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Search engines and SEO spam

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Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#241

Post by nradov »

loceng wrote: post #155
snth wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Ga…

I trust DC Rainmaker's reviews of fitness tech products because he always returns products back to the manufacturers after writing reviews. So there's no conflict of interest based on free products.

https://www.dcrainmaker.com/product-reviews

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#242

Post by numbsafari »

mad182 wrote: post #180
ErikVandeWater wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Not really that simple, I see a lot of potential for abuse - using bots and brigading to mass downvote your competitors or political opponents. Couple of positions up or down in google results for somewhat popular and valuable keywords can mean the difference in thousands of dollars per day of ad or affiliate revenue. I suspect it would get pretty wild if google launched something like this. There already are black-h…

> I see a lot of potential for abuse

They already have the tech to fight this on YT. They, in theory, are supposed to be doing the same thing to detect inauthentic behavior on ad placement and click abuse.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#243

Post by wodenokoto »

frenchyatwork wrote: post #145
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…

I think one of the fundamental things that make search work well about 1-2 decades ago was that web sites would link to each other, and that those links could vaguely correlate with reputation. There were link spammers, but there was actually a some decent organic content as well. What's happened since then is that almost all the normal "people linking to things they like" has gone behind walled gardens (chiefly Face…

Why has blogs and articles stopped linking to things? I'm reading a restaurant review site, and they won't link to the restaurant. The chef name is a link to a list of all articles tagged with the chefs name, rather a wikipedia link or something useful that can tell me who that person is.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#244

Post by prepend »

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 think the issue is that these crappy results are kind of good for revenue. It’s not just organic results impacted but all the affiliate ads.

Google is smart so I assume they crunched the numbers and figured out they make more money from people filtering through crappy results that include viewing and clicking ads than by surfacing good content.

I think Google is optimizing for ad revenue, not for good search.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#245

Post by ffhhj »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #113
eitland wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 immed…

Another big factor in what I do is prioritizing the opinions of certain indieweb sites when ranking domains, basically a segment of the graph consisting of humans with a particular dislike for seo spam. This makes ranking manipulation much less effective.

Good to see you in this thread! I just added Marginalia to the recommended search engines in a new search tool I'm building, to get programming answers faster. The search assistant builds queries for specific sites with "site:targetsite.com , programming question" (that comma is not a typo). When doing a query like that I get no results but these warnings:

/!\ The term "," contains characters that are not currently supported

/!\ Try rephrasing the query, changing the word order or using synonyms to get different results. Tips.

sample: https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=site%3Astackoverfl...

Please make your engine ignore the comma, it shouldn't affect the search.

Either ignore the site:... expression or filter sites accordingly.

Thanks a lot for creating Marginalia!

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#246

Post by nathanyz »

joshuaissac wrote: post #96
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,…

> 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…

Is conservative leaning info spam or not spam? What about liberal leaning info?

We have seen what this leads to inside the social networks as well as YouTube, and at a macro scale I think we might want to have a shared concept of what constitutes a good search result for a given query.

At micro scale, it can seem more optimized to get exactly the type of result you want, but if we take an absurd example like an Apple Pie recipe shouldn't we all have shared understanding of what types of ingredients would make for an Apple Pie?

The shared understanding, I believe, is core to communication. If all of us have our own specific ideas of Apple Pie, then who is actually right on what an Apple Pie really is? What happens when your search results insist that an Apple Pie doesn't actually have apples in it, but instead pears?

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#247

Post by jart »

rhtgrg wrote: post #176

I think pg is missing something important here. The reason Google was able to beat Yahoo, Altavista, Ask, etc. was not just because they had a better formula — it was also because they started in the era where 'search' was still seen as secondary to 'portals' by the big guys. Had these companies known how important search is to the internet back then, they would've copied Google's secret sauce and crushed it long bef…

Altavista was the only search engine in the same league as Google. So Google hired the guy who built it. Altavista infrastructure couldn't scale beyond a single server, because that's how DEC was, so it was a smart move for him.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#248

Post by colordrops »

netcan wrote: post #150

I'm almost certain that pg gave " compete with Google by competing in some niche " advice 10+ years ago. In any case, I'm not sure that competing in search is a very attractive notion. AdWords is the only meaningfully profitable search and business. Even if you steal 10% of Google's market, that absolutely doesn't translate into 10% of the revenue. That said, recipes. Someone make a search engine where the top result…

It's usually more than 500 words lol

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#249

Post by ceejayoz »

nradov wrote: post #241
loceng wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Ga…

I trust DC Rainmaker's reviews of fitness tech products because he always returns products back to the manufacturers after writing reviews. So there's no conflict of interest based on free products. https://www.dcrainmaker.com/product-reviews

If companies don't like his reviews, they'll stop sending review units. That hits both in the pocketbook and the race to be one of the earlier reviewers of a new product. Reduced conflict, perhaps, but not none.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#250

Post by lubesGordi »

How about a platform for curation. Curators who know a subject well can link to content that looks good to them. Search goes through the curators, people can favorite certain curators. Lots of people like to curate. This is a better idea than trying to go after spam.
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