by bussetta on 6/13/13, 9:58 AM with 96 comments
by buro9 on 6/13/13, 11:11 AM
The sites I run are all based around user generated content, and the links are all genuine instances of people sharing information and linking in the process. None of it is backlinks provided to benefit some third party, and we've never participated in link swapping or anything like that.
We think the link removal requests are dodgy.
Suspicion is that by and large the requests do not come from the companies actually associated with the linked site. And that when challenged those senders of the request have then squirmed, apologised and claimed the request was sent by accident.
Example: http://pastebin.com/P9tsWL0x
Basically: I believe that a fair number of these requests are from SEO companies attempting to get competitor sites a lower pagerank so that their properties fare better.
Only a minority of requests seem to come from the companies linked, and in part I wonder whether other SEOs are cargo-culting the phenomena by copying it without understanding it.
I forwarded an example to Matt Cutts a while ago thinking that this whole area feels spammy and dodgy, but I understand he's busy and must get a lot of mail.
I've not removed a single link as a result of these bizarre notices.
by DanielBMarkham on 6/13/13, 3:59 PM
Google owns the game. They run the game on a computer. Ergo, if you want people naturally coming from Google, you must do things its computer likes.
Only they won't tell you that. Instead, they'll offer platitudes like "write good content and the users will come" when we all know you could write great content until the cows come home and if nobody links to you, you ain't getting no traffic.
And I think it's unfair to call all these guys leeches, miscreants, or whatever. I don't like a lot of the things they do, but I also respect the fact that I live in a first world country. I have a good way of living. If I were terribly impoverished and only had to spam a lot to feed my family? I'd do it. We assume everybody else on the web lives the same lives that we do. We also are getting this quasi-religious thing going on where Google must return what I want at the top of the search results. If it does not, somebody has sinned. I'm not drinking that cool-aid.
I'm with Jacques on the solution: a new protocol and the elimination of single-points-of-failure. This thing where Google keeps updating it's algorithm and tens of thousands of people keep gaming the system has to stop. It's not healthy behavior either for Google or for the spammers. And it's destroying the web.
Sidebar: you know, if you think about it, with all the walled gardens and vendors refusing common protocols and such, the web itself is under attack from multiple angles.
by danso on 6/13/13, 1:07 PM
Um...what? If it were anyone but the OP, who always writes with a lot of thoughtfulness and insight, I would've assumed the graf above is satire. Academic discovery and citation is very much being gamed; the only reason why we don't notice it more is because the academics don't have the same tools and infrastructure that web spammers do and, also, the world of academic research is not something the average person outside of academia closely parses.
by DanBC on 6/13/13, 10:32 AM
But things are worse than that! With few exceptions (Stack Exchange and Wikipedia are notable) most searches will return sites that have been SEOd.
My Google search for [spectacles cases] returns these two sites on the first page:
(http://www.spectaclecases.co.uk/)
(http://www.aglassescase.co.uk/)
> Welcome to SpectacleCases.co.uk. You will find a wide selection of Glasses Cases / Spectacle Cases / Sunglass Cases.
> Made from leather, fabric, metal or plastic finished to a very high quality. Hard and soft cases for spectacles, glasses and sunglasses. We also have a good selection of cheap glasses cases which offer great protection for your glasses.
> Welcome to AGlassesCase.co.uk. The one stop shop for Glasses Cases, Spectacle Cases and Sunglass Cases. We also sell a number of Glasses Cloths
> Made from a range of quality materials including leather, fabric, metal and plastic all finished to a very high standard. We sell hard and soft cases for spectacles, glasses and sunglasses. We also have a good selection of cheap glasses cases which offer great protection for your glasses.
These two different sites are the same company.
Maybe they're a great place to buy spectacles cases from, but it's vaguely upsetting that Google can create freakin' awesome stuff (A self driving car! It is actually wonderful and futuristic) yet can't fix this stuff. Obviously, Google are not to blame, and really the problem is with sleazy SEO and odd behaviours by vendors.
by spindritf on 6/13/13, 10:22 AM
Yet. Google's on it though.
>> The launch of Google Scholar Citations and Google Scholar Metrics may provoke a revolution in the research evaluation field as it places within every researchers reach tools that allow bibliometric measuring. In order to alert the research community over how easily one can manipulate the data and bibliometric indicators offered by Google s products we present an experiment in which we manipulate the Google Citations profiles of a research group through the creation of false documents that cite their documents, and consequently, the journals in which they have published modifying their H index. For this purpose we created six documents authored by a faked author and we uploaded them to a researcher s personal website under the University of Granadas domain. The result of the experiment meant an increase of 774 citations in 129 papers (six citations per paper) increasing the authors and journals H index. We analyse the malicious effect this type of practices can cause to Google Scholar Citations and Google Scholar Metrics. Finally, we conclude with several deliberations over the effects these malpractices may have and the lack of control tools these tools offer.
by Killah911 on 6/13/13, 3:02 PM
Granted there is inherent benefit in coming in on top of a google search, but time and time again, I've seen good content naturally dominate and stay on top. Occasionally some black had spammer comes out on top.
And truth of the matter is, I think it's google/<insert search engine here>'s job to figure out a way to discern good content from spam.
Google Dominated early on, b/c they were able to parse thru a lot of the garbage and find you what you were looking for. There will always be spammers. And if this whole arms race thing is true, I think the spammers are likely to hit a ceiling before Google or another search engine is.
As a programmer, my initial instinct was to write code to counter what Google's algorithm would expect. Then, I thought, if I'm going to put in that much work, why the hell not build a better search engine myself?
I believe that if Google doesn't do a great job of getting the best possible results, not only do they face a treat from other giants like bing, but also from crafty programmers who may be writing black hat seo crap now and have the epiphany to try to build a better search engine (yes... I know... I think PG has a real point with the search engine thing)
by babarock on 6/13/13, 10:31 AM
For the people who got introduced to the web before me, how was "web browsing" done in the earlier decade of the Web? I'm assuming Google is not the first search engine available, but I'm pretty sure search engines were not the only way to go around.
I understand the concept behind the web, "a globe spanning network of computers linked by hyperlinks pointing to useful information". But was it as simple as that? You only had access to addresses you knew or links available on these pages? Where did you go to find interesting websites or how would you look for specific information (like, for instance, how would you research the working internals of a car engine for a school project?)
by csears on 6/13/13, 12:31 PM
We could write a simple spec around it. I'd see it being similar to robots.txt in form and function... easy for a human to write, easy for a search engine to parse, easy to generate programmatically if you need to scale it up.
Also, it avoids the black-hat SEO problem since only folks with access to the site could control the content of the disavow.txt file.
Thoughts?
by jiggy2011 on 6/13/13, 11:15 AM
Another problem that seems to be on the rise is corporate shills. In the past these were easy enough to spot, they were people who would go to blogs/forums and spam them with blatant attempts at promotion.
Now they seem to be getting much better, they will come to a site like HN and read the comments that people are posting and will write their own comments in a similar style, not embed links and fly under the radar as legitimate users.
There are marketplaces for selling aged accounts for these purposes. This makes me very skeptical of any type of product recommendation from a website user.
by yaakov on 6/13/13, 11:17 AM
by 8ig8 on 6/13/13, 11:22 AM
A painful tale of SEO, spam and Google's role in all
http://scriptogr.am/slaven/post/a-painful-tale-of-seo-spam-a...
by mmphosis on 6/13/13, 11:11 PM
I don't put all of my search eggs in the google basket.
I think that google search was great for about a decade. In the past couple of years, I am starting to have serious doubts about Google's search results. No I don't want the result tailored to me, or whatever IP address that I am searching from. And, I suspect there are lots of sites that are relevant that are not showing up. I also suspect that someone can do search better than Google.
There are other dominant and not so dominant search engines, please use them ...
https://duckduckgo.com/ http://www.yandex.com/ http://www.baidu.com/ http://www.bing.com/ http://gigablast.com/
by oneandoneis2 on 6/13/13, 11:59 AM
If your site isn't worthwhile enough to be on the front page of relevant search results, why would you pay somebody to set up link farms and comment spam et al that might get your site up the rankings; instead of just paying Google to put your site as an ad when people run the relevant searches?
Either way it's going to cost you money, but one is guaranteed to work & have no negative repercussions; the other isn't. Is it just about price, or do the SEO guys have really good marketing, or what?
by Tloewald on 6/13/13, 10:52 AM
by mathattack on 6/13/13, 2:13 PM
Any time you measure something, you impact what you measure. Without being pedantic about the Physics, look around. If you measure when people get in and our of work, they will optimize around it, and other things may suffer. If you measure defects in code, people will optimize it.
But back to the web... Search by definition is a measurement or prediction of usefulness. It will definitely impact what gets searched. But that collateral damage can be minimized. And it some cases it can improve the web experience, though I wouldn't bank on it. I certainly don't view the Web as a pristine wilderness being destroyed.
by sofiane-d on 6/13/13, 12:20 PM
One one side, systems like Google, facebook... compete to be the best spam filters, on the other side, cheaters try to fight back by using more advanced spam techniques.
At the end of the day, the Web keeps improving and tons of new applications flourish. It also makes it harder to spammers who can then decide to go white hat.
I must admit the quality of Google's SERPs is going down since Panda, especially for long tail keyword phrases, but look, Hacker News is one good example of alternative to Google and Facebook, and the web is not just about Google...
I also believe black hats are the best friends of Google, because they push the level of anti-spam higher, where newer or smaller search engines can't compete because of its lack of history.
by jeremybencken on 6/13/13, 2:39 PM
But then that breeds new problems:
1) The NSA might like the ability to tie every packet to a person, but privacy and anonymity are generally good things.
2) Just because you have a reliable way to track/measure "real" reputation/authority/trust, will that stop people from abusing it? Did the offline version of this stop Paula Deen from building an empire on unhealthy eating only to later reveal her own diet gave her diabetes? No.
Human nature is driving a fair bit of this stuff, and has nothing to do with Google, the web, protocols, or spam. We always try to eliminate the "flawed human" from systems, and it never works.
3) The fact that reputation/authority/trust is unreliable might actually be a feature not a bug. For one thing, it allows some dude with no social capital to get a toehold and get his stuff in front of users. Generally Google allows this to happen, and if the content sucks, it falls away. I don't mind a bit of spam if it's the price for more diversity and opportunity for people outside the "lucky sperm club" to rise.
Overall, I don't buy this "destruction of the web" stuff. If anything, Google has made both the web AND search are way better today. It's possible that Google's anti-spam strategies will hit a point of diminishing marginal return, and the spammers will catch up and the balance will swing in their direction again, but so far that's not been the trend.
I think the equilibrium we're seeing is that Google allows a very small amount of spam tactics spam to work for a while, but they use other signals that keeps that stuff from getting major traffic (e.g. eHow). So gaming the system can get you in search rankings, but if you suck, you won't stay there.
But more importantly, I don't want to trade off privacy and anonymity to eliminate what amounts to a very small amount of spam.
by ahmadalfy on 6/13/13, 12:31 PM
by saosebastiao on 6/13/13, 4:19 PM
by twrkit on 6/13/13, 1:34 PM
For all intents and purposes, Google is the Internet lobby that has the ear of legislators. They're not gonna stand for any kind of protocol reboot that would destroy their fundamental and wonderfully lucrative business model.
by arkitaip on 6/13/13, 10:38 AM
by randomseogeek on 6/14/13, 8:04 PM
http://webmasterfacts.com/google-webmaster-guidelines-seo/
But since the original Google page already explains much, I think there should be no provision of building pages with "verified" keywords as well. Now that official T&C directly states that one cannot take control of the content but one can sure take control of the spam words. What if I had an added service to the link above to some SEO company?
Would that have been ethical link building strategy? I don't know much about how things run around the Google cubicles but I know one thing for sure - No one is going to tell that for the next 100 years.
@Matt: Keep the fight on @rest: Keep the questions coming.
Good Luck.
by acdha on 6/13/13, 11:55 AM
“Destruction of the Web” is a bold title for what appears to be a minor kerfluffle affecting only web marketing types trying to scam search engines. If you produce decent content or something else useful, you can ignore it and carry on: back links will take care of themselves as they have for the last couple decades.
Put another way: the link-bait title got me to click but the anemic post left me less likely to come back and uninterested in sharing. Fix that if you want better search engine rankings.
by pre on 6/13/13, 11:00 AM
Hopefully fewer spam-links and robot-comments, no?
by rjonesx on 6/13/13, 1:49 PM
by Casse on 6/13/13, 2:50 PM
by moron4hire on 6/13/13, 10:54 AM
by jimmaswell on 6/13/13, 2:14 PM