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You have an autogenerated web site that consists of practically nothing other than affiliate links to Amazon. You can make an infinite number of autogenerated p
by Matt_Cutts 15y ago
You have an autogenerated web site that consists of practically nothing other than affiliate links to Amazon. You can make an infinite number of autogenerated pages on your site, e.g.
http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=hacker+news http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=hacker+news
http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=31.69 http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=31.69
http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=teen+sex http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=teen+sex
and each autogenerated page consists of literally hundreds of affiliate links stuffed with keywords for unrelated products.
When Google's webspam team takes action on websites in our websearch index, we can pass that information on to the ads group so they can check for violations. But it's a one-way street: we can send the ads team signals or information about spammers or other violations of our quality guidelines, but the ads team doesn't send information over to the quality/webspam team.
- kbrower 15y agoHi Matt, Thanks for responding. The point of the site is to find items of a particular price that qualify for free shipping on Amazon.com. If you want I will give you access to my google analytics to show you that this is a site people want and use. I guess I should not let people link to the search results page? http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=hacker+news http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=hacker+news and http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=anything+that+is+not+a+number http://www.filleritem.com/index.html?q=anything+that+is+not+... returns the same thing as if you did a search for $0. I will fix the bug so it returns an error. These are pages that no one has ever linked to as far as I know.
- lewispb 15y agoI think he can probably already see your analytics ;)
- Matt_Cutts 15y agoNope, I can't. I can see how often the site shows up in e.g. our search results, but Analytics is a separate property and they don't send data to the search team either.
- mc32 15y agoAmazon already provides this service itself: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?field-keywords=filler+item http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?field-keywords=filler...
- dangrossman 15y agoA filler item is something with a specific (low) price used to make an order near the free shipping minimum reach that minimum. A search for the words "filler item" is not at all related and not at all helpful.
- mc32 15y agoSorry, try this instead: http://www.amazon.com/Shipping-Filler-items-under-shipping/lm/R2DJJD2VEU9B7B http://www.amazon.com/Shipping-Filler-items-under-shipping/l...
- kevindication 15y agoThat's an Amazon user maintained list of low price items. The purpose of the filler item site is to answer the question: "What can I buy for $0.59?" That list doesn't answer that question.
- amitparikh 15y agoOh c'mon, now you're just submitting links blindly -- that's definitely not an official Amazon offering. That list is generated & curated by Amazon user "fargowifeandmom" and was last updated at the beginning of this year.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- Matt_Cutts 15y agoMy advice would be to use robots.txt to block out the autogenerated pages; when users search for e.g. a long-tail phrase and then land on a page that's nothing but affiliate links with a lot of keywords, they tend to complain to us. Users would be happier if they landed on the root page of your site or the root page of http://www.superfillers.com/ http://www.superfillers.com/ or http://www.filleritemfinder.com/ http://www.filleritemfinder.com/ than if they landed on a deep page full of links and unrelated products.
- nirvana 15y agohttp://www.filleritemfinder.com/ http://www.filleritemfinder.com/ is the first hit for "filler item" on google right now. A search for hacker news results in a page full of affiliate links, just as the example you gave above. Only difference is that they didn't re-write the URL. filleritemfinder.com has no robots.txt that I was able to pull up. So, filleritem.com, a google customer, was blocked, but filleritemfinder.com, doing the same thing, is the number one result. Further, shouldn't this kind of advice be given to people who appeal being excluded from the index? Or should we all post to Hacker News when it happens to us so that you can come explain directly? I think %50 of the problem is the arbitrary picking of sites to block (and it's not working, btw[1]) and %50 of it is that google seems uninterested in explaining or advising people when it happens to them. [1] Been buying gear for a project lately, and so doing a lot of google searches in the form of product-model-number review or product-name review. Overwhelmed with spam sites, and mindless human generated spam sites like dpreview.com, etc.
- Matt_Cutts 15y agoWhen I do the search [filler item], one of the top results I see is http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/top-5-amazon-filler-item-finders-qualify-free-shipping/ http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/top-5-amazon-filler-item-finder... which shows five different services to fill this information need, and that also has pictures. I do think that's a pretty helpful result. I mentioned filleritemfinder.com as a random example (there are many of these services), but filleritemfinder.com appears to use AJAX to keep results on the same page rather than making a new url. "filleritem.com, a google customer, was blocked, but filleritemfinder.com, doing the same thing, is the number one result." The filleritemfinder.com site is not doing the same thing, because it's not generating fresh urls for every possible search. But you're not really suggesting that we should treat advertising customers somehow differently in our search results, are you? The webspam team takes action regardless of whether someone is an advertising customer or not. "shouldn't this kind of advice be given to people who appeal being excluded from the index?" This advice is available to everyone in our quality guidelines. It sounds like the site owner reached out to the AdWords team, which gave him clear guidance that the site violated the ads policy on bridge pages. It sounds like the site owner also filed a reconsideration request, and we replied to let the site owner know that the reconsideration request was rejected because it was still in violation of our policies. It doesn't look like the site owner stopped by our webmaster support forum, at least that I could see in a quick look. At that point, the site owner did a blog post and submitted the post to Hacker News, where I was happy to reply.
- SODaniel 15y agoIf I'm not mistaken, this type of SEO white-noise is exactly what Google work yo stop. It's just search engine spam for profit; No hands on work, just a script that targets search engine results and creates 'dumb content' to farm visits.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- gojomo 15y agoStill, when used as intended (with the query a dollar amount, like your 31.69 example), isn't his site useful? (I've not noticed a similarly straightforward tool for this same purpose at Amazon.com itself.) The non-dollar-amount queries seem like a bug -- triggering a default of listing up from 0.00, unrelated to the query. If this were an intentional manipulative tactic, wouldn't the outlinks be related to the query? Still, tons of sites have infinite paths when fed unexpected queries. At least in a cursory look over the filleritem site, there's no obvious self-linking to abusive keyword-based queries -- like your example <?q=teen+sex>. If he just fixes it so that non-numeric queries get an error page, doesn't his homepage still deserve to be found by people searching for 'filleritem'? It's not obviously worse than the current top hit for that (and similar) queries, which behaves almost exactly the same, but might not trigger your same heuristics with its AJAX-results loads. (In such cases I also have to wonder if the initial penalty may have been triggered by complaints, or maliciously-created links, from similar competitive sites that thought themselves immune from the same enforcement actions...)
- Matt_Cutts 15y agoI'm not saying that the issues aren't fixable. But when the site came up for a review, we saw things that violate our quality guidelines: autogenerated pages with hundreds of affiliate links that consist of lots of keywords, and the links/keywords are duplicate content. If he fixes the issues by e.g. blocking out the autogenerated pages, then I expect his homepage will be found in Google. The autogenerated pages are also less useful to someone landing on a page because the pages quickly get stale: prices change, things go in/out of stock, etc.
- droithomme 15y agoI have no association with this person and just heard about this. But obviously those are search term result pages and not "autogenerated pages" in the usual sense. If Google is going to apply such a standard uniformly, they'd have to ban all sites that have search functions. Autogenerated in the bad sense is link farms like fakesite.com/buy_drugwiththisname_now.html, with drugwiththisname replaced with 500,000 different possibilities, and all generating pages linked to each other, which also have incoming links from ten billion forum comments across the web where a bot has signed up en masse and posted spam. Now, perhaps this guy is posting spam to his site in places which makes it valid to declare this a link farm and kill it. Looking at the site now, being able to search amazon by exact price is a pretty neat function and is totally different from a link farm. I think killing his site for having a search function is pretty unreasonable. However, you are a private for-profit company, so you can do as you please obviously.
- chime 15y ago> Autogenerated in the bad sense is link farms like fakesite.com/buy_drugwiththisname_now.html, with drugwiththisname replaced with 500,000 different possibilities Actually there is no difference between search page result sites like the OP and what you said. Having a URL that ends in .html does not mean there is a static html file on the server. For examples, nextag and pricegrabber have URLs like blah.com/digital/Canon-EOS-7D-SLR-Digital-Body/m739295014.html. Scroll around these sites and you'll see they're anything but static. Each page is simply a result of a query. Whether the database is local (like nextag) or remote (like Amazon API query like OP) is inconsequential. Personally, I would be VERY happy if Google hid/ignored these kind of search-query sites. I have not once found any of these sites useful. Problem is the large gray area in which these sites operate and what I find useless, someone else might find useful.
- StrawberryFrog 15y ago> Actually there is no difference between search page result sites like the OP and what you said Uh, yes there is. http://www.somesite.com/index.html?q=foo http://www.somesite.com/index.html?q=foo is obviously a search (right down to the choice if q for query), but http://www.somesite.com/buy_foo_now.html http://www.somesite.com/buy_foo_now.html does not look like one. You might say that technically they could have the same back-end, but the web is flexible - just about any URL scheme could resolve to the same back-end. The difference is that the first is honest and the second one goes out of its way to hide what it does.
- barmstrong 15y agoI actually used this site several times before I got an Amazon Prime account, and I think it has real value. My sister always got a kick out of the fact there were random pirate stickers (or some other random cheap item) in her birthday gift. Free shipping! Cleaning up spam sites is great, but it feels like Google is editorializing on this. A fine line.
- hbar 15y agoThe same could be said of Google's search engine itself: an autogenerated web site consisting of essentially nothing other than links to other places, many of them paid. But no one can deny that it's a useful site. I think that is the issue here -- probably the vast majority of such sites are undesirable, but you can't discount them all.
- Terretta 15y agoBut Google had to spend resources to crawl those other sites, collect the data those sites created, evaluate and order the results excerpting those sites' data based on a user's query, clearly adding value for the user performing a search... Oh, wait.
- eurohacker 15y agoAs we have heard lately how Google has manipulated the Yelp search results and others for their benefit, one has to wonder - since google has aquired some big websites like Zagat, theoretically - if one day they will just start to screw Zagat competitors , what can be actually done about it , i mean how can one prove that google is just attacking you and they just dont like you as their competitor ... its relative - you can always say that your site is not original enough, or you have bad links etc.
- Matt_Cutts 15y agoIt's a fair question, but our quality guidelines have been quite consistent for the last decade or so. Our team takes action without regard to whether a website is an advertiser, partner, or competitor. The long-term loyalty/trust of our users is worth much more than any sort of short-term revenue that a sneaky deal would provide. And Google's culture is such that anyone inside or outside of the company can claim that a particular practice isn't in line with "Don't be evil" and kick off a fair amount of self-scrutiny. Ultimately though if you don't trust Google, we don't lock your data in, so you can use a different search engine or service just by entering it in the address bar. That's the ultimate check on Google: if we start to act too abusive or "evil" we know that people can desert us. So it's in our enlightened self-interest to try to act in our users' long-term interests.
- option1138 15y agoThat's the ultimate check on Google: if we start to act too abusive or "evil" we know that people can desert us. So it's in our enlightened self-interest to try to act in our users' long-term interests. I hear this line thrown about quite a bit. And while it's true with regular users, it's certainly not true for webmasters or advertisers. Google controls around 67% of all US search share. If an advertiser doesn't play by your rules, they forfeit a significant amount of natural search traffic. All good for most of your policies but there are some real gray areas. I had a site years ago that got hit with a javascript hack on an obscure page. StopBadware found it within a day or two and suddenly we were blacklisted... virtually all organic traffic disappeared overnight. It took weeks to get the warning lifted and that was only as a result of a significant viral PR campaign (such as this). Maybe this has been addressed, but there are other areas. Affiliate sites are also penalized quite heavily by Google. It's one thing to take a stand due to the supposed quality of many of these sites (which frankly has little correlation with the presence of affiliate links... most sites suck). It's quite another when Google has a large affiliate advertising practice in house and a significant investment in an affiliate link tracking/cloaking company. I mention this with all due respect and I hope you take it as constructive criticism. I think the organic side of the house does a great job overall. The paid side is another story IMHO. Part of this is organizational stupidity... I struggle with this every day and I have a much smaller organization.
- tripzilch 15y agoWell, since this is a site people have a need for, look for and use, that must mean the process involving your "quality guidelines" is wrong, isn't it? However, you seem to imply there's something wrong with the site. Let me ask you a question, who decides whether a site is "right" or not? Google or the people that use the web? What was the original purpose of PageRank? You can make excuses all you want, but fact of the matter is that Google's Search Results quality has been plummeting over the past couple of months and it all stems from Google pretending to better know what people want than the people themselves. Good luck with your website.