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Search engines and SEO spam

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Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#11

Post by goatherders »

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…

This x100000.

There is no scenario - none - where thousands of engineers at Google working on search wake up in the morning and say "we sure have made it good enough wr2 SPAM. I think I'll have another Danish."

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#13

Post by hooande »

What are some search categories that are so dominated by spam that they are unusable?

I'll start: "how to rent a car" [0]

[0] worth noting that I personally get somewhat reasonable results for this, with a 3rd result from nerdwallet.com and a 4th from wikihow.com, both of which seem to answer the question in an unbiased way

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#14

Post by rickdeveloper »

I think a lot of this is due to Google both owning search and the ads on the websites (AdSense). There’s an incentive for them to prioritize click farms (and other sites filled with their ads). I think in general there may be a correlation between the number of ads on a site and its usefulness to me, which is inverse to its usefulness to google.

I’m curious what would happen if those products were split up into 2 separate companies.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#15

Post by judge2020 »

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…

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, but many people would still consider that spam since it adds such an obstacle to getting the information you want. Same for cnet articles like "Best smart home devices to buy in 2022" - it's a reputable brand with a list of smart home devices, but it's hardly a review and exists to funnel people to their Amazon affiliate link.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#16

Post by hammock »

hooande wrote: post #13

What are some search categories that are so dominated by spam that they are unusable? I'll start: "how to rent a car" [0] [0] worth noting that I personally get somewhat reasonable results for this, with a 3rd result from nerdwallet.com and a 4th from wikihow.com, both of which seem to answer the question in an unbiased way

Nerdwallet and wikiHow are both SEO spam content farms. They just happen to have above-average quality content.

They don't exist without a search engine.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#17

Post by new_here »

> Maybe ultimately you open up spam fighting to your users. If you managed this well, you could harness a lot of energy.

Doesn't Google already consider that if a user returns to the results page (or clicks a second link) then the first link visited was not satisfactory. Seems like a pretty elegant solution.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#18

Post by Jenk »

> What would a paid version of Google Search results look like - where Google can just try to give me the best possible results and not be worried about generating revenue?

God please no. YouTube premium shows what Google would do, i.e., they would further ruin the free experience by ramping up the amount of ads you see to "incentivize" the premium search.

Re: Search engines and SEO spam

#20

Post by snth »

Several people mention DuckDuckGo in that Twitter thread. I use DuckDuckGo for my main search engine, and it's not obviously any better than Google regarding SEO spam.
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