4 ms·

Hundreds of millions of searches and visitors in aggregate: yes. Hundreds of millions of searches and visitors in any one keyword niche: not so often. Many we

by bromley 16y ago

Hundreds of millions of searches and visitors in aggregate: yes. Hundreds of millions of searches and visitors in any one keyword niche: not so often. Many websites live off a handful of visitors a day coming from a few core keywords and associated long-tail traffic. For a keyword that only gets 100 searches a day, it wouldn't take many down-votes to affect the rankings of the relevant sites.

moe 16y ago
For a keyword that only gets 100 searches a day, it wouldn't take many down-votes to affect the rankings of the relevant sites. Why do you assume a flawed implementation? Naturally there would be thresholds. There is no reason to devalue a site that's only displayed in 100 search-results/day at all. The sites we want to hit are orders of magnitude worse at polluting the results. We're talking about the Mahalo's and expert sexchanges.
- bromley 16y ago
  Google seems to like building systems that automatically scale across all keywords and niches. For example, for a low competition keyword, 1 link can make a big difference to a site's rankings. For a high-competition keyword it takes many many more links to change anything. It's the same algorithm affecting the rankings in both cases, just in the latter case there's a lot more data being used as input. That's the way they seem to do things, so I'm guessing there's a fair chance they'd take a similar approach to the influence of down-votes on rankings, if they went down that road. There'd have to have some sorts of thresholds, but there'll always be points above which the algorithm can be gamed, just like pretty much every other aspect of their ranking algorithm can be gamed. Right now, in a low-volume-keyword niche, a sleazy operator can kill the rankings of competing sites pretty easily by buying them a few dirty links and letting Google's algorithm do the rest. If a site hasn't got lots of quality links pointing to it, and let's face it, the vast majority of sites don't, it's pretty easy for someone to kill its rankings. A lot of people say that it's impossible to affect the rankings of someone else's site, but that's simply not true. You can't easily affect the rankings of a big established site with lots of good links, but a little small-business site? The reality is it's pretty easy. I don't think Google have any interest in quashing that particular myth, because the reality is actually kind of scary for small business operating on the web. (Apologies if I'm going off on a tangent there. You are absolutely right in pointing out that I was assuming a flawed implementation.)
  - bad_user 16y ago
    Google seems to like building systems that automatically scale across all keywords and niches They haven't been doing a good job lately. For a high-competition keyword it takes many many more links to change anything. Not that many, and do you think that's a problem? Search "viagra": http://www.google.com/search?q=viagra http://www.google.com/search?q=viagra This is the third result (after wikipedia + viagra.com which have a hardcoded boost): http://www.genericviagrarx.net/ http://www.genericviagrarx.net/ Here's a sample of links to it: http://www.google.com/search?q=link:genericviagrarx.net http://www.google.com/search?q=link:genericviagrarx.net I.e. there are thousands of forums / blogs where you can post your link to (even in a proper context, the more popular the subject the better). Hire a couple of offshore workers for $5 / hour, and in a week you'll have thousands of links pointing to you.
    - bromley 16y ago
      Google's link operator is not reliable - it intentionally hides links to confuse SEOs. Take a site you own, for example, and compare the number of links that webmaster tools shows for it with the number of links that Google's link operator shows for it. That site you point to has many more links than Google shows. You can check yahoo to get a more realistic count: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=www.genericviagrarx.net&bwm=i&bwmo=d http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=www.genericvia... But even that is probably only indexing a small fraction of the links that are likely to be pointing to that site. Generally when a site has a few thousand spammy links, they've usually got tens of thousands more that haven't been indexed. Now I'm not for a second saying that that site should be ranking where it is, just because it has a lot of links. I really wish Google did a better job of discounting spammy links.
- CWIZO 16y ago
  Is experts-exchange really a spam site? I always thought they had real users who ask&answer questions. But that they are just a crap site that hides this behind a paywall (I'm aware that the actual content is at the bottom of the page).
  - roc 16y ago
    That sounds like trying to excuse junkmail and spam because someone out there finds it useful and orders the products being offered.
    - CWIZO 16y ago
      I'm not trying to do that. I'm just arguing that classifying it as spam is not fair. I remember (before SO) finding some useful info there from time to time. Whereas junk mail trying to sell me a bride from Russia for 50€ is defenetily a hoax :)
  - Nick_C 16y ago
    I don't know their current methodology, but they got a bad rep because they used usenet postings to answer questions. You could find their answers by searching usenet groups. So they were setting themselves up as a Q&A service, when really they had searched groups for questions and used the answers as though the answers were coming from themselves. Basically they were leveraging off other people's work and charging for it.

by bromley 16y ago

moe 16y ago

For a keyword that only gets 100 searches a day, it wouldn't take many down-votes to affect the rankings of the relevant sites. Why do you assume a flawed implementation? Naturally there would be thresholds. There is no reason to devalue a site that's only displayed in 100 search-results/day at all. The sites we want to hit are orders of magnitude worse at polluting the results. We're talking about the Mahalo's and expert sexchanges.

bromley 16y ago
Google seems to like building systems that automatically scale across all keywords and niches. For example, for a low competition keyword, 1 link can make a big difference to a site's rankings. For a high-competition keyword it takes many many more links to change anything. It's the same algorithm affecting the rankings in both cases, just in the latter case there's a lot more data being used as input. That's the way they seem to do things, so I'm guessing there's a fair chance they'd take a similar approach to the influence of down-votes on rankings, if they went down that road. There'd have to have some sorts of thresholds, but there'll always be points above which the algorithm can be gamed, just like pretty much every other aspect of their ranking algorithm can be gamed. Right now, in a low-volume-keyword niche, a sleazy operator can kill the rankings of competing sites pretty easily by buying them a few dirty links and letting Google's algorithm do the rest. If a site hasn't got lots of quality links pointing to it, and let's face it, the vast majority of sites don't, it's pretty easy for someone to kill its rankings. A lot of people say that it's impossible to affect the rankings of someone else's site, but that's simply not true. You can't easily affect the rankings of a big established site with lots of good links, but a little small-business site? The reality is it's pretty easy. I don't think Google have any interest in quashing that particular myth, because the reality is actually kind of scary for small business operating on the web. (Apologies if I'm going off on a tangent there. You are absolutely right in pointing out that I was assuming a flawed implementation.)
- bad_user 16y ago
  Google seems to like building systems that automatically scale across all keywords and niches They haven't been doing a good job lately. For a high-competition keyword it takes many many more links to change anything. Not that many, and do you think that's a problem? Search "viagra": http://www.google.com/search?q=viagra http://www.google.com/search?q=viagra This is the third result (after wikipedia + viagra.com which have a hardcoded boost): http://www.genericviagrarx.net/ http://www.genericviagrarx.net/ Here's a sample of links to it: http://www.google.com/search?q=link:genericviagrarx.net http://www.google.com/search?q=link:genericviagrarx.net I.e. there are thousands of forums / blogs where you can post your link to (even in a proper context, the more popular the subject the better). Hire a couple of offshore workers for $5 / hour, and in a week you'll have thousands of links pointing to you.
  - bromley 16y ago
    Google's link operator is not reliable - it intentionally hides links to confuse SEOs. Take a site you own, for example, and compare the number of links that webmaster tools shows for it with the number of links that Google's link operator shows for it. That site you point to has many more links than Google shows. You can check yahoo to get a more realistic count: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=www.genericviagrarx.net&bwm=i&bwmo=d http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=www.genericvia... But even that is probably only indexing a small fraction of the links that are likely to be pointing to that site. Generally when a site has a few thousand spammy links, they've usually got tens of thousands more that haven't been indexed. Now I'm not for a second saying that that site should be ranking where it is, just because it has a lot of links. I really wish Google did a better job of discounting spammy links.
CWIZO 16y ago
Is experts-exchange really a spam site? I always thought they had real users who ask&answer questions. But that they are just a crap site that hides this behind a paywall (I'm aware that the actual content is at the bottom of the page).
- roc 16y ago
  That sounds like trying to excuse junkmail and spam because someone out there finds it useful and orders the products being offered.
  - CWIZO 16y ago
    I'm not trying to do that. I'm just arguing that classifying it as spam is not fair. I remember (before SO) finding some useful info there from time to time. Whereas junk mail trying to sell me a bride from Russia for 50€ is defenetily a hoax :)
- Nick_C 16y ago
  I don't know their current methodology, but they got a bad rep because they used usenet postings to answer questions. You could find their answers by searching usenet groups. So they were setting themselves up as a Q&A service, when really they had searched groups for questions and used the answers as though the answers were coming from themselves. Basically they were leveraging off other people's work and charging for it.