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Search engines and SEO spam

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Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#131

Post by acdha »

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.

> It's like the bad-old-days of ExpertsExchange, which somehow was never delisted by Google for its shady SEO tactics.

This is really what made me suspect that Google was teetering on the edge of the MBA death spiral: these problems run for years when they'd be easy to block, which suggests to me that whatever metric gets you a bonus / promoted doesn't include things like that which are long-term threats to their core business even if it's selling a lot of ads short-term.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#132

Post by wakiza33 »

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…

Spam, yes, but Google has also made meaningful shifts that are clearly directed from the top-down. It's much harder now (imo) to get specific results, they've overall started looping SERPs into broad answers.

This is def a user-engagement strategy -- but it has cons as well.

Part of the complaints in the thread were spam related, other were something deeper

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#133

Post by noduerme »

loceng wrote: post #103
noduerme wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay that's sort of what the !bang in DDG is for, and why it's a meta-engine. What's the blue sky ideal for a real, no-bullshit, everything search engine that doesn't fall prey to the constant flood of garbage? I have an exterminator who comes to my house every couple months, and sets up traps here, poison there. I don't have any rats in my house. I do see rats running across the yard sometimes. The exterminator expl…

Creating a "trustless" search crawler, where anybody can participate, and then applying an algorithm to determine trust or value feels like it'd be a never-ending arms race - that'd require AI and extensive/expensive resources that is likely better invested in developing real trust networks and curation; curators are corruptible and regulatory capture of policy is possible if the organization is infiltrated or poorly…

Legitimate question; if this is a real business model (and I believe it could be) then why the fuck does Yahoo.com look like a dead clickbait aggregator instead of, yknow, what it used to look like? i.e. FINANCE ___ [Stocks] [ etc] ENTERTAINMENT ___ [Movies] [TV] Where's that site?

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#134

Post by notreallyserio »

IshKebab wrote: post #43
judge2020 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Yeah, the newest nuisance seems to be sites that clone Github Issues and StackOverflow with a crapper interface. Somehow they rank higher than the original sources. I'd say it's spam but it's definitely not traditional spam.

I'm not going to say solving spam programmatically is easy, but the gitmemory garbage site (for one example) has been around long enough that there's no excuse for not downranking or removing it. How hard could it possibly be for humans to spot these few sites and nuke em? I'm sure Google engineers see them all the time.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#135

Post by edrxty »

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…

The problem with all of this is it would help us greatly, but it would be useless to the 99% that the internet is increasingly being designed for. Modern UI trends are becoming obsessed with removing as many options and features as possible so the dumbest humans bordering on smartest vegetables can still use the service.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#136

Post by dang »

This was in response to mwseibel's thread, which had a big discussion yesterday:

Google no longer producing high quality search results in significant categories - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29772136 - Jan 2022 (1167 comments, spread over multiple pages - note the "X more comments" links at the bottom)

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#137

Post by zozbot234 »

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…

Legitimate sites could help a lot by adding machine-readable descriptions of their content, per the schema.org spec. The richness of these descriptions means that this is effectively a "hard", non-forgeable claim to being a worthwhile, non-spam source (quite unlike the old META tags that got abused to death pre-Google). Of course spam sites could simply lie in their schema.org tags, but the lies are easy to spot (with combined machine- and human-review) and then they just get banned. It makes it a lot harder (and hopefully infeasible) to SEO-spam by just copying random content.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#138

Post by lumost »

endisneigh wrote: post #126
numbsafari wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You only need ~1/10000th of Google's revenue to be a financially successful startup. 1/1000th and you'll have a great business, and at 1/100th you'll be somewhere between a unicorn and a decacorn.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#139

Post by wenbin »

FYI - Google hires 10,000+ search result raters [1], who are contractors, to evaluate search result quality.

In an ideal world, you build a thing, and it's done. It runs automatically and prints out money.

In reality, you still need human labors to do manual tasks, even in tech industry.

[1] https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-eat/quality-rater...

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#140

Post by wakiza33 »

endisneigh wrote: post #126
numbsafari wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

there is a smaller niche market. SEMrush is a tool used in the digital marketing industry that is now public and has a multi-billion dollar market cap. It originally started as a search engine. When they didnt gain traction they used the tech to monitor Google and interface it for customers who are tracking their performance in search results (and much more).
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