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> Next week, we'll launch the “helpful content update” to tackle content that seems to have been primarily created for ranking well in search engines rather tha
by seanwilson 4y ago
> Next week, we'll launch the “helpful content update” to tackle content that seems to have been primarily created for ranking well in search engines rather than to help or inform people. This ranking update will help make sure that unoriginal, low quality content doesn’t rank highly in Search, and our testing has found it will especially improve results related to online education, as well as arts and entertainment, shopping and tech-related content.
I know Google isn't going to reveal the exact secrets behind what changes they're making to do this to avoid black hat SEO, but haven't they been trying to do the above all along? What stops the SEO community from observing how rankings change, guessing what the new metrics are, and then optimising for these metrics as usual until the search spam is back where it started?
What about letting users give a vote/rating or leaving a comment on if a page was helpful? A big reason imo that Googling for "reddit <search term>" works is that spammy stuff on social sites (including Hacker News) gets punished quickly by spam filters, down-votes and negative comments - regular Google search lacks that because people can't down-vote or comment on a page. It feels inevitable to me they'll have to start doing something like this.
- dazc 4y agoThere is no incentive to arranging a downvoting scheme targeted against a random poster on HN or Reddit, there is, however, a great incentive to do the same against a commercial competitor in Google search results. Negative seo is a thing and any commercial site that is remotely successful is targeted with it daily.
- layer8 4y ago> What about letting users give a vote/rating or leaving a comment on if a page was helpful? Difficult for such a system not to be gamed, e.g. via botnets.
- Spivak 4y agoAnd difficult for the system to not be gamed by brigadiers. Also voting is an extremely skewed signal, what people say they like and what they actually like are very different and with search you can actually measure that by seeing which results users actually go to and don’t bounce from.
- layer8 4y agoI wonder about the bouncing, because I often either (1) check out a couple more results, only to find that they aren’t better than the first acceptable one, or (2) open the first ten or so promising search result in new tabs in one go before looking at the actual pages. Google can only make limited inferences about result quality from that, meaning that its ratings become skewed toward less sophisticated users.
- seanwilson 4y agoWhat stops Reddit from being gamed like this? How does the "reddit <search term>" trick on Google return good results in a way that isn't being gamed? I'm not saying it's as simple as adding an up/down vote widget next to each Google search result, but what can Google do to compete with social sites here where social sites have a lot of rich signals about what users prefer? There's no way to weigh or moderate each up/down vote based on how reliable the source is? What stops Hacker News, Reddit and Slashdot being overrun with spam from bot votes?
- layer8 4y agoReddit isn’t a very attractive target, because there’s a continuous stream of new posts/threads, so much more ephemeral than the average web page, and because Reddit users are only a small minority compared to everyone who uses Google. Also, Reddit has moderators. It wouldn’t be practical for Google to moderate votes on search results, and the moderators would be much less motivated than for the subreddit they’re engaged with. A better comparison is Amazon search results and reviews, which are known to suffer from being gamed.