Google Blocks 'Optimized' Pages 562
Rhett Creighton writes "For the past few years, webmasters have found tricks that bring their page higher for a given keyphrase search. Google recently implemented a filter to block sites that appeared to be tricking it into gaining a higher ranking. This NYTimes article reports of angry retailers who are losing their businesses, while this article gives more technical conspiracy theories of what google is actually doing."
Seth F's theories (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Seth F's theories (Score:5, Insightful)
Easy to defeat a bayesian filter: use a sentence generator. Feed a few hundred mission statements and "about us" pages into a markov model and let it churn out babble. You're not really concerned with being 100% coherent, since none of your generated spam is actually on the site having its ranking pumped up. You just want uniqueness, the bane of any bayesian filter.
Bayes Wars (Score:5, Interesting)
That's why I have to laugh whenever I read stories speculating that Microsoft might do to Google what they did to Netscape. It's one thing to steal a big consulting/integration contract by throwing lots of marketing and engineering resources at the customer. But to dominate the search engine world, you have to earn and maintain the trust of millions of users who pound on your engine every single minute. I used to think that Infoseek, Altavista, and the others died solely from corporate neglect. That's partially true, but they were doomed anyway, as soon as Google appeared. Because none of them ever understood what Brin and company seem to understand instinctively -- a public search engine requires hard work on a huge scale, and it never stops.
Re:Bayes Wars (Score:3, Interesting)
There are plenty of businesses which try and do this. I recall SearchKing [searchking.com] getting into a bit of a flap with Google [google.com], when a bunch of their customers' sites were downgraded. There are probably thousands of little piss-pot companies that will link to your page a million times for a hundred bucks or some such garbage. People should recognize this for what it is: web-spam. Millions of fake, garbage sites set up for the sole pu
Clearly They Do (Score:3, Interesting)
This is clearly a response to the Bayesian filter.
The same hacks who make the spam generating software are right there ready to sell their meta-crime to the web-varnishers.
Not about browsers (Score:3, Insightful)
On the other hand, when IE first appeared it really was something of a joke. It was just a rebranded version of Spyglass Mosaic that Microsoft hurriedly licensed when they realized that they'd ignored the Internet for too long. Lots of silly bugs and poor
Re:Seth F's theories (Score:3, Insightful)
It really pisses me off when half my results are links to other search engines, that never seem to have any information about what I'm looking for.
Needs works (Score:5, Funny)
ps: f1st pr0st.
Re:Needs works (Score:5, Funny)
"I'm Feeling Lucky" (Score:4, Funny)
Not really. "I'm feeling lucky" that I, unlike the gentleman in the picture, do not have a 6" diameter asshole.
Re:"I'm Feeling Lucky" (Score:5, Funny)
>
> Not really. "I'm feeling lucky" that I, unlike the gentleman in the picture, do not have a 6" diameter asshole.
At least! I know what to give thanks for tomorrow at the family dinner! Dude, Thanks!
Re:Needs works (Score:5, Funny)
The key words are 'I'm Feeling Lucky' - not 'I'm in the mood to be mentally scarred for fricking life.' Plus, it'd stop you getting a gruesome thumbnail if you typed in 'goats' in images.google.com.
Re:Needs works (Score:3, Funny)
Cheers,
Ian
Re:Needs works (Score:3, Informative)
visiting http://goatse.cx/robots.txt
If you don't care for visiting the site ( I wonder why)
you will see they don't want any bots in the site.
Re:Needs works (Score:5, Informative)
What am I missing? (Score:2, Insightful)
If the purpose of a search engine is to help us find the products/content we're looking for then why are they trying to filter out worthwhile search results? About 50% of the time when I'm searching, I AM looking for vendors of a product in order to do price comparisons. So, if Google turns their search engine into a search engine that ignores those types of search results then they've just moved out of the No.1 position in my favorite search engine list. Maybe I'm missing something
Re:What am I missing? (Score:4, Insightful)
this is an instance where one company has fouled up the search results. google's policies state to not do that, and if you do, you may be removed from search results.
Re:What am I missing? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What am I missing? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What am I missing? (Score:5, Informative)
case in point, last night, i decided i was going to buy the "i'm a bomb technician. if you see me running, try to catch up" shirt. when i searched for it, the first 7 results were more or less the same page (different bgcolors, different rotating ads, different popups), which all pointed to the same url for checkout. i didn't find the vendor i wanted until the 2nd page
i guess ihbt.
Re:What am I missing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Then use Froogle (Score:5, Informative)
Besides, these sites were using hacks to artificially inflate their pagerank instead of providing a higher quality site to increase it.
Re:Then use Froogle (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What am I missing? (Score:5, Informative)
Google already has a search engine specifically designed for price comparisons... maybe that's what you're missing.
It's called Froogle [google.com].
I'm not sure why they haven't added a tab for this on their main page, as it would make a lot of sense to separate out commerce-related searches from information-related searches while making both easily accessible.
Re:What am I missing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What am I missing? (Score:3, Insightful)
If you have a relevent site to the search...you don't have to "cheat" period.
These whiners are basically saying "hey...we made it so we could trick people into visiting us and now you're making it so we can't...waahhhh!"..I have no sympathy...go google.
Re:What am I missing? (Score:5, Informative)
"Common sense" comes to mind.
If you read the NYT article, it clearly says that some unscrupulous vendors were clogging up the search results. So, on the first page of Google results, you'd get most of the sites from the same vendor (shell sites, put up specifically to increase the number of links between them, thereby increasing the PageRank).
Google is trying to level the playing field, so that no one site can dominate the results.
Looking at your complaint, I think it would make sense for Google to have a "vendors" checkbox, which would list sites selling stuff, as opposed to sites giving out information.
Re:What am I missing? (Score:3, Informative)
Nonetheless, I think the gains outweight the losses. Spam results are obnoxious.
Re:What am I missing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What am I missing? (Score:5, Interesting)
If Joe (or any other web site owner) really wants to use Google as an advertising medium, he ought to pay for a sponsored link and be done with it. Joe has no right to manipulate the ranking system, and if he's going to do that he ought to be prepared to suffer the consequences.
Re:What am I missing? (Score:5, Insightful)
That acn hardly be considered a situation in which you can price-compare. Google is simply fixing the problem.
The sky is NOT falling. (Score:5, Insightful)
1. You can't say with authority that "Google has implemented a filter." Google isn't talking about how their rankings work. The webmasters and SEO types are like astronomers trying to figure out how Google works by observing samples of results. Take everything they say as a theory and nothing more.
2. There's a fine line between making responsibly search-optimized pages and spamming Google, and many of the people who complain are on the spamming side of that line. If you look in the forums where SEO types (and spammers) hang out, 90% of the messages are complaining that their site has disappeared and Google is wrong. If you look in web development forums, 90% of the messages are from people excited to see their pages' position increase.
3. For every webmaster that complains about their site's Google position going down, there are one or more sites whose positions have gone up. Often they're equally deserving of the traffic.
4. There are strong rumors (and some statements from a Google representative) that suggest that this is the last major update to Google's database, and that incremental "freshbot" updates will continue from now on. If this is the case, it may only be a day or a week before your site changes position again, so why complain?
5. Most importantly, notice that it's always webmasters complaining. Never end-users. Guess which group Google considers its customers?
Re:The sky is NOT falling. (Score:5, Insightful)
Since these people are a small subset of actual users, and probably are not paying for an ad; I doubt there is any concern at all about how they feel.
Re:The sky is NOT falling. (Score:5, Interesting)
My personal theory, albeit based on no hard evidence, is that Google has started to rely less on PageRank. Newspaper articles usually blame people subverting PageRank in some way, but I think they're wrong. Those papers don't realise that Google uses a combination of many methods to rank pages, not just PageRank.
What I think happened is this:
As I say, all this is speculation, but it makes sense to me.
Re:The sky is NOT falling. (Score:3, Insightful)
I think Pagerank and similar algorithms worked just fine when blogs came along - they correctly signaled a potential trend away from historical media control patterns to a new way of disseminating information - particularly political information. But the entities which have historically made a lot of money by controlling the
Re:The sky is NOT falling. (Score:5, Insightful)
Blogs got highly rated because groups of friends linked to each other's blogs. However, those sites shouldn't be linked that high for that reason alone. So, if the only external links on a site lead in circles, then the site really isn't that good, and it gets bumped down.
Basicially, the idea of "I'll link to you if you link to me, and we'll both move up in Google!" now does more harm than good.
Re:The sky is NOT falling. (Score:3, Insightful)
They also indicated a trend in how information is presented, from logically grouped chunks of info to chronological stream of thought. Blogs may be the most convienient way to get your thoughts down, but they are the most inconvienient method of presenting inform
Re:The sky is NOT falling. (Score:3, Insightful)
It would be great if Google had a few checkboxes on the Advanced Search page to disable results from pages matching a certain pattern. Blogs, mailing-list archives, and catalog pages (places which sell you products, rather than tell about products) should be omittable at the user's preference.
Re:The sky is NOT falling. (Score:3, Insightful)
Which couldn't find anything.
Re:The sky is NOT falling. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not webmasters. It's not end-users. It's advertisers.
Advertisers are the only ones that Google has to answer to. If they do something that makes their advertisers go away, you can bet that they will quickly reverse that decision. And, the only thing that will make advertisers go away is whatever makes end-users go away.
You see, for Google (of for any other media outlet, for that matter) the advertiser is the customer, and the end-user or reader is the product. The content is the means of delivering the product to the customer.
What defines "customer?" Someone who gives you money in exchange for goods and services.
Google does have customers other than advertisers: select webmasters who purchase Google's services for their own Intra-/Internet presences. Even here, the customer is not the end-user, but is the webmaster himself. In this case, Google's best interest is to return searches the webmaster considers favorable (which, ultimately, are those pages the webmaster thinks the end-user should see).
So, you see, Google's interests are where the money is. And the money is in advertising and select webmasters. Perhaps in Google's Internet search, they favor companies who have purchased their services. Perhaps they demote companies who have refused to, but that's only speculation on my part.
Re:The sky is NOT falling. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The sky is NOT falling. (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree.
There are 2 parts to this business transaction you describe--that is, Google selling ads to folks for money.
The ads, per se, have no value. What the people who pay Google the money really want is for people to see those ads. The "product" if you will allow an overused term--is eyeballs.
Google needs to maintain its position as the place to go to find things on the web. That means making sure that the vast majority of surfers say "Google is your friend.", not "Google links to spam."
Re:The sky is NOT falling. (Score:3, Informative)
We did a case study about this in one of my MSc classes. The example was Guinness: its end users are obviously drinkers, but it has no direct commercial relationship with them. Rather, it sells via pubs, which are owned by brewers, and Guinne
Re:The sky is NOT falling. (Score:4, Interesting)
This time, however, from what I can estimate most of the topped ranked pages have changed for a particular search term, which indicates a major change in Google's algorithm, which is particularly newsworthy. If that isn't news, then what is?
The reason businesses are complaining is that there are tens of thousands of small businesses that make their living from customers who find them via Google, which is also newsworthy. And most aren't SEO professionals or scammers who've illictly tried to artificially boost their rankings, thank you very much.
Whether the change will also elicit complaints from searchers has yet to be seen-- some search terms seem to return relevant results and some do not.
Re:The sky is NOT falling. (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone who makes a living running a business that is wholly dependent on Google results is--come on, let's all say it together--a moron. Google is under absolutely no obligation to pander to these people (many of whom are technically inept to the point where they think that hiring a search engine "optimizer" to cheat search algorithms is a perfectly legitimate thing to do), particularly because:
MetaRefresh=0 (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, pages with too many advertiser-only tricks seem to be down. They are still there, but fewer. I guess this is
Re:The sky is NOT falling. (Score:3, Interesting)
2) No, most of the people complaining are NOT on the spamming side. Read the article. It's primarily people on the COMMERCIAL side. Commercial sites have beend dropped, and educational (or entirely non-related sites) have taken their place.
3) Other sites have gone up
DAMN!...... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:DAMN!...... (Score:2)
Now, I just took a look at my page and the ranking is 0/10.
So it seems your fears are correct.
Junk Sites (Score:3, Interesting)
Meta keywords (Score:2)
CB
2nd Article Text (In case of /.'ing) (Score:4, Informative)
With the huge number of postings on all the various forums, concerning this update, most people don't know where to start looking for information about the recent Google update. The following is an attempt to put down rationally (I hope) most of the information that is known and the (unproven) theories behind the update algo.
Introduction.
Starting on the 16th of November, a major shift in results was seen on Google. Veterans recognised that Google appeared to be doing a major update, not seen for many months, as reported first on WebMasterWorld [webmasterworld.com] who named it Florida, continuing the tradition of naming updates rather like hurricanes. In this case it was a hurricane! As was usual with many updates, there were moans and groans as people complained about their sites falling. Many people were unaffected (including us) but the symptoms of the sites being dropped were not usual. No penalties, such as PR0, seem to have been applied against pages that had fallen - yet none of the pages targeted at specific key phrases, particularly index/home pages, appeared in the top results for these search terms. Indeed some had dropped hundreds of places and, in some cases reported, off the scale. Yet these pages did appear for obscure phrases and were obviously still in the index.
It appeared to us and to several other respected names (though hotly disputed by others) that some sort of over-SEOd filter had been applied to check if overt SEO had been done for that particular phrase. It was as if Google were checking to see if external links to the site included the phrase, on-page optimisation was being done for the phrase and even if the domain included the phrase. If the density of the optimisation, both on and off the page, appeared too artificial, then a filter was tripped and down went the page - solely for that phrase.
Google had never looked favourably on abuse of their systems and many established SEOs looked upon this algo tweak as a way of Google getting rid of the abuses of links and stopping the scrambling for getting (and sometimes buying) links including your required anchor text from other high PR, but probably irrelevant to your subject, sites. It seemed to make sense.
On Friday, 21st November, Google decided to tighten the filter. All hell broke loose as tens of thousands of sites disappeared from positions they had held (in some cases) for years. We noticed some of our client sites plummeting for their major key phrase from being #1 to total invisibility. Yet this was only in highly competitive areas, not for their secondary phrases. These sites were, in most cases, not highly optimised, had not sought reciprocal links but had achieved their rankings through being on the web for 4 or 5 years. The bad news was that their company name and domain included the key phrase, sites (including directories) linking to those sites included the key phrase in their links and Google interpreted this as over-optimisation and down they plunged. In many areas all the top 20 ranking sites disappeared, including industry leaders, to be replaced by educational sites, news review sites, government sites, major shopping portals or directories. Something major had happened - but what?
The Facts!
Thousands of web pages have been suddenly demoted in the Google search results, primarily on the main commercial search terms for which they targeted their pages to be replaced by other sites who, in the main, referred to the search term obliquely. Several were the main shopping portals or business directories which gave listings for companies who may provide the services requested, many were not.
Very high-ranking authority sites seemed to be unfiltered.
The changes were starkly obvious on regional English language Googles where a regional filter was employed and there were less commercial sites with authority.
An example for Google UK is the search for the word shelving. On the
Good for Google (Score:5, Insightful)
If I want to buy something I use Froogle. That's what it's there for.
Re:Good for Google (Score:2, Insightful)
You don't care, I don't care, Google doesn't care. Who does care?
Oh, some shitty box shifters. Well, I guess they're free to set up their own search engine and frig the results or whatever.
you do realize that froogle is still beta, right? (Score:3, Insightful)
The Real Moral: Google is not your ad agency (Score:5, Insightful)
Jon Acheson
Re:The Real Moral: Google is not your ad agency (Score:5, Insightful)
Analogy: If somebody you barely know started giving you a dollar a day for no reason whatsoever, then a couple years later stopped giving you the dollar, would you be pissed at the giver or be thankful for the generosity you did receive?
These companies act like they're owed something more based solely on the fact that they were getting it before. Merit-less entitlement. I bet the company owners aren't welfare fans, yet that seems to be what they're arguing for here.
Re:The Real Moral: Google is not your ad agency (Score:3, Interesting)
There was a study done (maybe a few) which rated customers' satisfaction with some service (a restaurant I believe). The customers were quite happy for time. Then one day they got an extra freebie, and their satisfaction went up. But the next day when they didn't get that freebie, the satisfaction plummeted below the original level despite receiving the same service. And the satisfaction level stayed low fo
Re:The Real Moral: Google is not your ad agency (Score:5, Informative)
1. Think about putting some kind of unique, useful, and/or entertaining content on your web site that people will want to visit, link to from their own web site, and even email to their friends. Good content builds traffic.
2. Take basic steps to make your pages search engine friendly. Descriptive titles, simple honest meta-tags, useful text in every page, descriptive links to other pages, etc.
3. Don't be obsessed with your Google ranking. Don't give money to anyone who claims they can boost your Google ranking. If you want to spend money for traffic than buy Google Ad Words or sponsor links, at least that way you pay per actual click-through rather than paying into a bidding war for an uncertain better ranking.
Oh, no!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Google was my #1 tool to find my penis enlargement products.
Now I can't even get a home loan!!! And I can't consolidate my debts!!!
What am I gonna do???
Re:Oh, no!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oh, no!!! (Score:4, Funny)
I LIKE GOOGLE. :) (Score:4, Interesting)
That gave that name of that program xxxxx.exe 1 hit on google. About 3 days later a search for the xxxxx.exe provided 3 hits, two of them were porn sites that somehow harvested the name of our
While it's not a huge deal, I e-mailed Google and heard nothing for 4 days. I didn't expect a response and told them that in my e-mail. However then I recieved a personalized (not a form) e-mail regarding my comments and that they'd take the issue seriously.
24 hours later they were able to filter out these porn sites that were harvesting new terms that appeared in Google.
I gotta say props out to the boys there, it's one classy establishment.
Re:I LIKE GOOGLE. :) (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I LIKE GOOGLE. :) (Score:3, Informative)
Hi Dave,
Thank you for your note. Yes, we do offer this kind of search. To find the pages that link to any given URL (say www.stanford.edu , for instance) go to the Google advanced search page at http://www.google.com/advanced_search a
google responses! (Score:3, Interesting)
I didn't expect a reply, but several days later I got a personal response from someone at google explaining what they were going to do about the problem and agreeing with what I said.
Indeed, a very classy establishment, especially when compared to other U.S.-based
Example of what google is trying to prevent (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Example of what google is trying to prevent (Score:4, Insightful)
I HATE when I am trying to search for something, and just keep coming up with crap sites.
I do web design, and my customers keep asking me how to get further up in Google rankings. I always tell them the same thing- have good content, and get other legitimate sites to link to you.
Some of them have been using these services that set up the link farms, and I will be very happy when it goes away.
I would much rather have the REAL website be the basis for the ranking, not a bunch of crap.
Fine By Me! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, many businesses are being hurt by GOOGLE's policy - however, it is GOOGLE's search engine! They have done nothing wrong but try and give authentic results to their Web Surfing friends.
Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Given the underlying reason why google is a good search engine (leveraging the popularity of the site by others), I don't want "my" search engine to be fooled into giving me commercially-orientated results.
If Google has re-organised the page-ranking system to cut out the link-merchants, I give it an unreserved thumbs up
Simon.
Reliance on Google... (Score:5, Insightful)
So some people are trying to cheat the system, and Google is taking steps to prevent this. Good for them, I say. I'm tired of getting pages that appear to be legitimate, only to find that they're just redirect fillers.
As for Google's practices in general, retailers are free to moan and groan about their rankings, but there is no obligation for Google to specifically cater to their needs. If Google decided to change its algorithms, such that all links were turned alphabetically rather than by PageRank, they would be well within their rights to do so. Of course, I imagine that such a move would result in many people seeking other search engines soon enough.
Complaining webmasters? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Complaining webmasters? (Score:4, Insightful)
In this case, to avoid paying Google for an Ad Word fee, they spend piles of money and time setting up cross-linking websites hoping to "beat the system".
This is the same mentality that alot of people who tried to scam DirecTV have/had. I know people who spent MORE MONEY on Hacked DirecTV cards (that constantly needed to be updated...) than it would have cost to have purchased a full-blown monthly subscription!
All they got was Bragging Rights that they "beat the system".
"Look", one of my friends would say, "I'm getting EVERY CHANNEL FOR FREE!". uh huh. not anymore.
hmmm, I had some sort of a point with this post, but now I've lost it. sorry.
misleading writeup (Score:3, Informative)
I did a google (Score:5, Funny)
for "boost page ranking", and got this cheesy online marketing company:
http://www.page-rank.boost-web-site-traffic.com/ [boost-web-...raffic.com]
My first reaction was that these guys are scam artists. But, they did appear at the top of the page...
Obviously it is still possible to scam google. To web experts: how do they do it?
Waaaaaa (Score:5, Interesting)
I for one welcome the change. Too many times have 20 of the top 30 links taken you two one site, but camafloged to google somehow as to look seperate. I experieced this painfully while looking for ringtones for my cellphone.
Google is first and foremost a search engine, not a marketing tool. Those who thought otherwise are finding out they are sorely mistaken.
Re:Waaaaaa (Score:5, Interesting)
That said:
having been a net surfer since 1993, and having NEVER EVER EVER paid money for an online service, other than my ISP -
I would pay Google a subscription fee monthly, maybe even something like $5, to ENSURE that it remained a tool to serve web users, instead of a tool to serve site operators.
Google is THAT important to me.
Without Google, I believe that the web, as a resource for information and communication, would become pointless within the space of 5 years.
I still don't think I'd pay money for any other site. (Including slashdot). Many many sites have started free, then initiated a "premium service" or subscription fee - and faded into obscurity. I think that only Google could survive such a move.
All your searches are belong to google (Score:5, Insightful)
I would wager google's potential control of information distribution and content filtering rivals that of major centralized information outlets like CNN or the NY times. Kinda unnerving.
Expectations too high? (Score:5, Insightful)
From the second linked article:
An example for Google UK is the search for the word "shelving"... On the main Google search for the same phrase, the results return 1 site that sells shelving, 6 shopping portals, 2 Universities and 1 Amazon store. Yet previously these results showed 9 shelving suppliers.
What does this guy expect? He searches on a single word and expects that every result be a retailer? Why not add some extra terms, like "buy" or "seller" or "retail" after that, buddy?
Seriously, should I start crying foul when I search Google for "dog" and it returns information on breeds rather than specific pet-stores?
on the flip side (Score:3, Interesting)
On the flip side, I help run a set of mailing lists for car enthusiasts. We've been around for 12-13 years, and we have archives that cover almost all of that. We were using htdig, and it sucked/broke a lot, so we tried google's search, and it sorta worked ok(mailing list archives are horrible for google because of the crosslinking etc)
Until recently- the last year or so is when we started noticing problems. The last 6 months, complaints about holes and odd behavior have skyrocketed; for example, you can search for "master cylinder 2003" and get some posts, but search for "master cylinder" and 90% of the time, you won't find anything from 2003 in any of the results. The whole seems to be from about 2001-2003, and some messages simply can't be found.
I emailed google pointing out the problem, and after 2-3 weeks, got a long-walk-short-pier kind of email that basically said "we can't really control how much we index, sucks to be you". Thanks google.
Soon as we find a free, full-text search DB engine that doesn't suck, we're switching....we'll probably give htdig another shot, but it'd be nice to have something a little smarter.
What Google needs (Score:4, Interesting)
Google needs to expand its advanced search options to include toggles for different ranking criteria. Anyone who has searched in vain knows this. I have several dead-end searches every week.
Google needs to change it's outdated automatic e-mail reply blurb. Staff may read every e-mail received but saying "[we] try to send personal responses to each message" is just baloney. That was true in the early years.
Google needs to get off its laurels and start listening to its customers again.
Re:What Google needs (Score:3, Informative)
Just FYI
Could be google forcing people to pay for adwords. (Score:3, Interesting)
"Hmm...if peoples businesses are no longer on the first page what are they going to do? Bingo...they are going to pay for sponsored matches to stay in the game!".
And lo and behold...we have finally found out what should replace ???????? !
Step 1)Create worlds largest and most popular search engine
Step 2)Shaft lots of commercial sites that use the most searched for keywords, causing lots more people to purchase sponsored matches
Step 3)Profit!!!
As the article said, it seems to be only the most popular search terms. Which means probably those that require the highest price per click on their sponsored matches. Now, more people will try for sponsored matches on those keywords, pushing the price up (artificially) high.
We are always warned about the dangers of a monopoly/monoculture, and this is precisely why.
Good (Score:3, Interesting)
The more Google does to obscure the peddlers of obnoxious scams and "get rich quick" Amway types, the better.
Barry Llyod - Agent to the Stars (Score:5, Interesting)
I run a teeny Miva Merchant site which used to be a 'regular' (html, cgi) web store. It has been up since 1997 with little or no changes. No meta tags or keywords on the site.
A week after I messed with that stuff, Google put my site at the top of the list when you do a search for some uncommon keywords related to it. It was nice to see, but so far of limited usefulness.
Now with the Miva site (which are notorious for not being indexed) I will have to come up with a revised strategy.
I would tell anyone - pay attention to your tags, and the immediate content of your site. Everyone is fighting for placement using similar keywords, so checkout the top results and see what they are using.
OT - Doesn't Barry look like he's making some deal on the phone? "Yeah, I can get you Ted, but he's gonna cost ya. He's huge at the Laugh 'n' Snort. I think he'll go for that, I'll call ya back."
Google no longer works (Score:3, Interesting)
I suppose it is just another symptom of monoculture. It would be real nice to have two or three search engines that were reliable and shared the market space. OTOH, it is a 'free' service, so I am not complaining, and am happy to have such a service.
Google just doesn't care. (Score:5, Interesting)
Plus ca change... (Score:3, Insightful)
Google updates every month, and every month webmasters throw hissy fits over PR and SERPs.
I get SEO spam simply for being the technical contact for a couple of domains at work, and I will bet my bottom dollar that anyone who does business with those people will be wiped of the map come the next update.
By contrast, all the sites I manage still show up as usual. I've been no.1 on key terms for a while, simply 'cos the sites provide relevant, useful info in a well-structured manner, and doesn't mess around with Google.
One thing I am curious about is whether or not Stuart Langridge's accessible image replacement [kryogenix.org] technique counts as an attempt at spamming Google: after all, it hides header text behind images...
Check this place out: (Score:3, Interesting)
This is the type of link I got back. The last paragraph is my favorite:
http://www.mortgage-broker-in-1.com/mortgage_br
The text of the page, that was followed by a LOT of links:
"Sourcing on the web for the best deals on mortgage broker scams? Well you've definitely arrived at the right place because that's what we're information experts in. Of course, being a new information web portal we don't yet have a monumental amount of information on the precise search term you were looking for - mortgage broker scams, but we're getting there.
Locating relevant and useful mortgage broker scams sites is often difficult. Which is why we created this website. Detailed research went into building this web site on mortgage broker scams to send you to the best web sites.
Coming across the best mortgage broker scams websites isn't as easy as it sounds. After a meeting of our team of planners and engineers we decided to build this site to assist you with your navigation. I'm thrilled to say that the countless hours of work we did studying info databases on mortgage broker scams for you to visit.
As the mushrooming of e-commerce continues mortgage broker scams businesses learn more in offering their products and services for sale The biggest benefit that the web mortgage broker scams businesses will maintain over store-front mortgage broker scams businesses is the significant savings they have an operating a successful business.
This is great! (Score:5, Informative)
KUDOS to Google for fixing this! Whatever changes they've made to their pagerank algorithm, Google is suddenly working again like I expect.
Re:This is great! (Score:3, Informative)
PageRank was never that simple (Score:5, Informative)
It's also known that PageRank isn't a static formula. Google reserves the right to change it at any time, in what is known by Google-watchers as a "Google Dance".
The only legit way to be highly ranked by Google is to be the most authoritative source for information about whatever you discuss, and naturally links will form from other quality websites on your topic and up the PageRank scale you go. www.microsoft.com being a 10/10 ranking doesn't indicate that Google likes Microsoft, it just simply indicates that site is the most authoritative site about a topic a lot of people talk about, Microsoft's products.
Any other way to cheat the system will result in penalties applied to your score. It's not so much a filter as it is negative factors in the formula. Google steadfastly claims that it doesn't maintain a blacklist of "bad" sites, but it is clear that sites designed to cheat Google's PageRank formula always fail once Google tweaks the formula. They don't need a blacklist, they simply identify the characteristics that define a "link farm" and then apply a penality. If a given site has a lot of links to external domains, very little non-link content, and absoulutely every linked to site returns a link back to the orignal site, it sure smells like a link farm and that's what the system penalizes.
To put it bluntly, anybody who's business depends on being displayed on the first page of Google results should be buying AdWords placements. If you're working hard to stay #1 in the editorial results, you're never gonna win. And no, just because your business depends on it doesn't mean you get to sue when Google pulls an ill-gotten #1 ranking out from under you.
Rollback (Score:3, Informative)
I wonder if this rollback was in response to the complaints?
In any case, without much trickery we were able to get relatively good ranking in the latest (pre-rollback) version just by having actual content and decent title & meta tags.
Cheers.
This freakin' attitude of entitlement (Score:5, Insightful)
Google is a service that is, for the most part, free to those who benefit from it.
Somebody discovers that they can manipulate this service to increase their benefit.
The people who provide this (free) service chose to ignore those manipulations. Maybe they deliberately lower the ranking of some pages, to hear the whiny TFH crowd speak.
Then those same whiners--who contributed NOTHING to the process from which they benefit--scream for damages.
If someone invented a pill to make people immortal and one of these jerks didn't get his pill, these same folks would want the inventor jailed for murder.
Until you form a union and negotiate a contract with google--that includes a "past practices" clause, just STFU.
Some ideas for p2p searching. (Score:3, Insightful)
I know p2p search is hopeless [searchenginewatch.com], but here's some ideas on how to do it anyways. I'll phrase it like an inductive proof: first make a node, then add a neighbor.
NODE - I'd use Lucene [apache.org]. Lucene is a traditional keyword search engine that is fast, lean, free and open. It's carried under the Apache Jakarta project, so it's not going anywhere. And, it's easy to develop with. Alternatively, any good search will do... you could probably bang something together with GNU shell utils.
NEIGHBOR - Turn search into a common TCP/IP protocol, a la SMTP, FTP, etc.. Telnet to port 534268 (the digits that most look like "SEARCH"), and have something like this:
If there are no results at that node, the server forwards you on:
So, you'd start by querying your own host's search-engine. Perhaps it would spider N-deep from what you browse, so it would perhaps have ready responses for many of your queries.
But your own node may not have the answer for you, so you forward on to the next. How does the forwarding table get setup? One way to do it would be by hand, but also, I imagine posting "known expert" lists to gnutella could help automate the process. A list would be a map of keywords to IPs. These lists wouldn't need to be too robust, as they'd serve to occasionally seed the network, not constantly sustain it.
Once you had a good forwarding table on your node, you'd have access to quite a large search DB. With 100 nodes in the search network, each using 1GB for its index, and 3:10 index to indexed ratio, that's 100*1GB*3.3=330GB of indexed text. Let's say the average webpage is 100KB (?), that's a total search DB size of 3.4M pages. Increase the number of nodes to 10,000 and increase each node's index size to 10GB, and you have 3,460,300,800 pages, which is just about equal to Google, which is currently at 3,307,998,701. 10k nodes happens to be about what distributed.net is running right now, and 10GB is getting cheaper by the minute. ;)
prime example: ringingphone.com (Score:4, Informative)
Those sham sites are no longer showing up in the Google results, and I can actually find what I was looking for instead of having to wade through the cesspool shopping mall that the internet is turning into.
Coincidence? Or IPO Strategy . . . (Score:3, Interesting)
Another wierd coincidence - by the end of the next quarter, they're supposed to go public (Google IPO - oogles of $$$).
Another wierd coincidence - With Yahoo's recent acquirement of Overture, and the ownership of multiple search technologies, it is rumored that they may end their contract with Google soon, and power their own search.
Another wierd coincidence - MS "trying" to develop a better search engine, already trying to take on Google, even before Longhorn.
Now isn't that a great way to drastically increase their revenue prior to becoming public by making all the top searched commercial sites pay for ads on Google, especially when a bulk of those sites' revenue come from the upcoming holiday season?
Wow - Google seems to also know how to play chess!
This is good news (Score:4, Interesting)
My sites have probably increased in position on Google because of these changes, but I don't plan on reducing my advertising budget.
One Search Does Not Fit All... (Score:4, Interesting)
For the issue at hand, the new filtered results implicitly assume no site can legitimately grab too many links above some threshold for non-trademarked words. But in the case of a shelving provider being referenced as "shelving" (as exampled in the second article), that is not the case. The result is commercial entities with a high PageRank are filtered out.
This is fine for users looking up info about shelving, but not for user looking to buy shelving. Hence my comment on semantic context. In this case, a simple drop down of search prefixes ("I want info about...", "I want to buy...",
And in traditional Google fashion, Google could provide links to possible alternative searches in other semantic contexts, just like they already do with spelling and the like.
The prefix approach is only one possibility. Maybe a sentence parser would be better (if you can convince current users to convert from keyword searches).
Re:Source Claims SCO Will Sue Google (Score:4, Funny)
Microsoft releases MSN Music Club
SCO sues Apple
Microsoft releases Sparkle
SCO sues Macromedia
Microsoft ships new Xbox model
SCO sues Sony
Gates farts
SCO sues the dog