search results, like YT videos. (If they added some kind of "coo…

> Enabled downvoting on results, like YT videos. (Has its own spam problems, just like YT)

Are there any search engines that do this? It's a great, simple idea.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#125

Post by stanleydrew »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #3

> And boy would Google find it hard to follow you down that road. This is a good perspective. Where can Google not go? Places that don't lead to profit. They will try (cough Wave cough) but will give up.

But isn't profit the point of any company? If you're going down a path that doesn't lead to profit, you'll fail whether Google follows you or not.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#126

Post by endisneigh »

numbsafari wrote: post #117
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…

The problem isn't that Google doesn't employ these people or invest in their activities. It's that Google has destroyed their own search results in order to continue to expand their revenue opportunities. If Google: - Enabled downvoting on results, like YT videos. (Has its own spam problems, just like YT) - Allowed you to block certain domains from your search results, like YT videos. (If they added some kind of "coo…

> That would be incredibly valuable. They already have most of the tech. They could even create a subscription service around custom search engines if they really wanted. Plenty of people would find something like that incredibly valuable.

Why would they do this? Google's customers are the advertisers, not the end-users. And no one is going to pay for a search engine, it's been tried and has failed.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#127

Post by wott »

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.

> 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.

Some even made slideshows of SO screen captures and put that on Youtube, with a fake video or spoken intro to make believe an actual content will be discussed... A number of shameless people would go any length to grab bits of money anywhere and anyhow, and I've hit those links a couple of times.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#128

Post by curiousllama »

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

JPG on Tik Tok, and Geoffrey verity schofield on instagram/quora/buy his book.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#129

Post by JohnJamesRambo »

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 don’t doubt it is hard but I’m forced to sign into Google now pretty much, just let me rate results and ban domains again etc. You will solve the seo problem really quick and start giving me results I want.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#130

Post by jeffbee »

ben7799 wrote: post #82

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.

Clicking a result is essentially an upvote.

Immediately returning to the results page is essentially a downvote.

You can't really crowdsource this stuff, because the problem of brigading and other forms of abuse is way too high. Just imagine what the crowdsourced results for "trump won" or "trump lost" would look like, or hydroxychloroquine, or ivermectin, or to go with some older cults of personality, Hitler or Ataturk.

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