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I'm hoping that Google will penalize them someday. They download all the content in the page so that they'll get indexed for it, but they don't offer it up wit
by andymcsherry 14y ago
I'm hoping that Google will penalize them someday. They download all the content in the page so that they'll get indexed for it, but they don't offer it up without an account to the user.
- niggler 14y agoHow would google determine that the content being served to other users differ from what the crawlers see?
- baddox 14y agoMost likely by someone at Google hearing about it if it gets negative coverage like this.
- jsnk 14y agoJust penalize any content from Quora.com in page rank.
- niggler 14y agoI was referring to automated processes, not a manual intervention
- artursapek 14y agoIf it's simply divs masking the content there must be a way to load the page on an iOS emulation, screencap the entire length of the page, and compare the amount of "content" in the source to what shows up in the screencap. I'm not saying it's worth the trouble for Google. Quora is probably the worst example of this bullshit. But it's certainly possible to automatically catch devilry like this, isn't it?
- niggler 14y agoYour proposal actually addresses quite a few sites that put lots of phrases in small font to boost pagerank rating
- artursapek 14y agoWith the proper image analysis technology it should work, right?
- andymcsherry 14y agoProbably if enough people report them for cloaking: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreportform?hl=en https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreportform?hl=en
- niggler 14y agoWell, I did my part in reporting quora. I wish there were a way to track the progress of this report. The process makes me feel as if the message was lost in the ether
- hayksaakian 14y agoThanks for the tip, I just filed a report.
- visualcsharp 14y agoReported. Thanks!
- dannyr 14y agoChange user agent to crawl as a mobile browser.
- niggler 14y agoThat wouldn't help if a site served different content to the google block of ip addresses
- SquareWheel 14y agoThis is cloaking and will get you in big trouble.
- dredmorbius 14y agoI suspect Google could get ahold of a block of non-Google AS addresses if it really wanted to.
- cbs 14y agoThe big fish (experts exchange etc...) are big enough to be caught manually. Programatically they can crawl with a typical browser user agent, from a netblock not registered to google nor announced by their ASes. They'd need to account for the dynamic nature of sites to determine if the difference between different crawls is a sign of trouble, but as luck have it they're already in the business of algorithms and archiving websites.
- Steko 14y agoI'm sure they'd do it algorithmically both for elegance and legal liability reasons. It'd be done in an identical fashion to the Panda update. Use the big fish to identify techniques you can build rules around and then make sure your arbitrary penalty doesn't affect too many innocents too much before you push it live.