10 ms·

Google search and search engine spam

239 points by jsm386 16y ago

Benvie 16y ago
For the love of god just give us the tools for effective persona blacklists. With Google's constant changes to the search site and the difficulty in efficiently and effectively monitoring live search results via browser extensions, it's been at best hit or miss. Whether that comes in the form of some API that can be tapped to make a good extension or having it built into the browser, I don't care. Google of all companies I would have thought would understand and respect the important of giving people the power over their own technology experiences.
nowarninglabel 16y ago
Curious though what the metrics they use to evaluate effectiveness against spam are. It could have just as much (or as little) spam indexed as it had 5 years ago, and in some comparisons that would be valid, but what if much of the spam had moved from being evenly distributed throughout results to being distributed in the top positions? Then, one could say spam was even lower than ever in total quantity, but it would be even worse in terms of user experience. That said, I agree with Google, users' expectations have skyrocketed, and it is tough to keep pace with them.
- Matt_Cutts 16y ago
  I actually feel quite comfortable with our metrics. Back in 2003 or so, we had pretty primitive measures of webspam levels. But the case that you're wondering about (more spam, but in different positions) wouldn't slip past the current metrics.
  - nolok 16y ago
    How do you interpret the backlash from the users recently ? In your eyes, have we become more used to "perfect" results, or are the fewer bad results left more insidious and thus more harmful (despite the overall level of quality being higher) ? Personally I tend to find what I'm looking for by adding a few more words, but in the case of reviews and tech stuff it doesn't always work and I often have to rewrite my query one or more times to get something valuable.
    - CWuestefeld 16y ago
      in the case of reviews and tech stuff it doesn't always work This is one of my pet peeves. If I search for "product X review", most of the result I get back are of the form "be the first to review product X", which is absolutely not what I want.
  - bambax 16y ago
    How do you measure your own performance regarding spam? If the measurement system is able to detect spam, why is spam not removed in the first place, before it has a chance to show up in the metrics...?
    - Matt_Cutts 16y ago
      I don't want to leak our eval methodology to competitors, but you can take subsamples and get those samples hand-rated by experts.
eps 16y ago
Metrics-shmetrics. Once I stop seeing StackOverflow clones listed above StackOverflow's original pages I will gladly believe that Google's search quality is "better than ever before."
- nolok 16y ago
  Can you provide a query where that is still the case ? It hasn't happened for a few weeks for me, since stack overflow changed their title seo.
  - lukev 16y ago
    Happened to me not ten minutes ago with the search string "pass json body to spring mvc" The efreedom answer at the 5th position is actually the most relevant - the stackoverflow question from which it was copied doesn't even show up on the first page. There is one stackoverflow result on the first page, but it deals with a more complex related issue, not the simple question I was looking for.
    - magicalist 16y ago
      to be completely fair, the very first link (from the official springsource blog) also appears to answer your question.
      - lukev 16y ago
        True, it does... I just noticed this because I've actually got in the habit of scanning for stackoverflow results, first - they almost always are right on the money, and it's less cognitive overhead to read a site format I'm familiar with, with extraneous discussion well tucked-away. It almost feels like a cache miss when I have to drop down to the official site/documentation, since that typically requires a greater time investment to read through to find the relevant sections. I guess that's a tribute to how well stackoverflow works, most the time. And also to how lazy I am.
        16y ago
powrtoch 16y ago
Am I the only one who was really hoping for some specifics about what they're doing and plan to do about content farm rankings? Without that, the article is virtually devoid of content other than "we're really not so bad!" Edit: By specifics, I don't necessarily mean implementation details, just anything more informative and plan-of-action than acknowledging the problem.
- nolok 16y ago
  Since google wants to do everything with algorithms rather than hard coding (some of) the offenders, the minute they give you specifics the "fix" will be circumvented in some way.
  - space-monkey 16y ago
    Google is probably right to not go down the hard-coding path. Hard coding the offenders doesn't work. You block a domain, they changes names. You block an IP, they switch to AWS so that your choice is to block all of AWS or not block them.
    - nolok 16y ago
      I totally agree, my post didn't intend to say the contrary
- Matt_Cutts 16y ago
  Our policy in search-quality is not to pre-announce things, but we did give some pretty strong hints about planned improvements to search quality in that post (e.g. talking about scraper sites). I'll be happy to talk more about them soon when they launch.
  - powrtoch 16y ago
    Awesome, I look forward to that.
  - jeremycolins 16y ago
dustingetz 16y ago
Google has taken a lot of criticism on HN and elsewhere for an apparent perverse incentive, to direct searchers to content farms with adwords, instead of the original source (like StackOverflow or Amazon reviews). I'm skeptical, because spammy-ad clickthrough rates are already low and trending lower, and I speculate google has great incentive to send people where they want to go lest their competitors get stronger.
- Matt_Cutts 16y ago
  Google also has a decade+ of track record of choosing the right long-term thing for users instead of short-term revenue: 1) not running annoying punch-the-monkey banner ads in the early days when everyone else was doing it. 2) not running pop-up ads when everyone else was doing it. 3) little-known fact: if the Google ads aren't ready by the time your search results are ready, you just don't see ads for that query. We don't delay your search results in order to show you ads. It just wouldn't make sense for Google to suddenly abandon that (very successful) strategy and say "let's keep spammy/low-quality sites around and send users there because we make money off the ads." We make more money long-term when our users get great results. That makes them more happy and thus more loyal.
  - ryanwaggoner 16y ago
    Regarding #3, why are these two things coupled in terms of page load? With all the js stuff you guys are doing now with instant, it seems like you could load up the ads on the right a split second after the search results and no one would notice or care...but I'm guessing you've tried this and it didn't test as well :)
    - Matt_Cutts 16y ago
      Great question. The "don't wait for ads" policy has been around since ~2001, way before AJAX became common. In theory you could make it so that the ads loaded when they were ready, but that could also generate a visual "pop" that I imagine would annoy many users. My preference is just to enforce a hard time deadline. If the ads team starts to miss that deadline and revenue decreases, then they're highly motivated to speed their system up. :)
theoretical 16y ago
I'd be interested in a further explanation of "Google absolutely takes action on sites that violate our quality guidelines [...]". Does that mean that Google manually decrease rankings of spammy sites that their algorithms haven't caught? Does this entail decreasing the rank of the entire domain, the IP? Does blacklisting ever happen? I ask since Google have previously[1] said they don't wish to manually interfere with search results. [1] "The second reason we have a principle against manually adjusting our results is that often a broken query is just a symptom of a potential improvement to be made to our ranking algorithm" - http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/introduction-to-google-ranking.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/introduction-to-googl...
- Matt_Cutts 16y ago
  "Does that mean that Google manually decrease rankings of spammy sites that their algorithms haven't caught?" Although our first instinct is to look for an algorithmic solution, yes, we can. In the blog post you mentioned, it says "I should add, however, that there are clear written policies for websites recommended by Google, and we do take action on sites that are in violation of our policies or for a small number of other reasons (e.g. legal requirements, child porn, viruses/malware, etc)." As the quote mentions, we do reserve the right to take action on sites that violate our quality guidelines. The guidelines are here, by the way: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769 http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...
dpapathanasiou 16y ago
And yet Mahalo is still tolerated, somehow. E.g., this query -- "travel agent vermont" (which I got from this post complaining about Mahalo spamming the web and Google not enforcing its own qc standards http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com/2010/03/08/mahalo-com-meet-the-new-spam-worse-than-the-old-spam/ http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com/2010/03/08/mahalo-com-m...) still returns a Mahalo result in the top 10.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- Matt_Cutts 16y ago
  Google has taken action on Mahalo before and has removed plenty of pages from Mahalo that violated our guidelines in the past. Just because we tend not to discuss specific companies doesn't mean that we've given them any sort of free pass.
  - dpapathanasiou 16y ago
    Mahalo pages are still in your index. Do you consider that site to be a quality & non-spam source of information?
    - vidar 16y ago
      His reply seems to indicate that they are working on a per-page basis, not moving the whole site on or off the index.
      - dpapathanasiou 16y ago
        Google knows what that site is. If they're serious about their standards, they would remove Mahalo en masse from their index. edit: Or, to satisfy lukev, they can keep the index as-is but make sure Mahalo pages never rank high in results.
        16y ago
hessenwolf 16y ago
According to our metrics we are great; pity-about-you, unless you can "Please tell us how we can do a better job." I expected more. It reads like content farm.
- brown9-2 16y ago
  Did you read past the first paragraph? They mention some recent changes they've made: To respond to that challenge, we recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly. ... We’ve also radically improved our ability to detect hacked sites, which were a major source of spam in 2010. And we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content. And they are saying pretty clearly they think they can do a better job on content-farms: Nonetheless, we hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content. ... The fact is that we’re not perfect, and combined with users’ skyrocketing expectations of Google, these imperfections get magnified in perception. However, we can and should do better.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - grindstone 16y ago
    @ Matt, wondering if you can give any insight on how the new algo will affect syndicated news sites? Will it grade them as duplicate content and devalue them? And if so, will google news be held to the same crucible of truth?
  - hessenwolf 16y ago
    To respond to that challenge, we recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly When is recently? We’ve also radically improved our ability to detect hacked sites Since when; all the complaints I have read are from the last few weeks, and when I looked up a medical complaint this week? And we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower Oh, are you now? Of course... Translation 'We are looking into it'. D'uh. that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content This last part is the only datum I got from the article - they explicitly respond to stack overflow, etc... It is still fluff though. What I would have preferred: I made a change on 2011-01-15 and you should see it here, here, and here. 'Here' can be broadly defined.
mmaunder 16y ago
"we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content." "As “pure webspam” has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to “content farms,” which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. In 2010, we launched two major algorithmic changes focused on low-quality sites. " Looks like 2011 is the year that Google kills the scrapers. Look for an uptick in the sensitivity of the duplicate content penalty.
- ryanwaggoner 16y ago
  I don't think they're talking about duplicate content so much as stuff like Demand Media (ehow), Associated Content, Hubspot, ezinearticles, etc, etc.
  - seunpy 16y ago
    What's wrong with eHow?
    - ryanwaggoner 16y ago
      I guess if you find it helpful, nothing. I always skip their results because they're always really shallow. The kind of article you'd expect if you were paying someone $4 to research and write an article on a topic they know nothing about.
      - mmaunder 16y ago
        Exactly, and there are a huge number of $4 sites out there and a large number of companies providing that kind of outsourced content generation. If you've got $100k in funding to blow, it's really easy to get your first 10,000 pages of content and a stream of SEO traffic within a few months. I agree with Ryan that these kinds of sites are worse than scrapers because they're just as useless but algorithmically much harder to detect.
      - kmfrk 16y ago
ddemchuk 16y ago
It doesn't appear that Cutts & Co. are looking to address any of the more popular blackhat link building methods that all popular SEO bloggers continually say "work but you shouldn't use them yourself because they're bad". Until the keyword "buy viagra" isn't littered with forum link and comment spam and parasite pages, Google's algo is still not "fixed"
- SpikeGronim 16y ago
  I think that's a bad example. AFAIK you can't legitimately buy Viagra online, so what results should Google be returning? Where are the awesome web pages about Viagra that you want to see? They don't exist, so the query comes back with spam.
  - MichaelGG 16y ago
    I'm pretty sure drugstore.com is legit: http://www.drugstore.com/pharmacy/drugindex/rxsearch.asp?search=viagra http://www.drugstore.com/pharmacy/drugindex/rxsearch.asp?sea...
    - pixelbath 16y ago
      So should we use the "pretty sure" metric of the domain name matching the product we are searching for? What makes this site more "legit" than others?
      - MichaelGG 16y ago
        Nasdaq:DSCM It seems to me a $200M company offering to sell a product to you via their website would seem more legit than, say, a site you're redirected to after someone hacked some .edu account. (At this moment, the second result on Google for buy viagra appears is a link to www.engineering.uga.edu, but that redirects to some pharmacy site if you click through from Google (but not if you load directly).) So yes, I'd say there's at least some way to compare the legitimacy here.
- Matt_Cutts 16y ago
jonpaul 16y ago
You know, sometimes it really makes me mad that it's difficult to get into contact with a person at Google for support of their products. But, I've got to hand it to them. They could have issued a non-personal public statement like most companies and signed it with "Google Search Team" But instead there is a personal touch. It's public statements like these that add just a bit of personal touch that makes people love them. My 2 cents. Entrepreneurs take note.
- Matt_Cutts 16y ago
  It's safe to say that many Googlers read what people write on the web and talk about it internally, even if we don't always respond. We're power users too, so if a search result bothers you, it almost certainly bothers us too. :)
  - bradly 16y ago
    Matt, Can you speak about the possibility for personal domain blacklists for Google accounts? I know giving users the option to remove sites from their own search results is talked about a lot in these HN threads. Is there any talk internally about implementing something like this?
    - Matt_Cutts 16y ago
      We've definitely discussed this. Our policy in search quality is not to pre-announce things before they launch. If we offer an experiment along those lines, I'll be among the first to show up here and let people know about it. :)
      - eurotrash 16y ago
        Can you let me know as well
- jsherry 16y ago
  The reason you can't in contact with people at Google is because you're not the customer. Paying businesses are the customers. Not just trying to sound snarky - it's true.
mbesto 16y ago
What are people's thoughts on companies who do create content farms? From the perspective as being a successful company rather than "I hate the spam and I hope they all DIAF". Personally I think any type of "scheming" in technology will eventually get caught and then all of a sudden there goes your business model.
- tristanperry 16y ago
  It depends on the quality of the content, in my opinion. Ultimately magazines are 'content farms'. Various game review sites are 'content farms', since they're both designed to 'churn out' content and articles. (To give a couple of quick - albeit silly - examples). The difference is that the content in these two cases is high quality, usually containing images and possibly videos, and with lots of unique ideas and opinions given. So I guess it depends. If a 'content farm' produces good, helpful content, then that's great and should be encouraged (even if it is done on a massive scale). But when it comes to a case like WiseGeek where content is spat out en masse, even if the content is crappy and really short, then it becomes a problem.
spiffworks 16y ago
I can't help but think that this is almost an exact parallel of the iPhone antenna problem. Both companies had minor to medium problems in their flagship products, both problems were vastly overblown by the media, both problems spurred an unbelievable spate of batshit conspiracy theories, and to take the cake both companies responded with the same "This is not a problem, but here's the solution." Good problems to have.
PaulHoule 16y ago
This reads just like the nutrition label on Nestle products: the ones that boast that the product has "3 vitamins AND minerals", and, on a distant part of the package, lists two minerals and one vitamin and what the health benefits of them are. They'd be a lot more credible without the corpo-speak junk in the first paragraph.
- Matt_Cutts 16y ago
  I've got the results of a test run of search results I did in October 2000 sitting on my computer. The Google search results from today are much better than from October 2000. I do think it's fair to make the point that overall Google is much better--and overall spam is much lower than 5 or 10 years ago--before we drilled down into responding to the blog posts from the last couple months.
  - PaulHoule 16y ago
    Matt, I'm sure that Google does better than it did in October 2000. They'd be something horribly wrong if that wasn't the case. That's not relevant to the specific concerns people have about what's happening here and now.
    - Matt_Cutts 16y ago
      Sorry, I was responding to the "They'd be a lot more credible without the corpo-speak junk in the first paragraph." by trying to defend that the statements in the first paragraph were true. Regarding the specific concerns that people have been raising in the last couple months, I think the blog post tried to acknowledge a recent uptick in spam and then describe some ways we plan to tackle the issue.
tmsh 16y ago
I'm just impressed with how this was handled. Consider how much more technocratic this is than a news release from ten years ago. Google issues an announcement via blog post. TC and others start to pick it up. And the original author of the blog post takes questions and provides technical answers, where allowed, in HN.
jonknee 16y ago
The timing of this is interesting... About a week before Demand Media's IPO. Must be a bad day for the investment bankers.
gojomo 16y ago
Please, exile half or more of Demand Media's pages from the index before their imminent IPO!
snewman 16y ago
To me, the most interesting aspect of this situation is the conflict between Google's view and the blogosphere's view. On the one hand, "...according to the evaluation metrics that we’ve refined over more than a decade, Google’s search quality is better than it has ever been...". On the other hand, you can't open an RSS reader today without tripping over someone griping about content farms polluting the search results. There are intelligent, thoughtful people on both sides of the debate. Why such disparate viewpoints? As Matt's post suggests, it could simply be that people's expectations are rising -- search results are getting so good in general (which they are) that we notice the problems more. Or it could be that Google is focused on a narrow definition of "spam" that doesn't cover content farms. It could even be that both sides are "right" -- that overall search quality is rising even as the content farm problem worsens, if Google has been successfully reducing other causes of low search quality. I'd love to see some hard analysis of this. For instance, pick some a reasonably large set of sample queries, and show what the results looked like five years ago, and what they look like today. Of course, you'd first have to find a set of sample queries and results from five years ago.
- Matt_Cutts 16y ago
  We do have some data on this. I'll ask about whether do some comparisons of "Google today" vs. "Google three years ago."
noibl 16y ago
One misconception that we’ve seen in the last few weeks is the idea that Google doesn’t take as strong action on spammy content in our index if those sites are serving Google ads. That's not quite what I've been reading. I believe the more common claim is that Google has a disincentive to algorithmically weed out the kind of drivel that exists for no other reason than to make its publisher money via AdSense. It's about aggregate effects, not failure to clamp down on individual sites. Or, put another way, it's not if certain sites are serving Google ads, it's because that kind of content is usually associated with AdSense. AdSense is definitely a problem for search quality. It creates the same imperative for the content farm as Google Search has: get the user to click off the page as soon as possible. And the easiest way to do that is to create high-ranking but unsatisfying content with lots of ad links mixed in.
- trevelyan 16y ago
  I agree. Also interesting to see that Google defines webspam as "pages that cheat" or "violate search engine quality guidelines." By this definition, scraper sites are not spam at all. Nor are the spammy sites in my field which super-optimize for keywords in ways that make it difficult for legitimate content to rise to visibility. If Google did not operate AdSense, it seems hard to believe the company would not have penalized this sort of behavior ages ago. A love for AdSense is probably the single largest thing spam sites have in common worldwide.
  - beefman 16y ago
    Smaller competitors can't eat their lunch in web search, because all the content that was on the web is now on Wikipedia, YouTube, or Google Maps. Personally, I search these directly from the address bar. For the past four years I've only had two use cases for web search: 1. as a spell checker for proper nouns (and before Alpha, as a calculator) 2. to circumvent paywalls on scholarly papers by doing filetype:pdf on the title (works better than Scholar most of the time).
  - Matt_Cutts 16y ago
    "By this definition, scraper sites are not spam at all." Disagree. Our quality guidelines at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769 http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en... say "Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content." Duplicate content can be content copied within the site itself or copied from other sites. Stack Overflow is a bit of a weird case, by the way, because their content license allowed anyone to copy their content. If they didn't have that license, we could consider the clones of SO to be scraper sites that clearly violate our guidelines.
klbarry 16y ago
I just want to thank Matt Cutts for always being classy. His blog posts/comment are always just set at a high bar.
bitskits 16y ago
I think there might be something else at work here: our rising expectations of how search engines should work. In years past, Google's results were measurably less relevant than they are today. In the time between "then" and "now", we're grown more accustomed to high quality, fast, relevant results. I think this makes it seem like small problems in search are bigger than they are. It would be great if there was a "Google of 2004" to test this side by side, but I don't think that is possible. :)
vannevar 16y ago
Google cannot escape their fundamental conflict of interest: they make money by selling web traffic to advertisers, then buying that traffic back at discounted rates and re-selling it again, over and over. None of their revenue comes directly from search, though search is their primary source of raw traffic. Their search results don't have to be good, they just have to be good enough to sustain traffic. And right now there are so many people who reflexively use Google out of habit that their results could deteriorate substantially (and many would argue already have) before it impacts their shell-game revenue stream.
huertanix 16y ago
tl;dr: Our algorithms already stop resultspam. Y'all are trippin'.
abrahamsen 16y ago
Google have two strong incentives to weed out AdSense drivel sites in the search results. 1. They diminish the value of Google Search as an advertising platform. And Google Search is likely the most valuable virtual estate on the net. I more often click on ads in Google Search than I click on ads on all other sites combined. This is because when I'm on Google Search I'm actually searching for something, so I might click on a relevant ad. 2. They diminish the value of AdWords content network ads. People pay Google to display their ads because they believe they get better return for their money there than on the alternatives (Yahoo and Microsoft). Ads on low quality sites are unlikely to be competitive, so these sites decrease the relative value of AdWords. That is, high-ranked low quality sites with AdSense are a double threat to the main source of income for Google, and I expect Google to make it their main priority. Why, then, aren't they more successful? My guess: Because the problem is a lot hard than any armchair designer would believe. Problems tend to be a lot simpler when you are not the one who must solve them.
- rfergie 16y ago
  I agree with you on point 1; if Google's search quality is not the best than people will (eventually) go elsewhere. I disagree on point 2. Users on low quality AdSense sites almost certainly arrived there from a search engine so if I can display my adverts on a users landing page it will be almost as good as if they arrived on my site straight from Google.
  - storborg 16y ago
    In fact, AdSense ads on sites with shitty content are even more likely to be effective, because users won't find what they're looking for in the page content.
    - zaidf 16y ago
      Bingo. When our indie music site's stream server would go down, our adsense ctrs would skyrocket. The people who come from google go apeshit and start clicking anything--especially adsense units--when the content they were expecting isn't found or isn't functional.
dcdan 16y ago
What is the technical difference between Google being able to accurately measure the volume of spam, and Google removing the spam?
mmaunder 16y ago
As a pointer: Matt_Cutts is the head of the webspam team at Google. He's been very active on this thread. Please search below for his posts.
kellysutton 16y ago
When a company needs to write a blog post in this tone, they are definitely losing ground. What you are saying != how you are performing.
jmount 16y ago
Google AdSense for Domains ( http://www.google.com/domainpark/ http://www.google.com/domainpark/) really makes a lie of not wanting useless content. The designed a revenue source for parkers/squatters.
- dhruvbird 16y ago
  +1 and my perfectly non-spammy blog was rejected by them. They didn't mention the reason but I have a hunch that it was because it isn't about any one or two things. It's about a bunch of things I find interesting - both personally as well as professionally. Now, google must have found it difficult to determine what ads to show, so they just black-listed my blog for ad-puposes. Period.
- drm237 16y ago
  How often have you searched Google and been sent to one of those pages? They don't want useless content in their serps. If someone goes directly to the domain, that's in no way related to search quality.
  - jmount 16y ago
    It is very related. Google made span sites and splogs profitable (through their various add networks). Therefore they are the major funder of spam sites- even if they themselves do not promote them.
jpalomaki 16y ago
I believe it is very hard to implement algorithms that can make a difference between stackoverflow.com and a rip-off, or a legitimate Apache mailing list archive and a rip-off. Why not allow the community to sort this out. "Google Custom Search" already exist. Google could extend that to the direction where people could customize the Google search to exclude certain sites from the results (right now it is only possible to specify a list of sites to include in the search). Blacklists for at least specific "fields of searching" would emerge very quickly. People could select what blacklists to use, if any.
jacoblyles 16y ago
In other industries, the government regulates that there must be a "Chinese Wall" (no communication or shared personel) between segments of a company that have conflicts of interest. In this case, search and advertising qualify. I expect to see proposals for this kind of regulation in the next 10 years as the FCC begins regulating the internet.
- Klinky 16y ago
  Good luck, see the Comcast & NBC merger. The FCC is impotent.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
ericb 16y ago
While I applaud the direct personal response, I feel like the content says "we don't see a problem." If users see a problem and you don't, smaller competitors can eat your lunch. I'm kind of hoping for some competition in the field. In terms of adsense, if you really think about it, adsense content on a page should probably be a slightly negative ranking signal (not just not a positive signal). The very best quality pages have no ads. Think of government pages, nonprofits, .edu, quality personal blogs, etc. If no one is making money off a page (no ads) then whatever purpose it has, it is likely to be non-spammy.
- moultano 16y ago
  I feel like the content says "we don't see a problem." We see a virtually unbounded number of problems with our search results, and we're working constantly to fix them. Most of the people I talk to who work on search have the attitude that Google is horribly broken all the time, it's just also measurably the best thing available. Google as a company, and search quality in particular, does not rest on its laurels. The people who hate Google's search results the most all work at Google. If you think you hate Google's search results as much as we do, you should come work for us. :)
- zone411 16y ago
  Wrong. I mentioned this before. Check out AdSense on the NY Times homepage. If you punish AdSense sites, you'll mostly punish smaller business or one-person sites that are not big enough to have in-house ad sales.
mssfldt 16y ago
Spam is not only in the organic search but also in the image-search. I observed a site that steals 140.000 (!) images by hotlinking (also some of my pictures). First the pages itself seems to be "clean". They only set hotlinks to blended search images, and they got a lot of traffic, that sure. Then they switched the site: on the top there are two porn-ads (it was xslt*us) I wrote a spam report and posted it an webmasterforum. But it took about 10 days until the site was removed. Hope this gets better... And: hotlinking is a great problem.
beefman 16y ago
"The short answer is that according to the evaluation metrics that we’ve refined over more than a decade, Google’s search quality is better than it has ever been in terms of relevance, freshness and comprehensiveness." The long answer is that without Wikipedia results, Google's search quality would be at an all-time low in terms of relevance, freshness and comprehensiveness.
darksaga 16y ago
This is just lip service - Google's quality has dropped off and its really obvious. Recently, I've been regularly comparing the results I get from Google and the ones I get from Bing. Needless to say, Bing's far more relevant. The biggest point people have made are on the money searches like "MP3 Player" but the results I've been comparing have been local searches and programming things like: "show/hide text boxes in Javascript." In Google all I get is links to Amazon and other random results to link farms like javascriptworld.com. In Bing, I get links to forums and tutorials which is what I'm looking for. Time and time again Google has failed. I've already moved on to Bing and Duckduckgo and I would recommend you do too. Unless you like digging through hordes of useless SERPS.
- dori 16y ago
  Consider that possibly the problem isn't Google; perhaps it's you. For instance, http://www.javascriptworld.com http://www.javascriptworld.com (which I run) is NOT a link farm. Rather, it's there to support the book "JavaScript & Ajax for the Web: Visual QuickStart Guide, 7th edition" (by Tom Negrino and myself). Numerous colleges & universities courses use our book as a required textbook. Consequently, many teachers & professors link to it from course websites to let their students know where to download the book's code examples. Yes, that probably helps the site's Google rank, but that was never one of our goals. As a result, when you search for certain JavaScript examples, you may run across my site. And in your particular case, my site doesn't help because you don't own our book. But just because it doesn't solve your particular problem doesn't mean that the site isn't useful for other people. I'm not sure why you thought it was a link farm. Perhaps you should have taken a closer look at the site before using it as a bad example?
antirez 16y ago
What sounds odd of all this is that I think the spam sites and "content farms" are generating a lot of ad clicks for Google. Will they really take appropriate actions against this sites if this will mean a significant cut on the earnings? I played with adsense a lot in the past, and if you did too you should now how spam sites generate a lot more clicks than sites where the user is actually focused on reading content...
rhwd2003 16y ago
@Matt_Cutts starting around page 4 results for the term [loans] what is with all the .edu sites? This seems to be an error on the ranking side of things for all these .edu sites for a financial related term such as [loans]? All the results are .edu after page 4?
- Matt_Cutts 16y ago
  Typically those .edu sites have been hacked at some point.
mwilton13 16y ago
@Matt I like that you pinpointed some specific here, but is the algorithm going to be strong enough to easily pick up things like this: http://posterous.com/people/YrCushFlSet http://posterous.com/people/YrCushFlSet This single account is feeding 100 different websites alone that all feed hundreds of others. This is helping fuel numerous sites in the plastic surgery niche and it's quite disturbing.
- Matt_Cutts 16y ago
  mwilton13, I passed this on to my team when you mentioned it to me on Twitter recently. Have you mentioned the site to Posterous too?
  - mwilton13 16y ago
    Thank you Matt. I am following up with Posterous and the other sites involved on Monday. We reported one of the content farms on blogger last year too.
paul9290 16y ago
A recent Google search for the Walmart being built 2 miles away from me led me nowhere. Google listed 2 pages of job sites listing open positions at this wal-mart. I almost gave up my search, but decided to search twitter and in doing so I found what I was looking for!
- Matt_Cutts 16y ago
  I'd be curious to know where the Walmart is and what searches you tried.
  - paul9290 16y ago
    Jan. 15th I was curious if the walmart was going to be a supercenter so I searched, "fallston md walmart," & "will fallston md walmart be a supercenter." As you can see either result does not show the most relevant and recent info about my query, rather it's littered by prominent job sites. Though on a search for "will fallston md walmart be a supercenter," i see the six result to be http://www.belairnewsandviews.com/2011/01/job-ads-out-this-week-for-fallston-walmart-indicate-it-will-be-a-supercenter-with-groceries.html http://www.belairnewsandviews.com/2011/01/job-ads-out-this-w..., yet that information to me was weak;. it deduces from all the job listings that yes this will be a Super Walmart. Since I found the results/info lacking I immediately went to Twitter and found an even more detailed article(http://belair.patch.com/articles/fallston-walmart-may-open-by-mid-february#photo-4446601 http://belair.patch.com/articles/fallston-walmart-may-open-b...) that had pictures that I think should have appeared in one of my queries. As you see that article was published Jan. 14th and Google did not point me to the most recent/up to date info rather it favored prominent job sites' listings, yet Twitter did. Pardon, if this seems nitpicky, but just wanted to share one of my recent experiences where Google failed me(i have another example too but search was personal), while Twitter did not.
    - Matt_Cutts 16y ago
      This is interesting. Part of the problem is answering questions when there's not much content on the web. I think a lot of the job sites showed up because Walmart is hiring for that location in preparation for opening. I'm just now testing this query, but when I did [fallston md walmart], there is a really comprehensive article at http://www.exploreharford.com/news/3074/work-start-fallston-walmart/ http://www.exploreharford.com/news/3074/work-start-fallston-... that shows up at #5. That article mentions that "The new road will lead into a 147,465-square-foot Walmart, which has been planned with a possible 57,628-square-foot expansion" Then I did the search [walmart supercenter size square feet]. The #1 and #2 results are both pretty good, e.g. the page at http://walmartstores.com/aboutus/7606.aspx http://walmartstores.com/aboutus/7606.aspx says that an average store is 108K square feet, and supercenters average 185K square feet. As a human, I can deduce that 147K square feet (with 57K square feet of potential expansion) implies that it will probably be a supercenter, but it's practically impossible for a search engine to figure out this sort of multi-step computation right now. My guess is that in a couple months when the store opens up, this information will be more findable on the web--for example, somewhere on Walmart's web site. But for now, this is a really hard search because there's just not much info on the web. I appreciate you sharing this search. I think it's a pretty fair illustration of how peoples' expectations of Google have grown exponentially over the years. :)
eitland 16y ago
There are a few signals that should be possible to pick up. Examples: - When power searchers start adding -somedomain.xyz to their searches - Increase spam reporting by adding some kind of feedback to the spam reporting feature. I think I'd love to get an automated mail saying something like: "The site somespamdommain.xyz that you and others reported x days ago is now handled by our improved algorithms". Submitting spam reports really doesn't feel useful when it seems like nothing ever happens. - Adding weight to spam reports. You know a lot about us, and I guess you can filter out who are power searchers. This could help stop people from gaming the system into blocking competitors.
bmastenbrook 16y ago
Beyond the flood of SEO spam and Demand Media-style content mills, there's another search quality problem I have with Google: torrent sites. I will frequently search on the exact name of a song or album on Google in order to find out more information about that song or album, but lately most of the results have been links to torrents, including results on the first page. This applies even if I add "review" to the search query. I will even see links to torrents ranking above links to iTunes. These songs and albums are not available legitimately through torrents. What value is there in providing links to pirated content? I understand that Google is not under any legal obligation to remove these results, but as a non-pirate these results are significantly lowering my perception of the quality of Google's search results.
- klbarry 16y ago
  Google tries to make no judgments about the sites that go the top of their algorithms.
  - bmastenbrook 16y ago
    Isn't this the whole problem? 90% of the web is crap. If Google can't deliver the non-crap, I'll be looking elsewhere.
franksinatra2 16y ago
I was hoping to see something in the latest blog post from Google about spammers using Exact Match Domains to get huge algorithmic boosts. EMD + tools like xrumer usually = first page results :(
zone411 16y ago
First, I haven't noticed any significant increase in the frequency of spam sites appearing the Google search results. The biggest problem that I did notice is social bookmarking sites, like reddit and digg, outranking original content. They often have nothing more than a copied-and-pasted paragraph, sometimes supplemented by low quality comments (as is common with these types of sites). Since this site is very similar, not many people will be concerned about this issue. Second biggest issue is poor Wikipedia articles appearing in the top results for almost any reference type query. Many less frequently updated Wikipedia articles are nothing but regurgitated content lifted from other quality sources. What makes it worse is that Wikipedia is using no-follow for their links, so even if these sites are linked in the reference section, they won't get any credit. It's interesting to see so many people complain about low quality content on commercial sites, but they never mention Wikipedia, which is a much bigger offender (I guess this might be because Wikipedia gets its content for free and doesn't have ads and other sites pay for the content and do have ads). Third, I hope Google doesn't make any changes without checking very carefully that good sites will not be negatively affected. For example, newspapers will often have the exact same articles from the AP, but also original content based on their own reporting. Punishing them for having duplicate content would not work well. There are many similar possible pitfalls.
Darin81 16y ago
What about sites like ezinearticles? Where they do not pay for content, isn't that more like organic content from experts? They are not content machines.
fzk390 16y ago
I also have one spam site example. http://www.google.com/search?q=internet+phone+service http://www.google.com/search?q=internet+phone+service Look at 3rd result for internetphoneguide.org
tomotomo 16y ago
Why don't we collaboratively blacklist or push down domains from our Google results? This could be a stopgap measure until Google incorporates such a feature including the collaborative database or magically puts an end to spam. A proposal: http://www.saigonist.com/content/google-spam-content-farm-filter http://www.saigonist.com/content/google-spam-content-farm-fi...
jrmg 16y ago
The problem isn't just rank though. After I've seen the original source of duplicated content, I don't just want sites that copy it to rank below it, I want to not see them at all, so that the rest of my results are filled with /different/ things.

239 points by jsm386 16y ago

For the love of god just give us the tools for effective persona blacklists. With Google's constant changes to the search site and the difficulty in efficiently and effectively monitoring live search results via browser extensions, it's been at best hit or miss. Whether that comes in the form of some API that can be tapped to make a good extension or having it built into the browser, I don't care. Google of all companies I would have thought would understand and respect the important of giving people the power over their own technology experiences.

nowarninglabel 16y ago

Curious though what the metrics they use to evaluate effectiveness against spam are. It could have just as much (or as little) spam indexed as it had 5 years ago, and in some comparisons that would be valid, but what if much of the spam had moved from being evenly distributed throughout results to being distributed in the top positions? Then, one could say spam was even lower than ever in total quantity, but it would be even worse in terms of user experience. That said, I agree with Google, users' expectations have skyrocketed, and it is tough to keep pace with them.

Matt_Cutts 16y ago
I actually feel quite comfortable with our metrics. Back in 2003 or so, we had pretty primitive measures of webspam levels. But the case that you're wondering about (more spam, but in different positions) wouldn't slip past the current metrics.
- nolok 16y ago
  How do you interpret the backlash from the users recently ? In your eyes, have we become more used to "perfect" results, or are the fewer bad results left more insidious and thus more harmful (despite the overall level of quality being higher) ? Personally I tend to find what I'm looking for by adding a few more words, but in the case of reviews and tech stuff it doesn't always work and I often have to rewrite my query one or more times to get something valuable.
  - CWuestefeld 16y ago
    in the case of reviews and tech stuff it doesn't always work This is one of my pet peeves. If I search for "product X review", most of the result I get back are of the form "be the first to review product X", which is absolutely not what I want.
- bambax 16y ago
  How do you measure your own performance regarding spam? If the measurement system is able to detect spam, why is spam not removed in the first place, before it has a chance to show up in the metrics...?
  - Matt_Cutts 16y ago
    I don't want to leak our eval methodology to competitors, but you can take subsamples and get those samples hand-rated by experts.

eps 16y ago

Metrics-shmetrics. Once I stop seeing StackOverflow clones listed above StackOverflow's original pages I will gladly believe that Google's search quality is "better than ever before."

nolok 16y ago
Can you provide a query where that is still the case ? It hasn't happened for a few weeks for me, since stack overflow changed their title seo.
- lukev 16y ago
  Happened to me not ten minutes ago with the search string "pass json body to spring mvc" The efreedom answer at the 5th position is actually the most relevant - the stackoverflow question from which it was copied doesn't even show up on the first page. There is one stackoverflow result on the first page, but it deals with a more complex related issue, not the simple question I was looking for.
  - magicalist 16y ago
    to be completely fair, the very first link (from the official springsource blog) also appears to answer your question.
    - lukev 16y ago
      True, it does... I just noticed this because I've actually got in the habit of scanning for stackoverflow results, first - they almost always are right on the money, and it's less cognitive overhead to read a site format I'm familiar with, with extraneous discussion well tucked-away. It almost feels like a cache miss when I have to drop down to the official site/documentation, since that typically requires a greater time investment to read through to find the relevant sections. I guess that's a tribute to how well stackoverflow works, most the time. And also to how lazy I am.
      - 16y ago

powrtoch 16y ago

Am I the only one who was really hoping for some specifics about what they're doing and plan to do about content farm rankings? Without that, the article is virtually devoid of content other than "we're really not so bad!" Edit: By specifics, I don't necessarily mean implementation details, just anything more informative and plan-of-action than acknowledging the problem.

nolok 16y ago
Since google wants to do everything with algorithms rather than hard coding (some of) the offenders, the minute they give you specifics the "fix" will be circumvented in some way.
- space-monkey 16y ago
  Google is probably right to not go down the hard-coding path. Hard coding the offenders doesn't work. You block a domain, they changes names. You block an IP, they switch to AWS so that your choice is to block all of AWS or not block them.
  - nolok 16y ago
    I totally agree, my post didn't intend to say the contrary
Matt_Cutts 16y ago
Our policy in search-quality is not to pre-announce things, but we did give some pretty strong hints about planned improvements to search quality in that post (e.g. talking about scraper sites). I'll be happy to talk more about them soon when they launch.
- powrtoch 16y ago
  Awesome, I look forward to that.
- jeremycolins 16y ago

dustingetz 16y ago

Google has taken a lot of criticism on HN and elsewhere for an apparent perverse incentive, to direct searchers to content farms with adwords, instead of the original source (like StackOverflow or Amazon reviews). I'm skeptical, because spammy-ad clickthrough rates are already low and trending lower, and I speculate google has great incentive to send people where they want to go lest their competitors get stronger.

Matt_Cutts 16y ago
Google also has a decade+ of track record of choosing the right long-term thing for users instead of short-term revenue: 1) not running annoying punch-the-monkey banner ads in the early days when everyone else was doing it. 2) not running pop-up ads when everyone else was doing it. 3) little-known fact: if the Google ads aren't ready by the time your search results are ready, you just don't see ads for that query. We don't delay your search results in order to show you ads. It just wouldn't make sense for Google to suddenly abandon that (very successful) strategy and say "let's keep spammy/low-quality sites around and send users there because we make money off the ads." We make more money long-term when our users get great results. That makes them more happy and thus more loyal.
- ryanwaggoner 16y ago
  Regarding #3, why are these two things coupled in terms of page load? With all the js stuff you guys are doing now with instant, it seems like you could load up the ads on the right a split second after the search results and no one would notice or care...but I'm guessing you've tried this and it didn't test as well :)
  - Matt_Cutts 16y ago
    Great question. The "don't wait for ads" policy has been around since ~2001, way before AJAX became common. In theory you could make it so that the ads loaded when they were ready, but that could also generate a visual "pop" that I imagine would annoy many users. My preference is just to enforce a hard time deadline. If the ads team starts to miss that deadline and revenue decreases, then they're highly motivated to speed their system up. :)

theoretical 16y ago

I'd be interested in a further explanation of "Google absolutely takes action on sites that violate our quality guidelines [...]". Does that mean that Google manually decrease rankings of spammy sites that their algorithms haven't caught? Does this entail decreasing the rank of the entire domain, the IP? Does blacklisting ever happen? I ask since Google have previously[1] said they don't wish to manually interfere with search results. [1] "The second reason we have a principle against manually adjusting our results is that often a broken query is just a symptom of a potential improvement to be made to our ranking algorithm" - http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/introduction-to-google-ranking.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/introduction-to-googl...

Matt_Cutts 16y ago
"Does that mean that Google manually decrease rankings of spammy sites that their algorithms haven't caught?" Although our first instinct is to look for an algorithmic solution, yes, we can. In the blog post you mentioned, it says "I should add, however, that there are clear written policies for websites recommended by Google, and we do take action on sites that are in violation of our policies or for a small number of other reasons (e.g. legal requirements, child porn, viruses/malware, etc)." As the quote mentions, we do reserve the right to take action on sites that violate our quality guidelines. The guidelines are here, by the way: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769 http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...

dpapathanasiou 16y ago

And yet Mahalo is still tolerated, somehow. E.g., this query -- "travel agent vermont" (which I got from this post complaining about Mahalo spamming the web and Google not enforcing its own qc standards http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com/2010/03/08/mahalo-com-meet-the-new-spam-worse-than-the-old-spam/ http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com/2010/03/08/mahalo-com-m...) still returns a Mahalo result in the top 10.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
Matt_Cutts 16y ago
Google has taken action on Mahalo before and has removed plenty of pages from Mahalo that violated our guidelines in the past. Just because we tend not to discuss specific companies doesn't mean that we've given them any sort of free pass.
- dpapathanasiou 16y ago
  Mahalo pages are still in your index. Do you consider that site to be a quality & non-spam source of information?
  - vidar 16y ago
    His reply seems to indicate that they are working on a per-page basis, not moving the whole site on or off the index.
    - dpapathanasiou 16y ago
      Google knows what that site is. If they're serious about their standards, they would remove Mahalo en masse from their index. edit: Or, to satisfy lukev, they can keep the index as-is but make sure Mahalo pages never rank high in results.
      - 16y ago

hessenwolf 16y ago

According to our metrics we are great; pity-about-you, unless you can "Please tell us how we can do a better job." I expected more. It reads like content farm.

brown9-2 16y ago
Did you read past the first paragraph? They mention some recent changes they've made: To respond to that challenge, we recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly. ... We’ve also radically improved our ability to detect hacked sites, which were a major source of spam in 2010. And we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content. And they are saying pretty clearly they think they can do a better job on content-farms: Nonetheless, we hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content. ... The fact is that we’re not perfect, and combined with users’ skyrocketing expectations of Google, these imperfections get magnified in perception. However, we can and should do better.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- grindstone 16y ago
  @ Matt, wondering if you can give any insight on how the new algo will affect syndicated news sites? Will it grade them as duplicate content and devalue them? And if so, will google news be held to the same crucible of truth?
- hessenwolf 16y ago
  To respond to that challenge, we recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly When is recently? We’ve also radically improved our ability to detect hacked sites Since when; all the complaints I have read are from the last few weeks, and when I looked up a medical complaint this week? And we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower Oh, are you now? Of course... Translation 'We are looking into it'. D'uh. that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content This last part is the only datum I got from the article - they explicitly respond to stack overflow, etc... It is still fluff though. What I would have preferred: I made a change on 2011-01-15 and you should see it here, here, and here. 'Here' can be broadly defined.

mmaunder 16y ago

"we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content." "As “pure webspam” has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to “content farms,” which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. In 2010, we launched two major algorithmic changes focused on low-quality sites. " Looks like 2011 is the year that Google kills the scrapers. Look for an uptick in the sensitivity of the duplicate content penalty.

ryanwaggoner 16y ago
I don't think they're talking about duplicate content so much as stuff like Demand Media (ehow), Associated Content, Hubspot, ezinearticles, etc, etc.
- seunpy 16y ago
  What's wrong with eHow?
  - ryanwaggoner 16y ago
    I guess if you find it helpful, nothing. I always skip their results because they're always really shallow. The kind of article you'd expect if you were paying someone $4 to research and write an article on a topic they know nothing about.
    - mmaunder 16y ago
      Exactly, and there are a huge number of $4 sites out there and a large number of companies providing that kind of outsourced content generation. If you've got $100k in funding to blow, it's really easy to get your first 10,000 pages of content and a stream of SEO traffic within a few months. I agree with Ryan that these kinds of sites are worse than scrapers because they're just as useless but algorithmically much harder to detect.
    - kmfrk 16y ago

ddemchuk 16y ago

It doesn't appear that Cutts & Co. are looking to address any of the more popular blackhat link building methods that all popular SEO bloggers continually say "work but you shouldn't use them yourself because they're bad". Until the keyword "buy viagra" isn't littered with forum link and comment spam and parasite pages, Google's algo is still not "fixed"

SpikeGronim 16y ago
I think that's a bad example. AFAIK you can't legitimately buy Viagra online, so what results should Google be returning? Where are the awesome web pages about Viagra that you want to see? They don't exist, so the query comes back with spam.
- MichaelGG 16y ago
  I'm pretty sure drugstore.com is legit: http://www.drugstore.com/pharmacy/drugindex/rxsearch.asp?search=viagra http://www.drugstore.com/pharmacy/drugindex/rxsearch.asp?sea...
  - pixelbath 16y ago
    So should we use the "pretty sure" metric of the domain name matching the product we are searching for? What makes this site more "legit" than others?
    - MichaelGG 16y ago
      Nasdaq:DSCM It seems to me a $200M company offering to sell a product to you via their website would seem more legit than, say, a site you're redirected to after someone hacked some .edu account. (At this moment, the second result on Google for buy viagra appears is a link to www.engineering.uga.edu, but that redirects to some pharmacy site if you click through from Google (but not if you load directly).) So yes, I'd say there's at least some way to compare the legitimacy here.
Matt_Cutts 16y ago

jonpaul 16y ago

You know, sometimes it really makes me mad that it's difficult to get into contact with a person at Google for support of their products. But, I've got to hand it to them. They could have issued a non-personal public statement like most companies and signed it with "Google Search Team" But instead there is a personal touch. It's public statements like these that add just a bit of personal touch that makes people love them. My 2 cents. Entrepreneurs take note.

Matt_Cutts 16y ago
It's safe to say that many Googlers read what people write on the web and talk about it internally, even if we don't always respond. We're power users too, so if a search result bothers you, it almost certainly bothers us too. :)
- bradly 16y ago
  Matt, Can you speak about the possibility for personal domain blacklists for Google accounts? I know giving users the option to remove sites from their own search results is talked about a lot in these HN threads. Is there any talk internally about implementing something like this?
  - Matt_Cutts 16y ago
    We've definitely discussed this. Our policy in search quality is not to pre-announce things before they launch. If we offer an experiment along those lines, I'll be among the first to show up here and let people know about it. :)
    - eurotrash 16y ago
      Can you let me know as well
jsherry 16y ago
The reason you can't in contact with people at Google is because you're not the customer. Paying businesses are the customers. Not just trying to sound snarky - it's true.

mbesto 16y ago

What are people's thoughts on companies who do create content farms? From the perspective as being a successful company rather than "I hate the spam and I hope they all DIAF". Personally I think any type of "scheming" in technology will eventually get caught and then all of a sudden there goes your business model.

tristanperry 16y ago
It depends on the quality of the content, in my opinion. Ultimately magazines are 'content farms'. Various game review sites are 'content farms', since they're both designed to 'churn out' content and articles. (To give a couple of quick - albeit silly - examples). The difference is that the content in these two cases is high quality, usually containing images and possibly videos, and with lots of unique ideas and opinions given. So I guess it depends. If a 'content farm' produces good, helpful content, then that's great and should be encouraged (even if it is done on a massive scale). But when it comes to a case like WiseGeek where content is spat out en masse, even if the content is crappy and really short, then it becomes a problem.

spiffworks 16y ago

I can't help but think that this is almost an exact parallel of the iPhone antenna problem. Both companies had minor to medium problems in their flagship products, both problems were vastly overblown by the media, both problems spurred an unbelievable spate of batshit conspiracy theories, and to take the cake both companies responded with the same "This is not a problem, but here's the solution." Good problems to have.

PaulHoule 16y ago

This reads just like the nutrition label on Nestle products: the ones that boast that the product has "3 vitamins AND minerals", and, on a distant part of the package, lists two minerals and one vitamin and what the health benefits of them are. They'd be a lot more credible without the corpo-speak junk in the first paragraph.

Matt_Cutts 16y ago
I've got the results of a test run of search results I did in October 2000 sitting on my computer. The Google search results from today are much better than from October 2000. I do think it's fair to make the point that overall Google is much better--and overall spam is much lower than 5 or 10 years ago--before we drilled down into responding to the blog posts from the last couple months.
- PaulHoule 16y ago
  Matt, I'm sure that Google does better than it did in October 2000. They'd be something horribly wrong if that wasn't the case. That's not relevant to the specific concerns people have about what's happening here and now.
  - Matt_Cutts 16y ago
    Sorry, I was responding to the "They'd be a lot more credible without the corpo-speak junk in the first paragraph." by trying to defend that the statements in the first paragraph were true. Regarding the specific concerns that people have been raising in the last couple months, I think the blog post tried to acknowledge a recent uptick in spam and then describe some ways we plan to tackle the issue.

tmsh 16y ago

I'm just impressed with how this was handled. Consider how much more technocratic this is than a news release from ten years ago. Google issues an announcement via blog post. TC and others start to pick it up. And the original author of the blog post takes questions and provides technical answers, where allowed, in HN.

jonknee 16y ago

The timing of this is interesting... About a week before Demand Media's IPO. Must be a bad day for the investment bankers.

gojomo 16y ago

Please, exile half or more of Demand Media's pages from the index before their imminent IPO!

snewman 16y ago

To me, the most interesting aspect of this situation is the conflict between Google's view and the blogosphere's view. On the one hand, "...according to the evaluation metrics that we’ve refined over more than a decade, Google’s search quality is better than it has ever been...". On the other hand, you can't open an RSS reader today without tripping over someone griping about content farms polluting the search results. There are intelligent, thoughtful people on both sides of the debate. Why such disparate viewpoints? As Matt's post suggests, it could simply be that people's expectations are rising -- search results are getting so good in general (which they are) that we notice the problems more. Or it could be that Google is focused on a narrow definition of "spam" that doesn't cover content farms. It could even be that both sides are "right" -- that overall search quality is rising even as the content farm problem worsens, if Google has been successfully reducing other causes of low search quality. I'd love to see some hard analysis of this. For instance, pick some a reasonably large set of sample queries, and show what the results looked like five years ago, and what they look like today. Of course, you'd first have to find a set of sample queries and results from five years ago.

Matt_Cutts 16y ago
We do have some data on this. I'll ask about whether do some comparisons of "Google today" vs. "Google three years ago."

noibl 16y ago

One misconception that we’ve seen in the last few weeks is the idea that Google doesn’t take as strong action on spammy content in our index if those sites are serving Google ads. That's not quite what I've been reading. I believe the more common claim is that Google has a disincentive to algorithmically weed out the kind of drivel that exists for no other reason than to make its publisher money via AdSense. It's about aggregate effects, not failure to clamp down on individual sites. Or, put another way, it's not if certain sites are serving Google ads, it's because that kind of content is usually associated with AdSense. AdSense is definitely a problem for search quality. It creates the same imperative for the content farm as Google Search has: get the user to click off the page as soon as possible. And the easiest way to do that is to create high-ranking but unsatisfying content with lots of ad links mixed in.

trevelyan 16y ago
I agree. Also interesting to see that Google defines webspam as "pages that cheat" or "violate search engine quality guidelines." By this definition, scraper sites are not spam at all. Nor are the spammy sites in my field which super-optimize for keywords in ways that make it difficult for legitimate content to rise to visibility. If Google did not operate AdSense, it seems hard to believe the company would not have penalized this sort of behavior ages ago. A love for AdSense is probably the single largest thing spam sites have in common worldwide.
- beefman 16y ago
  Smaller competitors can't eat their lunch in web search, because all the content that was on the web is now on Wikipedia, YouTube, or Google Maps. Personally, I search these directly from the address bar. For the past four years I've only had two use cases for web search: 1. as a spell checker for proper nouns (and before Alpha, as a calculator) 2. to circumvent paywalls on scholarly papers by doing filetype:pdf on the title (works better than Scholar most of the time).
- Matt_Cutts 16y ago
  "By this definition, scraper sites are not spam at all." Disagree. Our quality guidelines at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769 http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en... say "Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content." Duplicate content can be content copied within the site itself or copied from other sites. Stack Overflow is a bit of a weird case, by the way, because their content license allowed anyone to copy their content. If they didn't have that license, we could consider the clones of SO to be scraper sites that clearly violate our guidelines.

klbarry 16y ago

I just want to thank Matt Cutts for always being classy. His blog posts/comment are always just set at a high bar.

bitskits 16y ago

I think there might be something else at work here: our rising expectations of how search engines should work. In years past, Google's results were measurably less relevant than they are today. In the time between "then" and "now", we're grown more accustomed to high quality, fast, relevant results. I think this makes it seem like small problems in search are bigger than they are. It would be great if there was a "Google of 2004" to test this side by side, but I don't think that is possible. :)

vannevar 16y ago

Google cannot escape their fundamental conflict of interest: they make money by selling web traffic to advertisers, then buying that traffic back at discounted rates and re-selling it again, over and over. None of their revenue comes directly from search, though search is their primary source of raw traffic. Their search results don't have to be good, they just have to be good enough to sustain traffic. And right now there are so many people who reflexively use Google out of habit that their results could deteriorate substantially (and many would argue already have) before it impacts their shell-game revenue stream.

huertanix 16y ago

tl;dr: Our algorithms already stop resultspam. Y'all are trippin'.

abrahamsen 16y ago

Google have two strong incentives to weed out AdSense drivel sites in the search results. 1. They diminish the value of Google Search as an advertising platform. And Google Search is likely the most valuable virtual estate on the net. I more often click on ads in Google Search than I click on ads on all other sites combined. This is because when I'm on Google Search I'm actually searching for something, so I might click on a relevant ad. 2. They diminish the value of AdWords content network ads. People pay Google to display their ads because they believe they get better return for their money there than on the alternatives (Yahoo and Microsoft). Ads on low quality sites are unlikely to be competitive, so these sites decrease the relative value of AdWords. That is, high-ranked low quality sites with AdSense are a double threat to the main source of income for Google, and I expect Google to make it their main priority. Why, then, aren't they more successful? My guess: Because the problem is a lot hard than any armchair designer would believe. Problems tend to be a lot simpler when you are not the one who must solve them.

rfergie 16y ago
I agree with you on point 1; if Google's search quality is not the best than people will (eventually) go elsewhere. I disagree on point 2. Users on low quality AdSense sites almost certainly arrived there from a search engine so if I can display my adverts on a users landing page it will be almost as good as if they arrived on my site straight from Google.
- storborg 16y ago
  In fact, AdSense ads on sites with shitty content are even more likely to be effective, because users won't find what they're looking for in the page content.
  - zaidf 16y ago
    Bingo. When our indie music site's stream server would go down, our adsense ctrs would skyrocket. The people who come from google go apeshit and start clicking anything--especially adsense units--when the content they were expecting isn't found or isn't functional.

dcdan 16y ago

What is the technical difference between Google being able to accurately measure the volume of spam, and Google removing the spam?

mmaunder 16y ago

As a pointer: Matt_Cutts is the head of the webspam team at Google. He's been very active on this thread. Please search below for his posts.

kellysutton 16y ago

When a company needs to write a blog post in this tone, they are definitely losing ground. What you are saying != how you are performing.

jmount 16y ago

Google AdSense for Domains ( http://www.google.com/domainpark/ http://www.google.com/domainpark/) really makes a lie of not wanting useless content. The designed a revenue source for parkers/squatters.

dhruvbird 16y ago
+1 and my perfectly non-spammy blog was rejected by them. They didn't mention the reason but I have a hunch that it was because it isn't about any one or two things. It's about a bunch of things I find interesting - both personally as well as professionally. Now, google must have found it difficult to determine what ads to show, so they just black-listed my blog for ad-puposes. Period.
drm237 16y ago
How often have you searched Google and been sent to one of those pages? They don't want useless content in their serps. If someone goes directly to the domain, that's in no way related to search quality.
- jmount 16y ago
  It is very related. Google made span sites and splogs profitable (through their various add networks). Therefore they are the major funder of spam sites- even if they themselves do not promote them.

jpalomaki 16y ago

I believe it is very hard to implement algorithms that can make a difference between stackoverflow.com and a rip-off, or a legitimate Apache mailing list archive and a rip-off. Why not allow the community to sort this out. "Google Custom Search" already exist. Google could extend that to the direction where people could customize the Google search to exclude certain sites from the results (right now it is only possible to specify a list of sites to include in the search). Blacklists for at least specific "fields of searching" would emerge very quickly. People could select what blacklists to use, if any.

jacoblyles 16y ago

In other industries, the government regulates that there must be a "Chinese Wall" (no communication or shared personel) between segments of a company that have conflicts of interest. In this case, search and advertising qualify. I expect to see proposals for this kind of regulation in the next 10 years as the FCC begins regulating the internet.

Klinky 16y ago
Good luck, see the Comcast & NBC merger. The FCC is impotent.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

ericb 16y ago

While I applaud the direct personal response, I feel like the content says "we don't see a problem." If users see a problem and you don't, smaller competitors can eat your lunch. I'm kind of hoping for some competition in the field. In terms of adsense, if you really think about it, adsense content on a page should probably be a slightly negative ranking signal (not just not a positive signal). The very best quality pages have no ads. Think of government pages, nonprofits, .edu, quality personal blogs, etc. If no one is making money off a page (no ads) then whatever purpose it has, it is likely to be non-spammy.

moultano 16y ago
I feel like the content says "we don't see a problem." We see a virtually unbounded number of problems with our search results, and we're working constantly to fix them. Most of the people I talk to who work on search have the attitude that Google is horribly broken all the time, it's just also measurably the best thing available. Google as a company, and search quality in particular, does not rest on its laurels. The people who hate Google's search results the most all work at Google. If you think you hate Google's search results as much as we do, you should come work for us. :)
zone411 16y ago
Wrong. I mentioned this before. Check out AdSense on the NY Times homepage. If you punish AdSense sites, you'll mostly punish smaller business or one-person sites that are not big enough to have in-house ad sales.

mssfldt 16y ago

Spam is not only in the organic search but also in the image-search. I observed a site that steals 140.000 (!) images by hotlinking (also some of my pictures). First the pages itself seems to be "clean". They only set hotlinks to blended search images, and they got a lot of traffic, that sure. Then they switched the site: on the top there are two porn-ads (it was xslt*us) I wrote a spam report and posted it an webmasterforum. But it took about 10 days until the site was removed. Hope this gets better... And: hotlinking is a great problem.

beefman 16y ago

"The short answer is that according to the evaluation metrics that we’ve refined over more than a decade, Google’s search quality is better than it has ever been in terms of relevance, freshness and comprehensiveness." The long answer is that without Wikipedia results, Google's search quality would be at an all-time low in terms of relevance, freshness and comprehensiveness.

darksaga 16y ago

This is just lip service - Google's quality has dropped off and its really obvious. Recently, I've been regularly comparing the results I get from Google and the ones I get from Bing. Needless to say, Bing's far more relevant. The biggest point people have made are on the money searches like "MP3 Player" but the results I've been comparing have been local searches and programming things like: "show/hide text boxes in Javascript." In Google all I get is links to Amazon and other random results to link farms like javascriptworld.com. In Bing, I get links to forums and tutorials which is what I'm looking for. Time and time again Google has failed. I've already moved on to Bing and Duckduckgo and I would recommend you do too. Unless you like digging through hordes of useless SERPS.

dori 16y ago
Consider that possibly the problem isn't Google; perhaps it's you. For instance, http://www.javascriptworld.com http://www.javascriptworld.com (which I run) is NOT a link farm. Rather, it's there to support the book "JavaScript & Ajax for the Web: Visual QuickStart Guide, 7th edition" (by Tom Negrino and myself). Numerous colleges & universities courses use our book as a required textbook. Consequently, many teachers & professors link to it from course websites to let their students know where to download the book's code examples. Yes, that probably helps the site's Google rank, but that was never one of our goals. As a result, when you search for certain JavaScript examples, you may run across my site. And in your particular case, my site doesn't help because you don't own our book. But just because it doesn't solve your particular problem doesn't mean that the site isn't useful for other people. I'm not sure why you thought it was a link farm. Perhaps you should have taken a closer look at the site before using it as a bad example?

antirez 16y ago

What sounds odd of all this is that I think the spam sites and "content farms" are generating a lot of ad clicks for Google. Will they really take appropriate actions against this sites if this will mean a significant cut on the earnings? I played with adsense a lot in the past, and if you did too you should now how spam sites generate a lot more clicks than sites where the user is actually focused on reading content...

rhwd2003 16y ago

@Matt_Cutts starting around page 4 results for the term [loans] what is with all the .edu sites? This seems to be an error on the ranking side of things for all these .edu sites for a financial related term such as [loans]? All the results are .edu after page 4?

Matt_Cutts 16y ago
Typically those .edu sites have been hacked at some point.

mwilton13 16y ago

@Matt I like that you pinpointed some specific here, but is the algorithm going to be strong enough to easily pick up things like this: http://posterous.com/people/YrCushFlSet http://posterous.com/people/YrCushFlSet This single account is feeding 100 different websites alone that all feed hundreds of others. This is helping fuel numerous sites in the plastic surgery niche and it's quite disturbing.

Matt_Cutts 16y ago
mwilton13, I passed this on to my team when you mentioned it to me on Twitter recently. Have you mentioned the site to Posterous too?
- mwilton13 16y ago
  Thank you Matt. I am following up with Posterous and the other sites involved on Monday. We reported one of the content farms on blogger last year too.

paul9290 16y ago

A recent Google search for the Walmart being built 2 miles away from me led me nowhere. Google listed 2 pages of job sites listing open positions at this wal-mart. I almost gave up my search, but decided to search twitter and in doing so I found what I was looking for!

Matt_Cutts 16y ago
I'd be curious to know where the Walmart is and what searches you tried.
- paul9290 16y ago
  Jan. 15th I was curious if the walmart was going to be a supercenter so I searched, "fallston md walmart," & "will fallston md walmart be a supercenter." As you can see either result does not show the most relevant and recent info about my query, rather it's littered by prominent job sites. Though on a search for "will fallston md walmart be a supercenter," i see the six result to be http://www.belairnewsandviews.com/2011/01/job-ads-out-this-week-for-fallston-walmart-indicate-it-will-be-a-supercenter-with-groceries.html http://www.belairnewsandviews.com/2011/01/job-ads-out-this-w..., yet that information to me was weak;. it deduces from all the job listings that yes this will be a Super Walmart. Since I found the results/info lacking I immediately went to Twitter and found an even more detailed article(http://belair.patch.com/articles/fallston-walmart-may-open-by-mid-february#photo-4446601 http://belair.patch.com/articles/fallston-walmart-may-open-b...) that had pictures that I think should have appeared in one of my queries. As you see that article was published Jan. 14th and Google did not point me to the most recent/up to date info rather it favored prominent job sites' listings, yet Twitter did. Pardon, if this seems nitpicky, but just wanted to share one of my recent experiences where Google failed me(i have another example too but search was personal), while Twitter did not.
  - Matt_Cutts 16y ago
    This is interesting. Part of the problem is answering questions when there's not much content on the web. I think a lot of the job sites showed up because Walmart is hiring for that location in preparation for opening. I'm just now testing this query, but when I did [fallston md walmart], there is a really comprehensive article at http://www.exploreharford.com/news/3074/work-start-fallston-walmart/ http://www.exploreharford.com/news/3074/work-start-fallston-... that shows up at #5. That article mentions that "The new road will lead into a 147,465-square-foot Walmart, which has been planned with a possible 57,628-square-foot expansion" Then I did the search [walmart supercenter size square feet]. The #1 and #2 results are both pretty good, e.g. the page at http://walmartstores.com/aboutus/7606.aspx http://walmartstores.com/aboutus/7606.aspx says that an average store is 108K square feet, and supercenters average 185K square feet. As a human, I can deduce that 147K square feet (with 57K square feet of potential expansion) implies that it will probably be a supercenter, but it's practically impossible for a search engine to figure out this sort of multi-step computation right now. My guess is that in a couple months when the store opens up, this information will be more findable on the web--for example, somewhere on Walmart's web site. But for now, this is a really hard search because there's just not much info on the web. I appreciate you sharing this search. I think it's a pretty fair illustration of how peoples' expectations of Google have grown exponentially over the years. :)

eitland 16y ago

There are a few signals that should be possible to pick up. Examples: - When power searchers start adding -somedomain.xyz to their searches - Increase spam reporting by adding some kind of feedback to the spam reporting feature. I think I'd love to get an automated mail saying something like: "The site somespamdommain.xyz that you and others reported x days ago is now handled by our improved algorithms". Submitting spam reports really doesn't feel useful when it seems like nothing ever happens. - Adding weight to spam reports. You know a lot about us, and I guess you can filter out who are power searchers. This could help stop people from gaming the system into blocking competitors.

bmastenbrook 16y ago

Beyond the flood of SEO spam and Demand Media-style content mills, there's another search quality problem I have with Google: torrent sites. I will frequently search on the exact name of a song or album on Google in order to find out more information about that song or album, but lately most of the results have been links to torrents, including results on the first page. This applies even if I add "review" to the search query. I will even see links to torrents ranking above links to iTunes. These songs and albums are not available legitimately through torrents. What value is there in providing links to pirated content? I understand that Google is not under any legal obligation to remove these results, but as a non-pirate these results are significantly lowering my perception of the quality of Google's search results.

klbarry 16y ago
Google tries to make no judgments about the sites that go the top of their algorithms.
- bmastenbrook 16y ago
  Isn't this the whole problem? 90% of the web is crap. If Google can't deliver the non-crap, I'll be looking elsewhere.

franksinatra2 16y ago

I was hoping to see something in the latest blog post from Google about spammers using Exact Match Domains to get huge algorithmic boosts. EMD + tools like xrumer usually = first page results :(

zone411 16y ago

First, I haven't noticed any significant increase in the frequency of spam sites appearing the Google search results. The biggest problem that I did notice is social bookmarking sites, like reddit and digg, outranking original content. They often have nothing more than a copied-and-pasted paragraph, sometimes supplemented by low quality comments (as is common with these types of sites). Since this site is very similar, not many people will be concerned about this issue. Second biggest issue is poor Wikipedia articles appearing in the top results for almost any reference type query. Many less frequently updated Wikipedia articles are nothing but regurgitated content lifted from other quality sources. What makes it worse is that Wikipedia is using no-follow for their links, so even if these sites are linked in the reference section, they won't get any credit. It's interesting to see so many people complain about low quality content on commercial sites, but they never mention Wikipedia, which is a much bigger offender (I guess this might be because Wikipedia gets its content for free and doesn't have ads and other sites pay for the content and do have ads). Third, I hope Google doesn't make any changes without checking very carefully that good sites will not be negatively affected. For example, newspapers will often have the exact same articles from the AP, but also original content based on their own reporting. Punishing them for having duplicate content would not work well. There are many similar possible pitfalls.

Darin81 16y ago

What about sites like ezinearticles? Where they do not pay for content, isn't that more like organic content from experts? They are not content machines.

fzk390 16y ago

I also have one spam site example. http://www.google.com/search?q=internet+phone+service http://www.google.com/search?q=internet+phone+service Look at 3rd result for internetphoneguide.org

tomotomo 16y ago

Why don't we collaboratively blacklist or push down domains from our Google results? This could be a stopgap measure until Google incorporates such a feature including the collaborative database or magically puts an end to spam. A proposal: http://www.saigonist.com/content/google-spam-content-farm-filter http://www.saigonist.com/content/google-spam-content-farm-fi...

jrmg 16y ago

The problem isn't just rank though. After I've seen the original source of duplicated content, I don't just want sites that copy it to rank below it, I want to not see them at all, so that the rest of my results are filled with /different/ things.