What I have never understood is why google has put so much concentration on punishing the Websites that receive web spam. Why not balance it and punish the sites that don't prevent it. Punishing them sites will firstly de-value the link + push webmasters to actually do something on the other end. Sometimes it is out of the site owners control because they cannot prevent that link from being created. The google updates right now encourage negative SEO because that webmaster has no control of that link creation. If you start punishing the people who have control and are able to prevent spam then it makes them focus on being better at moderating that and allowing more relevant links from blog comments and such.
Google is Breaking the Internet
291–300 of 306 posts
Re: Google is Breaking the Internet
#292My 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…
Duckduckgo crawls a fraction of the web that Google does. Would you like a Tomato or a Cherry Tomato?
And Google crawls a fraction of a fraction of the entire internet, last count around 0.04% http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/11740/how-much-of...
All I care about are the quality of the results, and for that DDG does a pretty good job.
Re: Google is Breaking the Internet
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had a DMCA takedown notice sent to me on behalf of a website owner who didn't want me linking to their site. How does that even work? How does the DMCA apply such that I can invoke it to tell you to stop linking to my site? I'm guessing it doesn't, but if you're at the mercy of a hosting service that doesn't actually understand the DMCA you're in a jam.
The way the DMCA works ISPs or any other service hosting third-party content must comply with every takedown notice immediately, regardless of it's legitimacy, if they want to continue to enjoy the protections of the DMCA. (meaning, unless they want to accept liability for the copyright of every piece of content on their servers). So yes, it absolutely does work that way: you can send a takedown notice to anybody for…
> The way the DMCA works ISPs or any other service hosting third-party content must comply with every takedown notice immediately, regardless of it's legitimacy, if they want to continue to enjoy the protections of the DMCA.
AFAICT from actually reading the act, they only have to comply with notices meeting the facial requirements, and failing to do so only exposes them to liability for the content covered by the particular notice for which they failed, and only where they would have had liability without the DMCA safe harbor provisions. I'd like to see any analysis supporting the characterization you make here.
Re: Google is Breaking the Internet
#294My 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.
https://duckduckgo.com/html/ should solve your htpc's problem.
Re: Google is Breaking the Internet
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
"You should never know in advance a link is coming, or where it’s coming from. If you do, that’s the wrong path." That is an absolutely ridiculous rule of thumb to follow. What exactly is wrong about doing something like: 1) Having a good article on your site about a certain topic 2) Reaching out to other site owners who have similar content and asking them to link to you as an additional resource 3) Getting that lin…
dchuk, that's a direct quote from Bing, not Google: http://www.bing.com/blogs/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/201... It's in the "Links are all I need" section. Here's the full quote: "While important as a vote of confidence for the content they point to, there is simply so much link spam these days that it’s tough to know where to turn. Obviously buying links is a dead end, and it doesn’t matter how you split this ha…
In other words, get your links by using a PR firm, not an SEO one,
Re: Google is Breaking the Internet
#296IME, this is pretty much always a spammer trying to get their past comment spam removed.
So although I acknowledge the general message, the specifics really don't help the poster's case.
Re: Google is Breaking the Internet
#297I 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…
IME, this sort of letter is pretty much always a spammer trying to get their past comment spam removed.
You're penalising spammers, and it's being effective. GOOD.
Re: Google is Breaking the Internet
#298I 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…
IME, this sort of letter is pretty much always a spammer trying to get their past comment spam removed.
You're penalising spammers, and it's being effective. GOOD.
Re: Google is Breaking the Internet
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
So now black hat SEO people have a tool where they can buy links and disavow the ones where they get caught?
Re: Google is Breaking the Internet
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
the doc says it's your responsibility to remove spammy back links that you (or a SEO you've hired) have introduced to improve your ranking. it cannot possibly be your responsibility to remove links that other unrelated entities have towards you! (unless it's an obvious link scheme)
I think Matt and Google are getting an unfair rap on this. Google provided a search engine that worked better than any other so people started using it. People are still using it because it's still better than the others. It's not a monopoly. You can use another search engine if you want to. The site that emailed to get a link taken down employed an SEO agency to improve their rankings and they created a bunch of spa…
No, they aren't. Google is using FUD to scare sites into requesting links be removed that they never built on legitimate sites. No one can possibly guess which links an individual Googler will think "might" be paid. I assure you they guess wrong most of the time.
As Google penalizes the best writers and blogs, one of two things happens:
1) Entire sites are being nofollowed - removing links to deserving sites.
2) The site refused to nofollow, so they stay penalized with PR0 no matter how good the site may be or how high the PR once was.
The end result will be that even more black hat spammy MFA sites will rank. Sites that deserved to be written about and linked to will drop and be invisible.
It is high time people stop defending Google when they are destroying small businesses and costing much needed jobs. Now Cutts has declared war on bloggers who often make a living writing.
Google wants to destroy any site that enables advertisers and businesses to connect with sites where their target audience already is by forcing publishers to decide whether they want to risk losing organic traffic and being branded with a scarlet PR0 or to nofollow everything they ever write.
Nofollow = NOT TRUSTED. We do not invest time writing about anything we do not trust. (On the VERY rare occasion we do we do not link to them.) We do not publish content that does not fit our audience.
Every link is a potential risk. Nofollowing links may damage the sites we link to so what is a writer who already cares about what they write about supposed to do?
Google has a monopoly on search because the wealthy elite who own the media handed it to them. People use it because in many cases they do not even know there is an alternative. Many use whatever is installed on their computers without even having any idea what it even is.
People who are trying to clean up unnatural links penalties are not SEO experts. They rely on tools to tell them what links to remove. These tools are not very accurate. I've had them flag DMOZ, Best of the Web, and Business2Community as "toxic". Finally many remove and/or disavow every link in desperation.
How does all that disavowing affect search results and individual sites? How many verify that requests to remove organically given links are from the actual site and not their unethical competitor. (Hint: almost none.)
Many businesses fail waiting for recovery. Others get penalties lifted, but having removed links they no longer get any traffic.
"Google didn't "force" sites into using the nofollow attribute by scaring them into thinking that their rankings would drop." YES, they most certainly DID!