Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Search engines and SEO spam

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 555 posts

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#151

Post by fragmede »

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…

How do you fight brigading, the organization of groups elsewhere to collectively vote on something? Eg white supremacist groups get together and vote down everything by people of color, and vote up their pages about how great they are?

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#152

Post by deltarholamda »

The quote-Tweeted thread mentioned recipes as one of the things that has been SEObliterated. It's a great example of the problem, and also a great example of the problems any solution will encounter.

Recipes have become a bellwether Internet problem. In the past, your great-grandmother had a card file with a bunch of 3x5 index cards with the ingredients and instructions on how to make everything, and they pretty much all fit on one side. There was a great deal of domain knowledge required (e.g. "whip to stiff peaks"), but these things reveled in their terseness.

Internet recipes all begin with 9 paragraphs of the author's first time encoutering the dish in a Moroccan bazaar in 1997, and the life story of the chef. There are two embedded 10-minute videos of the lifecycle of the vanilla bean. And then you get to the ingredient list. Then two more 10-minute videos, then instructions.

The drive to make recipes full-contact Internet content has changed what it means to be a recipe. This is similar to how cooking shows evolved from Julia Childs working on a sound stage to a carnival barker presentation with vivid personalities dominating the scene.

I'm not sure there is any technological solution to a problem that has fundamentally changed what it means to be a recipe, short of establishing a new informational silo in the form of a new Web site devoted to recipes only. You could encourage an RSS-like format for recipes, but that requires buy-in from places that profit from the new evolution. This new status quo may be good or bad--you can make the argument either way--but it is what it is. A cultural change is required more than tweaking algorithms.

(Unless tweaking algorithms can be foundational to cultural change, in which case we really, really, really need to take a hard look at the corporate behemoths and their algorithms, and sooner better than later.)

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#153

Post by numpad0 »

coding123 wrote: post #4

> Lots of people want to be amateur police. (pg) This is very true. How many times have I clicked on a site met with ads so bad that the browser slows down, and after 10 seconds the page gets covered up by more and more crap and then a paywall shows up sometimes too. Now here's the thing - a competitor to Google might detect you clicking back and then pop-up a special set of controls near the search result that lets…

Google already detects immediate returns and knock off that link for you. What's problematic to me is I tend to reactively mash back and forward and link just goes from it.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#154

Post by cpeterso »

Amazon’s search results and scammy third party sellers are a similar trust problem. When possible I try to purchase directly from the product manufacturer’s website. Similarly, I don’t search Google for product reviews, I go directly to trustworthy review websites.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#155

Post by loceng »

snth wrote: post #115
jrockway wrote: post #91

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…

> 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. That's not strictly true, given that reviewers are often sent pre-release versions of things in order to do that work before release day.

Not sure why you're being downvoted, as you're correct - however to point out there seems to be a trend where reviewers are only given pre-release versions if they practically always give favourable reviews to the products they list, especially if they're provided the product for free; there doesn't have to be an express relationship or contract between a reviewer and a company either, it's the reverse of how Bill Gates apparently has given $200 million+ to different news channels/media organizations - and so they're less likely going to as freely share negative news about him or perhaps his organizations, so then ; this makes me think, similarly to how stocks being sold by CEOs (etc) must be pre-planned to avoid shenanigans like market manipulation, that anyone giving large sums of money to any media/journalism organization must divide the amount up over 20-40+ years, so that organization at least has a runway and not dependant on larger "dopamine hits" at shorter intervals.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#156

Post by wakiza33 »

jeffbee wrote: post #114

All of the amateur search quality experts forget to mention the regulatory environment. Obviously, Google could nuke Pinterest from orbit, dramatically improving image search results. Clearly, Google could effectively take down Statista, technically. But various Eurocracies have shown an extreme willingness to take the side of Yelp, Pinterest, and whatever other spam/scam mills are able to form a shadow alliance with…

big part of it. and the scrutiny is only going to get more intense

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#157

Post by vlovich123 »

thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #29

I'm honestly not trying to take a potshot against PG or YC here, but it's kinda funny to see him saying this after I worked for a YC-backed startup years ago that built its core revenue streams around generating SEO spam, we just marketed it as something else. Just to be clear, I don't think PG or YC are responsible for all or even most SEO spam, but I know firsthand that they've profited from it through at least one…

Don't know how rarely it happens. After all, weapons dealers frequently arm both sides of a conflict. They don't really need to care who wins - they're just making twice the amount of money.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#158

Post by bell-cot »

behnamoh wrote: post #87
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.

In which countr[y|ies] does Google not have the discretion to decide that certain sites / pages / etc. "belong considerably further down" in Google's search results pages? Seems to me that sorting the search results to #1, #2, #3, etc. is pretty well baked into their basic product.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#159

Post by bogwog »

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…

Those shitty SEO spam sites exist only to serve ads, and Google has a monopoly on internet ads. So there is no real incentive for them to solve the problem.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#160

Post by _hcuq »

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.

They outrank the original content because google is corrupt.
Post reply on HN