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

Google is Breaking the Internet

jeremypalmer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 306 posts

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#261

Post by Isofarro »

RealGeek wrote: post #168
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If the wrong sorts of sites (however defined), sites outside my control, are linking to my site, why am I penalized, and why should the burden be placed on me to go fix it?" Well, if a website was link spamming then it seems appropriate that the site should attempt to clean up the spam they made before they can rank well in Google again. Otherwise it's not fair to the other websites that have been trying to rank fai…

So in this scenario, my competitors can spam links for my website and put me into trouble. Google will notice that my website has some spammy links (which my competitor created), and then penalize me for it. Then I have to contact every website that links to me to ask them to remove links to my website... else their website would get penalized too. I get such emails every week. Rather than these fear mongering tactic…

> why can't Google just ignore spammy links instead of penalizing the whole websites and all the websites that link to them

You are suggesting an approach where there are no downsides to link spam. Obviously, players of this game would then ramp up their link spam bots, and run them non-stop. Because it causes no damage to the site they want to rank.

Link spam isn't just a search engine indexing problem, it is also a detriment to the general Web user too. It makes the Web worse, not just search.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#262

Post by Isofarro »

lingben wrote: post #22
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #5

I talked about this phenomenon recently on This Week in Google with Leo Laporte and Gina Trapani: http://twit.tv/show/this-week-in-google/248 Skip to 4:15 in to listen to the discussion. Note that there are two different things to keep in mind when someone writes in and says "Hey, can you remove this link from your site?" Situation #1 is by far the most common. If a site gets dinged for linkspam and works to clean up…

Matt, this does not address whatsoever the point being brought up. And in case you missed it, I will try to cite it as clearly as possible here: This is a case where google wants people to mold the internet according to what their current incarnation of their algorithm says the way it should be. Rather than google trying to mold its algorithm to understand the internet, natural links vs. spams, and their respective a…

> The model (google's algo) should fit reality. Rather than forcing reality to fit the model.

Google's algorithms should reward behaviour that's best for Web users, and penalise behaviour that is worse for Web users.

That way, for people who want to game search engine rankings, they are pushed more towards techniques that benefit web users in the course of trying to benefit themselves.

The problem with models is that they are not accurate simulations of the real world. They have flaws and simplifications, and those give rise to people taking advantages of those flaws. All models and representations have flaws.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#263

Post by Isofarro »

scholia wrote: post #189
dreamfactory2 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that I and it seems many commenters here have seen similar things occurring with non-spam sites. Regardless of the specific domains referred to in this post, a general pattern is being talked about - the fundamental criticism is that we are getting a google-shaped web rather than a web-shaped google, due to google's de facto monopoly position. If this wasn't the case, it wouldn't be a talking point here.

"we are getting a google-shaped web rather than a web-shaped google" Very well put.

We were getting a google-shaped web from the moment SEO started optimising for Google rankings.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#264

Post by TerraHertz »

It appears to me that Google has a long term ambition to become the sole means of navigating the Internet. Inter-site links are fundamental to topic-related navigation, as the Internet was originally intended. It appears that Google is trying to depreciate inter-site linking in general, and skilled PR misdirection on the topic by a Google employee doesn't reassure.

One has to wonder to what extent the entire phenomenon of link spamming sites might be a Hegelian Dialectic tactic by Google - ie a manufactured problem, intended to prompt a 'solution' that is in fact more beneficial to Google's unstated intent. Are we really to believe that there's no algorithmic solution to mitigating the link-spamming nuisance?

Another dimension of this same ambition, is the movement to obfuscate URLs in browser address bars. Traditionally, Web users could copy, save and manipulate links directly as another means of navigating the Internet and maintaining their own records of Web places. As browsers progress further in the direction of eliminating direct user visibility of true URLs, this navigational method becomes less available. The Google-promoted alternative? Just search via Google!

As for why Google would want to do this, the obvious answer would be the usual 'money and power'. If Google succeeds in virtually eliminating all navigational alternatives to Google-searching, they then own the Net. For instance, if they wanted to make any given web site disappear, they could simply de-index it. That's a politically very dangerous power. Even if Google has no political agenda now (a debatable point), given such power they'd be guaranteed to become political. Power corrupts, etc.

We've been through this before, with a gold ring and a volcano. It's generally a bad idea to create 'one thing to rule them all', and Google is no exception.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#265

Post by buro9 »

liveoneggs wrote: post #157
buro9 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no protection against this from a publisher perspective. The vast majority of link removal requests I've received do not come from an email address that matches the destination of the link for which the removal is requested.

they just re-hire the same SEO guy who bought all of the spam links in the first place. :)

Not the case. I do speak to a lot of the smaller merchants who email as I feel for them.

They still don't really understand the web, and they hired someone who appeared professional to them (and probably cold called them). Only after a while do they realise they're paying a lot of money for something unquantifiable and with no guarantee of hitting the front-page of Google, and so they end that relationship (in fear, as they're told that whatever placement they now have may be in jeopardy).

So starts the merry-go-round, where the smaller merchants constantly jump from one bad SEO company to another. Each one creating mess, whilst claiming they'll clean up the mess before.

I do feel for the smaller merchants. Their business is being eaten by the internet, and they're missing out and have ambition but are being fleeced by sharks every step of the way.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#266

Post by Isofarro »

malandrew wrote: post #121
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If the wrong sorts of sites (however defined), sites outside my control, are linking to my site, why am I penalized, and why should the burden be placed on me to go fix it?" Well, if a website was link spamming then it seems appropriate that the site should attempt to clean up the spam they made before they can rank well in Google again. Otherwise it's not fair to the other websites that have been trying to rank fai…

It seems like you are heading down the path where black hat anti-SEO on competitors becomes an increasingly viable business model. For example, company A competes with company B. They are cutt-throat so they pay a blackhat SEO firm to generate obviously spammy links for their competitor, not in an effort to bring up their own ranking, but to tank the ranking of their competitor relative to their own. At the end of th…

The victim site looks at where these newly created back links are coming from, and then reports them to the Google disavow tool and disavow the lot of them. That is the mechanism for dealing with the intent of those links.

After a few cases like this, a long list of multiple disavowed domains/networks/fingerprints, where are these negative links going to come from? This anti-SEO tactic you outline can only be used a handful of times before it becomes useless.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#267

Post by Isofarro »

RealGeek wrote: post #180
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If the wrong sorts of sites (however defined), sites outside my control, are linking to my site, why am I penalized, and why should the burden be placed on me to go fix it?" Well, if a website was link spamming then it seems appropriate that the site should attempt to clean up the spam they made before they can rank well in Google again. Otherwise it's not fair to the other websites that have been trying to rank fai…

If my website is getting spammy links, which I did not create. Additionally, it is out of my control to create / edit / remove those links. In such scenario, how does Google determines if I created the links? Does Google have precognitive abilities or it can spy on my communication channels (Gmail, Google Voice, Hangouts etc.) to figure out if I am innocent?

That's where the Google disavow links tool comes in: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main?p...

A model is only as good as the information in it. In this case providing details of these spammy links helps you, and every other site targeted through the same sites/networks/fingerprints.

Consider it a reverse no-follow mechanism.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#268

Post by Isofarro »

aaronwall wrote: post #247
btown wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If manually disavowing a link truly has the same effect as getting it removed by contacting the third-party site's webmaster, then why would people still ask for links to be removed? Is disavowal somehow penalized, i.e. it reduces but does not eliminate the penalty induced if no action had been taken? Or is Google's line that the penalty would be eliminated, but people don't trust that Google's algorithms work the wa…

Links which are nofollowed are still seen by users & can still impact that user's experience with the website. Yet those are fine, even if they point at spam, because they don't have a significant impact on Google. So then what's the difference between disavows and having the links removed? Getting the links removed costs far more time & money. And it gives Google a data mining stream of feedback they can leverage to…

> So then what's the difference between disavows and having the links removed? Getting the links removed costs far more time & money. And it gives Google a data mining stream of feedback they can leverage to dish out further penalties.

That's a good thing right? Pushing sources of bad links down through the basement, effectively nuking the source/network from the link graph.

You know Google's ranking system is based on information, and adding more information leads to better results for the Web user.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#269

Post by mcv »

I feel the article misrepresents the content of the email:

"We have discovered that a company we hired to help promote our website have used a variety of questionable techniques to secure links to our website. These links were placed purely for SEO purposes, with the intention of manipulating search rankings."

So basically the company hired people who spam links in order to game search results. Google is totally right in fighting that. The "natural" links on the author's site are not made by the SEO company, so those links are fine.

The probem is not linking to content you want to link to, the problem is hiring people to artificially boost your search ranking by spamming links in places they don't belong.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#270

Post by gcb0 »

milesf wrote: post #51

My solution has been to recommend friend and family to switch to http://DuckDuckGo.com (or just http://ddg.gg ) This may seem to be an impossible task, but in days not too long ago people switched search providers often. I went from the curated links of Yahoo, to Lycos, to AltaVista, to Webcrawler, to Google, and now DDG. Google got a lot of mileage out of my in my mind with their motto "Don't be Evil", because I had…

what is the love this crowd has with duckduck?! it is nothing more than bing with EXTRA ads!

also, it display a retarded "this page uses javascript. click here for the content" or something, every time i use it from my HTPC with firefox+noscript.

Post reply on HN