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The article calls out two specific companies as "landfill in the garbage websites that you find all over the web." Reasonable people can disagree over whether s
by Matt_Cutts 16y ago
The article calls out two specific companies as "landfill in the garbage websites that you find all over the web." Reasonable people can disagree over whether such content is truly spam or low-quality content, and thus how to respond.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- replicatorblog 16y agoWhat is the difference and how should they respond? It seems to be a rising frustration among power users that Google is increasingly becoming a wasteland populated by spam. For example, Marco Arment recently commented on his podcast how hard it was to find answers to simple questions on Google these days. He was saying that the content farms have basically created a page for every PHP function with thin content and rendered it useless. For a company whose goal is to index all human information it is a pretty big warning flag. What is the appropriate user response? Go to Stack Overflow? Find a branded knowledge base like O'Reilly's Safari? I'm genuinely curious to know what we can do.
- robryan 16y agoDisagree on the PHP function thing. For nearly all function names the php.net page is the top result, even when there is a C function of the same name. Occasionally there is a w3schools or similar close to the top, but it's not like those guys have just wholesale ripped the docs.
- Matt_Cutts 16y agoI was referring to how Google should respond to content farms. Historically, Google has been willing to take manual action on webspam. With the rest of search quality and ranking, Google tries to use algorithms as much as we can. So the distinction of whether something is spam vs. low-quality is an important one within Google.
- robryan 16y agoOne of the reasons the searchwiki approach was a good idea. Not everyone has the same opinion, what one person found helpful another found low quality content.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- ddemchuk 16y agoSounds more like a semantic excuse to justify the proliferation of adsense riddled spam content mills that are chasing keyword search volume and making Google a hefty sum each year rather than a legitimate conundrum.
- robryan 16y agoWhat if this low quality content is able to give the answers the user was looking for when the searched? A lot of the ehow type stuff could be considered low quality to some and informative to others.
- ddemchuk 16y agoI am not opposed to the content mills per se, mainly because I think that they aren't doing anything "destructive" IE comment spamming, phishing, etc. They're using the tools and data that Google freely provides to produce laser targeted content that the algorithm eats up and ranks high because of their domain authority and onsite interlinking. It's essentially a battle between them and Google, and clearly Google is fine with them doing what they do or else they would have stopped them years ago. What most (power) users are opposed to are scraper sites that reuse other sites' content to rank higher than the original content source, and tactics like eHow uses where they have 10 different articles about how to tie your shoe, but each one has a title that matches a different long-tail version of the search query. Again though, the issue is that Google isn't reacting to and clearing out content spam. Most likely because the sites add to Google's bottom line and a spam engineer modifying the algo to remove the powerhouse content mill sites can actually negatively impact the Google's revenue. Also, when we complain about search quality, we're a vocal micro-minority. Most people, like you said, find these sites useful, and haven't even though about the implications of these content mill sites.
- Matt_Cutts 16y ago"Most likely because the sites add to Google's bottom line and a spam engineer modifying the algo to remove the powerhouse content mill sites can actually negatively impact the Google's revenue." This is definitely not the reason. See my comment at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2059661 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2059661 for more context.
- gojomo 16y agoIf we were to pick a random Demand Media or Associated Content page, what are the odds a reasonable person would prefer its writing to a less-cynically-optimized, less-ad-drenched alternative page that the test page has bumped out of the top results?
- fanf2 16y agoNeither spam nor low quality results should appear on the first page of results. I don't see how the distinction necessarily changes how you treat the useless sites.