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To fix this, Google needs to stop relying on links as a search engine ranking factor--or at least not rely on it as much.
by bhartzer 5y ago
To fix this, Google needs to stop relying on links as a search engine ranking factor--or at least not rely on it as much.
- colejohnson66 5y agoGoogle’s original crème de la crème is PageRank: the idea that links to your page have more weight than keyword spam. They don’t seem to want to abandon that idea.
- not2b 5y agoThey can't; the web is too large to work without it, and it is (legitimate) links that make it possible to distinguish a well-known site from a pop-up plagiarist that just copies all of the text. But for it to work on the modern web you need to be able to distinguish high-quality links from bogus link-farm links.
- MarcoZavala 5y ago
- throwawayboise 5y agoIf anyone can combat it, Google can. It doesn't seem that hard to me to assign low (or negative) weight to links that suddenly appear on a page that hasn't otherwise changed in years, for example. Or links to the same site on pages that otherwise have nothing to do with each other in terms of content/subject. I'm sure it's harder than that, but all those engineers ought to be earning their six figure salaries.
- Cymen 5y agoBut how do you translate that into (short term) OKRs and work that engineers can build a career upon as an achievement (for promotion)? I think there is a cultural mismatch between how engineers grow and what they work on at Google versus the quality of the search results. There seems to be very limit upside and huge potential downside to working on this at Google. That said, I don't work for Google and my conjecture is based on the hand wavy details (from engineers that do/have) posted online.
- reincarnate0x14 5y agoIt's more that they seem unwillingly to admit that purely automated methods don't achieve optimal results when they're being fought by equally automated scams. They could bump their overall ranking quality significantly by blacklisting known bad-actors that scrape real sites and put up hollow shells of barely edited, machine-munged plagiarism, yet do not.
- colejohnson66 5y agoAnd that’s fine. PageRank is/was a genius idea that should still be used today. But they need to do more. When I search something and half the results are Markov Chain like blogspam full of ads, I have to wonder where the effort is going into those things (definitely not AdSense /s).
- ronsor 5y agoBecause of stuff like this Google doesn't rely on links much any more, but these scammers and SEO nuts aren't going to stop because of that fact. To them, they just need more links to make up for it.
- nightpool 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law More simply: "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once you use it to determine how much money somebody makes"
- mountainb 5y agoThey will never stop doing this. They have stopped relying on it as much (by changing how sites are scored based on perceived authority), but it just shifts the manipulation techniques accordingly.
- notahacker 5y agoBlacklisting everyone who did this from their index would be a start Although I guess then they'd send out fake DMCA takedowns requesting people put links to their competitors...