2 ms·

Not sure I understand your complaint. The idea is that these sites get de-indexed after the grace period. (i.e. they will no longer show up in the search resu

Not sure I understand your complaint. The idea is that these sites get de-indexed after the grace period. (i.e. they will no longer show up in the search results).

sorbus 16y ago
During the grace period they would be decreasing result quality. I don't care if all the junk cluttering up my searches will be gone in a few months, because I'm not going to wait a few months to try to find the information I'm looking for. Allowing money to influence rankings (selling "mappings" is basically selling pagerank) would also potentially decrease quality; I am much, much more inclined to having websites ranked only by their quality and the quality of information in them, which is the way search should work anyways. Oh, and a way that this could be broken: One person wants to be at the top of the results for a single, fairly common, search term. They start a bunch of "funnel" sites (hundreds, maybe), and manage to get most of them into the top ~40 pages[1] for that search term. Then, in the marketplace you've proposed, they buy up all of them from themselves, at as low a price as possible. The resulting increase in pagerank (which they're buying from themselves, so only paying google for the privilege) pushes them up to the top of the rankings for that high-value search term. [1] Random number. Could be higher, could be lower.
- grovulent 16y ago
  With respect to your first point - the idea is that these spam sites are cluttering up things already anyway. A result which has them de-listed after three months is better than the current situation. You could possibly find a way to eliminate the grace period altogether if you could find a way to demonstrate the value of particular keywords to those who would buy them. All google would really need to do is release more information about keywords. And think - they only keep that information guarded now because they want to make life harder for spammers. With respect to the second point - again, the answer is to keep incentives properly aligned with desired outcomes. In this case I suggested that the price for a mapping be increased if the marketer already has sold to a stable of quality sites (as determined by other aspects of the PR algo). With respect to your third point - I agree these sorts of issues will have to be sorted out. This particular one would be easily avoided though - just place constraints on how many domains they can register as funnel sites. Yes they can try to game - but now being caught has a real risk - the loss of their legitimate income. But there is no doubting that there will be real difficulties of the sort you mention. Nevertheless, I think the general gist is good - however the final form, black hats need to be incentivised to work with the system, not against it. And this can only be achieved by bringing them into the fold somehow.
  - notahacker 16y ago
    pitches to rank perfectly fine for the search queries before the spam sites push them down the index. The black hat SEO guy therefore isn't adding any value to the unsophisticated end user he targets at all. Better solution: anyone pitching SEO services to webmasters on the basis of their competing sites' higher rankings gets their competing sites booted from the index. Even if your solution were to miraculously yield better results it would still create a massive PR problem for Google, who have always purposefully kept paid and organic search rankings separately. Frankly I'd probably trust an index that directly sold SERPs rankings more than one that deliberately facilitated spammers acting as intermediaries.

Not sure I understand your complaint. The idea is that these sites get de-indexed after the grace period. (i.e. they will no longer show up in the search results).

sorbus 16y ago

During the grace period they would be decreasing result quality. I don't care if all the junk cluttering up my searches will be gone in a few months, because I'm not going to wait a few months to try to find the information I'm looking for. Allowing money to influence rankings (selling "mappings" is basically selling pagerank) would also potentially decrease quality; I am much, much more inclined to having websites ranked only by their quality and the quality of information in them, which is the way search should work anyways. Oh, and a way that this could be broken: One person wants to be at the top of the results for a single, fairly common, search term. They start a bunch of "funnel" sites (hundreds, maybe), and manage to get most of them into the top ~40 pages[1] for that search term. Then, in the marketplace you've proposed, they buy up all of them from themselves, at as low a price as possible. The resulting increase in pagerank (which they're buying from themselves, so only paying google for the privilege) pushes them up to the top of the rankings for that high-value search term. [1] Random number. Could be higher, could be lower.

grovulent 16y ago
With respect to your first point - the idea is that these spam sites are cluttering up things already anyway. A result which has them de-listed after three months is better than the current situation. You could possibly find a way to eliminate the grace period altogether if you could find a way to demonstrate the value of particular keywords to those who would buy them. All google would really need to do is release more information about keywords. And think - they only keep that information guarded now because they want to make life harder for spammers. With respect to the second point - again, the answer is to keep incentives properly aligned with desired outcomes. In this case I suggested that the price for a mapping be increased if the marketer already has sold to a stable of quality sites (as determined by other aspects of the PR algo). With respect to your third point - I agree these sorts of issues will have to be sorted out. This particular one would be easily avoided though - just place constraints on how many domains they can register as funnel sites. Yes they can try to game - but now being caught has a real risk - the loss of their legitimate income. But there is no doubting that there will be real difficulties of the sort you mention. Nevertheless, I think the general gist is good - however the final form, black hats need to be incentivised to work with the system, not against it. And this can only be achieved by bringing them into the fold somehow.
- notahacker 16y ago
  pitches to rank perfectly fine for the search queries before the spam sites push them down the index. The black hat SEO guy therefore isn't adding any value to the unsophisticated end user he targets at all. Better solution: anyone pitching SEO services to webmasters on the basis of their competing sites' higher rankings gets their competing sites booted from the index. Even if your solution were to miraculously yield better results it would still create a massive PR problem for Google, who have always purposefully kept paid and organic search rankings separately. Frankly I'd probably trust an index that directly sold SERPs rankings more than one that deliberately facilitated spammers acting as intermediaries.