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http://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

by nirvana 15y ago

http://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 ago
When 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.
- OpenAlgorithm 15y ago
  Would it be likely that if the site was to use another monetization plan that it would be less likely to be penalized e.g. advertising instead of affiliate links?
  - Matt_Cutts 15y ago
    I recently talked for about a minute about the topic of "too much advertising" that sometimes drowns out the content of a page. It was in this question and answer session that we streamed live on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7Yv6DzHBvE#t=19m25s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7Yv6DzHBvE#t=19m25s . The short answer is that we have been looking more at this. We care when a page creates a low-quality or frustrating user experience, regardless of whether it's because of affiliate links, advertising, or something else.
    - OpenAlgorithm 15y ago
      Thanks Matt, took a look at the video, that answers my original question. Also is there a preferred monetization model, e.g. do Google think advertisements are more or less harmful to the user experience than affiliate links, sponsored posts, etc? Obviously across different models you can't just track space taken up, so is there some kind of metric that tracks the rate of content diluting via monetization?
      - option1138 15y ago
        I know you were looking for an answer from Matt but I thought I would offer up my opinion here (as you might have noticed, I love talking about this stuff). Our models currently suggest that the presence of contextual advertising is a significant predictive factor of webspam. We use 10-fold bagging and classification trees, so it's not all that easy to generalize. But I pulled one model out at random for fun. The top predictive factor in this particular model is the probability outcome of the bigrams (word pairs) extracted the visible text on the page. Here are a few significant bigrams: relocationcompanies productsproviding productspure qualitybook recruitmentwebsite ticketsour thesetraffic representingclients todayplay tourshigh registryrepair rentproperties weddingportal printingcanvas prhuman privacyprotection providingefficient waytrade printingstationery priceseverything website*daily Next, this model looks for tokens extracted from the URL and particular meta tags from the page. Similar to above, but I believe unigrams only. A few examples follow. Please keep in mind that none of these phrases are used individually... they are each weighted and combined with all other known factors on the page: offer review book more Management into Web Library blog Joomla forums The model then looks at the outdegree of the page (number of unique domains pointed to). From there, it breaks down into TLD (.biz, .ru, .gov, etc) The file gets pretty hard to decipher at this point (it's a huge XML file) but contextual advertising is used as a predictive variable throughout. Just from eyeballing it, it appears to be more or less as significant as the precision and recall rate of high value commercial terms, average word length (western languages only), and visible text length. Based on what I'm looking at right now, my answer would be that sponsored posts are going to be far more harmful to the user experience than advertising. Can't answer the rest of your question which I assume relates to the number of ad blocks or amount of space taken up by ads... we don't measure it. Edit: Just realized that Google will probably delist this page within 24 hours. Should've used a gif for those bigrams. Oh well ;-)
option1138 15y ago
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. This. Assume you work on the webspam team and you have a 92% spam detection rate but a 99.9% accuracy rate on what you do detect. There are around 40,000,000 active domains in a given month listed on Google. That means 40,000 sites on average are being penalized without reason.

by nirvana 15y ago

Matt_Cutts 15y ago

When 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.

OpenAlgorithm 15y ago
Would it be likely that if the site was to use another monetization plan that it would be less likely to be penalized e.g. advertising instead of affiliate links?
- Matt_Cutts 15y ago
  I recently talked for about a minute about the topic of "too much advertising" that sometimes drowns out the content of a page. It was in this question and answer session that we streamed live on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7Yv6DzHBvE#t=19m25s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7Yv6DzHBvE#t=19m25s . The short answer is that we have been looking more at this. We care when a page creates a low-quality or frustrating user experience, regardless of whether it's because of affiliate links, advertising, or something else.
  - OpenAlgorithm 15y ago
    Thanks Matt, took a look at the video, that answers my original question. Also is there a preferred monetization model, e.g. do Google think advertisements are more or less harmful to the user experience than affiliate links, sponsored posts, etc? Obviously across different models you can't just track space taken up, so is there some kind of metric that tracks the rate of content diluting via monetization?
    - option1138 15y ago
      I know you were looking for an answer from Matt but I thought I would offer up my opinion here (as you might have noticed, I love talking about this stuff). Our models currently suggest that the presence of contextual advertising is a significant predictive factor of webspam. We use 10-fold bagging and classification trees, so it's not all that easy to generalize. But I pulled one model out at random for fun. The top predictive factor in this particular model is the probability outcome of the bigrams (word pairs) extracted the visible text on the page. Here are a few significant bigrams: relocationcompanies productsproviding productspure qualitybook recruitmentwebsite ticketsour thesetraffic representingclients todayplay tourshigh registryrepair rentproperties weddingportal printingcanvas prhuman privacyprotection providingefficient waytrade printingstationery priceseverything website*daily Next, this model looks for tokens extracted from the URL and particular meta tags from the page. Similar to above, but I believe unigrams only. A few examples follow. Please keep in mind that none of these phrases are used individually... they are each weighted and combined with all other known factors on the page: offer review book more Management into Web Library blog Joomla forums The model then looks at the outdegree of the page (number of unique domains pointed to). From there, it breaks down into TLD (.biz, .ru, .gov, etc) The file gets pretty hard to decipher at this point (it's a huge XML file) but contextual advertising is used as a predictive variable throughout. Just from eyeballing it, it appears to be more or less as significant as the precision and recall rate of high value commercial terms, average word length (western languages only), and visible text length. Based on what I'm looking at right now, my answer would be that sponsored posts are going to be far more harmful to the user experience than advertising. Can't answer the rest of your question which I assume relates to the number of ad blocks or amount of space taken up by ads... we don't measure it. Edit: Just realized that Google will probably delist this page within 24 hours. Should've used a gif for those bigrams. Oh well ;-)

option1138 15y ago

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. This. Assume you work on the webspam team and you have a 92% spam detection rate but a 99.9% accuracy rate on what you do detect. There are around 40,000,000 active domains in a given month listed on Google. That means 40,000 sites on average are being penalized without reason.