4 ms·

I have done a fair bit of work labeling and classifying quality of user submitted URLs for a public facing platform (not Google). That includes many hours spent

I have done a fair bit of work labeling and classifying quality of user submitted URLs for a public facing platform (not Google). That includes many hours spent manually inspecting content and deciding whether a site looks "spammy" overall. http://weblog.globaladvancedmedia.com/2010/research-before-buying-web-software-script-security-is-important/ http://weblog.globaladvancedmedia.com/2010/research-before-b... If I were judging by the first few paragraphs of this entry from your site, I would lean toward blacklisting it. Reasons: typos, grammatical errors, and a general lack of polish and punch in the writing. It looks at least superficially similar to thousands of keyword-stuffed, semantically-impoverished blogs that I have encountered before. The page source contains another red flag:  The co-occurrence of the terms "SEO" and "optimized" is almost a good enough signal to blacklist it on that basis alone. I am not saying that you are personally trying to exploit search or recommendation systems to trick people into visiting your page. There are also two big counter-signals that show me this entry isn't part of a content farm: - You don't link to commercial sites. - You don't show ads on the page. The problem is that there are armies of people churning out "SEO blogging make money fast" content, incorporating ads or commercial links, and spreading it across a multitude of domains. For every blog entry like this one -- unpolished but harmless -- there are many that look textually similar and are purely mercenary. So the one big G statement said that NOT being transparent is the best thing so bad actors don't take advantage of knowledge of the system - well I believe you are hurting more good actors and more users by hiding everything. This is where I disagree most strongly. Google already struggles to keep junk out of search results. Process transparency would enable content farmers to evolve more quickly. Thousands of brilliant engineers are not a match for millions of people who pollute the web as a full time job. Some good actors will be hurt, granted. I think that you are badly underestimating the number of bad actors when you say that opacity hurts "more good actors" and users than bad actors.

stevenicr 7y ago
thank you for chiming in - you see there the partial remnants of what once was an important site to me and attempts to share and get discussions going with average people who internet but are not geeks. That site started as a place to put on a business card for an email contact, and then morphed into pages to help people as I found issues in the non-online world. For a couple of years so many people asked me to help them fixed borked computers, I put up a few pages and directed friends and family to go here - do these three things on this page, call me with the results - it's the few things I would do if I came over to try to rescue your xp or vista system.. then added more things.. then experimented with new(ish) at the time wodpress and moveable type. may things have changed since then, updates and hacks and thankfully less spyware infected systems friends call me about. It's not made to take the #1 spot for anti-virus, and the experiment with MT and WP has led to some interesting growth in other areas. So it's not written to win any writing award or be referenced in a phd or anything, just for the average joe I meet on the street and don't want to spend 20 minutes telling them about viruses and know that sending to sofos or something is not going to help them learn or do anything different in the future. The yoast seo plugin I have used on other sites as well - the main reason for using that plugin is that wordpress does not handle meta title and descriptions very well out of the box - for the most part they put that into the chosen theme to handle - and most do not handle it well. When you check how your wordpress site looks in google's eyes, many people with a WP site will get warnings about 'duplicate meta descriptions' which cause a penalty in the results I believe. So the yoast plugin can create meta descriptions on pages and posts that do not have them - and it can set some standard robots.txt type rules to block 'duplicate content indexing' as WP out of the box often puts the same text and such on the homepage, and a category page, and an archive page, and others.. So it's a quick an easy fix a few problems with WP that google will alert you about if you login into webmaster tools or maybe when you run a pagespeed check, some of those issues. So included the yoast seo plugin is to fix some things, it does not create comment spam for seo or try to insert hidden text for britney spears disney and shady redirect to a porn site or anything like that. you could rename the yoast, the all-in-seo and similar plugins as "remove the negative self created search engine penalties caused by WP and your lousy theme with one click" - They are even more important on sites that run buddypress on top of wordpress for the same issue - and sometimes cause more - but that's for another post. I think it's possible that we could both be right (although I certainly could be wrong) - in that I still think more good actors are hurt by the non-transparency, and you could be right in that there would be millions more junk sites / pages, although I think there are many fewer people making the bad stuff, I do know they make a lot of it... I still think that by trying to fool a few thousand bad actors big G is actually seriously hurting hundreds of thousands of web site owners. Just think how many thousands of people have bought shady seo because they have no way to know what works or what doesn't and what's good or what's bad - I definitely think more good people and businesses are being hurt and the playing field is less even for the average business owner because of the lack of transparency.
stevenicr 7y ago
This "typos, grammatical errors, and a general lack of polish and punch in the writing." - reminded me of something I had considered some years ago... A time when I read google was ranking edu type sites higher, and blogs lower... I noticed more news sites in top results and mayo clinic types.. It dawned on me that it would be a convenient truth to point to a bunch of 'high brow signals' to justify sanitizing results a bit - and that this would be a slippery slop slide into censoring lots of adult stories and other entertainment, while also playing into the bigger companies that can afford to spend the adwords money. Could be good reasons for this (less public pressure to remove the porn and such) - could be nefarious, censor the web for users and cater to those who can afford to pay the big bucks, less companies to contend with content questions - while not be transparent to the users and content creators. This allows big money to influence the results via ads easier, and limits choice - those publishers who spend a lot of time creating content are cast aside, even though one side of the big G keeps saying 'create good content you will soar to the top'. I think we, er they, big G especially, crossed a threshold of being able to determine intent more often than not and so the need to filter search results for 'how to have sex' and 'watch free sex' for example are different and can be, and should be handled differently. I know they are handled differently to a degree, I feel it's important to point out that these two different intentional searches should show results even much more different than they are. The first one would likely benefit from ranking higher sites that meet a lot of the points on the pdf manual checkers document and other factors for trust rank and what have you. However I think the other kind of sexual entertainment searches would actually benefit from not using many of those factors in the ranking process. I believe you will find many professional sex people do not advertise their address on every page of their site, and many do not use real names in order to make it harder for bad things to happen to these people. For example. I also think the need for perfect grammar and such is much less when people are looking for erotic entertainment. Millions of penthouse stories magazines have sold over the (pre-internet, get that stuff free via searches from content indexers, years) - and I am pretty sure that if every story had perfect grammar like it was written for a college thesis, that they would not have sold as well month after month for years. If you combine this with the type of grammar and spelling you see a majority of people using via textual communique - look at Insta, fbk, snap... people expect, engage with, react with, and continue to pursue content that is not grammar and spelling perfect. I'd go so far as to say that a majority of people in the US at least (?) are actually mostly trying to find more crude discussions and writing styles, and it's a much smaller amount of people searching daily for phd level high brow perfection. Of course this is different when looking for electrical engineering searches, and even searches for putting together prefab furniture - they are definitely searches where you want things to be accurate and no fluff, no extra personality needed. Given that I believe this to be obvious to most, and that we do not have the computer systems of 1991 running the search giants, I believe that they know they could provide tons more content that browser reporting behavior would show that people enjoy and are looking for - yet they choose to use some of these trust rank things to censor bigger portions of the net for various reasons. Hey, I'm a big believer in private companies doing what they want - I just think transparency is seriously lacking with big G - why not be honest about how many semi-good sites are not being shown because google is employing new content filters? We used to see this chilling effects notices regularly, and some results show that X number of pages or sites are not being shown due to dmca requests... but being honest about how many sex chat sites google use to show in the results, and how they have pushed many good ones down and many more straight out of the index.. we don't see any posts about that. Sadly, for many people the internet is what google shows it is. I understand there are many in the world who think whatever if on fcbook is the entire internet. Well if things are being removed from these platforms and it's not being understood - then it's a huge disservice to humanity, imho. It's closer to people learning with today's tools may never find Mark Twain and others for they are not perfect in the eyes of the elite.

stevenicr 7y ago

thank you for chiming in - you see there the partial remnants of what once was an important site to me and attempts to share and get discussions going with average people who internet but are not geeks. That site started as a place to put on a business card for an email contact, and then morphed into pages to help people as I found issues in the non-online world. For a couple of years so many people asked me to help them fixed borked computers, I put up a few pages and directed friends and family to go here - do these three things on this page, call me with the results - it's the few things I would do if I came over to try to rescue your xp or vista system.. then added more things.. then experimented with new(ish) at the time wodpress and moveable type. may things have changed since then, updates and hacks and thankfully less spyware infected systems friends call me about. It's not made to take the #1 spot for anti-virus, and the experiment with MT and WP has led to some interesting growth in other areas. So it's not written to win any writing award or be referenced in a phd or anything, just for the average joe I meet on the street and don't want to spend 20 minutes telling them about viruses and know that sending to sofos or something is not going to help them learn or do anything different in the future. The yoast seo plugin I have used on other sites as well - the main reason for using that plugin is that wordpress does not handle meta title and descriptions very well out of the box - for the most part they put that into the chosen theme to handle - and most do not handle it well. When you check how your wordpress site looks in google's eyes, many people with a WP site will get warnings about 'duplicate meta descriptions' which cause a penalty in the results I believe. So the yoast plugin can create meta descriptions on pages and posts that do not have them - and it can set some standard robots.txt type rules to block 'duplicate content indexing' as WP out of the box often puts the same text and such on the homepage, and a category page, and an archive page, and others.. So it's a quick an easy fix a few problems with WP that google will alert you about if you login into webmaster tools or maybe when you run a pagespeed check, some of those issues. So included the yoast seo plugin is to fix some things, it does not create comment spam for seo or try to insert hidden text for britney spears disney and shady redirect to a porn site or anything like that. you could rename the yoast, the all-in-seo and similar plugins as "remove the negative self created search engine penalties caused by WP and your lousy theme with one click" - They are even more important on sites that run buddypress on top of wordpress for the same issue - and sometimes cause more - but that's for another post. I think it's possible that we could both be right (although I certainly could be wrong) - in that I still think more good actors are hurt by the non-transparency, and you could be right in that there would be millions more junk sites / pages, although I think there are many fewer people making the bad stuff, I do know they make a lot of it... I still think that by trying to fool a few thousand bad actors big G is actually seriously hurting hundreds of thousands of web site owners. Just think how many thousands of people have bought shady seo because they have no way to know what works or what doesn't and what's good or what's bad - I definitely think more good people and businesses are being hurt and the playing field is less even for the average business owner because of the lack of transparency.

stevenicr 7y ago

This "typos, grammatical errors, and a general lack of polish and punch in the writing." - reminded me of something I had considered some years ago... A time when I read google was ranking edu type sites higher, and blogs lower... I noticed more news sites in top results and mayo clinic types.. It dawned on me that it would be a convenient truth to point to a bunch of 'high brow signals' to justify sanitizing results a bit - and that this would be a slippery slop slide into censoring lots of adult stories and other entertainment, while also playing into the bigger companies that can afford to spend the adwords money. Could be good reasons for this (less public pressure to remove the porn and such) - could be nefarious, censor the web for users and cater to those who can afford to pay the big bucks, less companies to contend with content questions - while not be transparent to the users and content creators. This allows big money to influence the results via ads easier, and limits choice - those publishers who spend a lot of time creating content are cast aside, even though one side of the big G keeps saying 'create good content you will soar to the top'. I think we, er they, big G especially, crossed a threshold of being able to determine intent more often than not and so the need to filter search results for 'how to have sex' and 'watch free sex' for example are different and can be, and should be handled differently. I know they are handled differently to a degree, I feel it's important to point out that these two different intentional searches should show results even much more different than they are. The first one would likely benefit from ranking higher sites that meet a lot of the points on the pdf manual checkers document and other factors for trust rank and what have you. However I think the other kind of sexual entertainment searches would actually benefit from not using many of those factors in the ranking process. I believe you will find many professional sex people do not advertise their address on every page of their site, and many do not use real names in order to make it harder for bad things to happen to these people. For example. I also think the need for perfect grammar and such is much less when people are looking for erotic entertainment. Millions of penthouse stories magazines have sold over the (pre-internet, get that stuff free via searches from content indexers, years) - and I am pretty sure that if every story had perfect grammar like it was written for a college thesis, that they would not have sold as well month after month for years. If you combine this with the type of grammar and spelling you see a majority of people using via textual communique - look at Insta, fbk, snap... people expect, engage with, react with, and continue to pursue content that is not grammar and spelling perfect. I'd go so far as to say that a majority of people in the US at least (?) are actually mostly trying to find more crude discussions and writing styles, and it's a much smaller amount of people searching daily for phd level high brow perfection. Of course this is different when looking for electrical engineering searches, and even searches for putting together prefab furniture - they are definitely searches where you want things to be accurate and no fluff, no extra personality needed. Given that I believe this to be obvious to most, and that we do not have the computer systems of 1991 running the search giants, I believe that they know they could provide tons more content that browser reporting behavior would show that people enjoy and are looking for - yet they choose to use some of these trust rank things to censor bigger portions of the net for various reasons. Hey, I'm a big believer in private companies doing what they want - I just think transparency is seriously lacking with big G - why not be honest about how many semi-good sites are not being shown because google is employing new content filters? We used to see this chilling effects notices regularly, and some results show that X number of pages or sites are not being shown due to dmca requests... but being honest about how many sex chat sites google use to show in the results, and how they have pushed many good ones down and many more straight out of the index.. we don't see any posts about that. Sadly, for many people the internet is what google shows it is. I understand there are many in the world who think whatever if on fcbook is the entire internet. Well if things are being removed from these platforms and it's not being understood - then it's a huge disservice to humanity, imho. It's closer to people learning with today's tools may never find Mark Twain and others for they are not perfect in the eyes of the elite.