3 ms·

I think the biggest problem that Google can't fix is that they treat links as a voting mechanism, and that voting mechanism has value. So, there is a big econom

I think the biggest problem that Google can't fix is that they treat links as a voting mechanism, and that voting mechanism has value. So, there is a big economic incentive to "buy votes" by buying links. As long as there is a financial incentive to ranking well in google and that the mechanism to rank better is to get links, people with money will buy links in the same way they buy influence in the media, politics, etc.

brokentone 13y ago
There will always be something to buy (Yelp: http://www.buyyelpreview.com/ http://www.buyyelpreview.com/ YouTube: http://www.ytview.com/ http://www.ytview.com/, via a quick Google search). Overall it links are a very successful metric (the pagerank algorithm changed the search game), but it's more about the sophistication of the engine to detect and demote abuses.
jcampbell1 13y ago
Google punishes people that buy links, just like our government punishes people that buy votes. That sets up an incentive to not do it. I would say, this problem is not in the "can't fix" category. Just like in real politics, Google must tread carefully. You can't arrest the president because someone bought votes on his behalf, just like Google can't nuke a site because it has purchased links.
- BrianEatWorld 13y ago
  Extending that analogy though, the government can punish people buying votes, but that doesn't stop the billion dollar lobbying industry from shaping public policy. The incentive doesn't disappear, as there is a great deal to be gained by being bumped up search results. They raise the costs or circumventing the system, but that just means people look elsewhere. Its an arms race.
- charliepinglass 13y ago
  Except Google does nuke sites all the time for buying links...
austenallred 13y ago
If Google wants to fight against SEO (of whatever color of hat), it needs to somehow separate the links of people that are trying to manipulate Google and the links of people that are just trying to use the Internet. The closer a spammer's actions appear to that of a normal person, the harder it is to find and devalue those links. Google's updates have been in the recent past are saying (Panda, Penguin), "Well, spammers generally tend do to this, let's make that bad now."
- Uchikoma 13y ago
  I always have this in my head: http://xkcd.com/810/ http://xkcd.com/810/
gfodor 13y ago
I'm not sure but it sounds like you are falling into the "Google still uses PageRank" fallacy.
mtgx 13y ago
How would you solve it then? By putting more focus on social media? They are doing that, too, but that can be even more easily abused sometimes. Google can distinguish between the less spammy and the more spammy links anyway, but it's a hard problem, so they can distinguish it to a certain agree. But Google's algorithm by now is certainly more complex than "giving each link a vote". A lot of SEO is on-page SEO, too, so it doesn't depend all on links. It also seems they will be focusing more on "author rank", which means posts written by "popular" authors (whatever that means in Google's algorithm) will more easily rank in Google than those written by less "popular" authors.
- bradleyjg 13y ago
  When google first started, or more accurately when Brin and Page were first working on PageRank, much of the content of the web was still written by hobbyists and professors. Sure there were web-rings and the like, but by and large putting together a page was a manual labor of love and linking was a personal endorsement. Now the function of a link has changed entirely. Many of them don't even exist to be clicked, and many of those that do are either advertising or the functional equivalent. There are a few places where a link really is still an endorsement: for example if I put together a hacker news comment that links a blog post I think is informative. Or a (genuine) blogger that writes about a topic. However, anytime there's a useful signal to be found in something like that the SEO jerks come and flood it. That's why we've got comment spam, we have reddit sock-puppets, we've got blogvertisments and so on. And the so-called white hat SEOs aren't much better in this regard. They are pushing their clients to go write mediocre "content" that is largely duplicative of what's already out there. People should only be writing content if they have something -- preferably interesting and/or informative -- to say, not because it means more people will visit their brochureware site, and certainly not as a means of getting (tricking?) people to click on no-value-add affiliate links or AdSense ads. That's putting the cart before the horse.
- programminggeek 13y ago
  re: "author rank" By this do you mean popular people will rank more easily like they do now? How is popularity determined? By links? re: How do you solve it? You don't. At least, not how Google does it. Google is trying to act like the government of the internet and tries to manipulate behavior into things that align with Google's goals - primarily making money via AdWords. To achieve this goal, they try to discredit competing advertising paid link systems because they break Google's system. It's akin to twitter making it all but impossible to have a successful twitter client. At some point, there is too much money in the current system to render what Google's webspam team does as much more than an elaborate game of whack-a-mole. They hit spam, more spam pops up elsewhere. The only way for Google to make their algorithm better is to take out or dial back the "buyable" elements - the social ones like links, tweets, facebook fans, etc. They did this pretty effectively with AdWords over the years. It's harder with organic results, but not impossible. Arguably, for many people you could put 10 reasonable, relevant, non-spam results on the front page of a given search term and it would be "good enough" for many people. Something akin to DuckDuckGo. Since this is a non-trivial problem what Google is doing is basically better than anyone else so far, and there is a lot of value in the social signals if only because it makes people care more about Google than they care about ranking on Twitter or Facebook. So, kudos to Google on what they're doing, but there is nothing inherent to search that requires a link to be a vote or for that to be such an important relevance factor.
damoncali 13y ago
As someone who has sold links and seen that income dry up completely, I would disagree.
Silhouette 13y ago
I think the biggest problem that Google can't fix is that they treat links as a voting mechanism They treat public links as a voting mechanism. Unfortunately, in the era of social networking, and maybe outside of their own Google+ network, they probably don't even see the majority of high quality links based on honest personal recommendations any more. Ultimately, I think this is going to be a good thing. Relying on a single, unaccountable source for most of your traffic was always a risky prospect for a small business, however good your products/services might be. I'm much happier with the situation we're seeing now, where search traffic represents maybe 30-40% of our total visits over a month, social networks are collectively a larger part, and there's also a substantial minority of direct traffic that presumably came from off-line word of mouth referrals and/or more traditional marketing channels where we use them.
- joonix 13y ago
  I wonder if Google is buying linkshare data from Facebook and Twitter. It seems obvious that they should.
  - Silhouette 13y ago
    That's an intriguing idea, assuming that the likes of Facebook and Twitter would want to share that data with Google and would be able to do so without running into privacy concerns given that the links were presumably not public if Google couldn't see them in the first place. I've been wondering whether something like this might explain how one of my sites, which has about two incoming public links in the entire universe and probably a page rank of 0 but seems to attract a decent level of FB/Twitter interest, hits the first SERP at least once for numerous queries in its niche.

brokentone 13y ago

There will always be something to buy (Yelp: http://www.buyyelpreview.com/ http://www.buyyelpreview.com/ YouTube: http://www.ytview.com/ http://www.ytview.com/, via a quick Google search). Overall it links are a very successful metric (the pagerank algorithm changed the search game), but it's more about the sophistication of the engine to detect and demote abuses.

jcampbell1 13y ago

Google punishes people that buy links, just like our government punishes people that buy votes. That sets up an incentive to not do it. I would say, this problem is not in the "can't fix" category. Just like in real politics, Google must tread carefully. You can't arrest the president because someone bought votes on his behalf, just like Google can't nuke a site because it has purchased links.

BrianEatWorld 13y ago
Extending that analogy though, the government can punish people buying votes, but that doesn't stop the billion dollar lobbying industry from shaping public policy. The incentive doesn't disappear, as there is a great deal to be gained by being bumped up search results. They raise the costs or circumventing the system, but that just means people look elsewhere. Its an arms race.
charliepinglass 13y ago
Except Google does nuke sites all the time for buying links...

austenallred 13y ago

If Google wants to fight against SEO (of whatever color of hat), it needs to somehow separate the links of people that are trying to manipulate Google and the links of people that are just trying to use the Internet. The closer a spammer's actions appear to that of a normal person, the harder it is to find and devalue those links. Google's updates have been in the recent past are saying (Panda, Penguin), "Well, spammers generally tend do to this, let's make that bad now."

Uchikoma 13y ago
I always have this in my head: http://xkcd.com/810/ http://xkcd.com/810/

gfodor 13y ago

I'm not sure but it sounds like you are falling into the "Google still uses PageRank" fallacy.

mtgx 13y ago

How would you solve it then? By putting more focus on social media? They are doing that, too, but that can be even more easily abused sometimes. Google can distinguish between the less spammy and the more spammy links anyway, but it's a hard problem, so they can distinguish it to a certain agree. But Google's algorithm by now is certainly more complex than "giving each link a vote". A lot of SEO is on-page SEO, too, so it doesn't depend all on links. It also seems they will be focusing more on "author rank", which means posts written by "popular" authors (whatever that means in Google's algorithm) will more easily rank in Google than those written by less "popular" authors.

bradleyjg 13y ago
When google first started, or more accurately when Brin and Page were first working on PageRank, much of the content of the web was still written by hobbyists and professors. Sure there were web-rings and the like, but by and large putting together a page was a manual labor of love and linking was a personal endorsement. Now the function of a link has changed entirely. Many of them don't even exist to be clicked, and many of those that do are either advertising or the functional equivalent. There are a few places where a link really is still an endorsement: for example if I put together a hacker news comment that links a blog post I think is informative. Or a (genuine) blogger that writes about a topic. However, anytime there's a useful signal to be found in something like that the SEO jerks come and flood it. That's why we've got comment spam, we have reddit sock-puppets, we've got blogvertisments and so on. And the so-called white hat SEOs aren't much better in this regard. They are pushing their clients to go write mediocre "content" that is largely duplicative of what's already out there. People should only be writing content if they have something -- preferably interesting and/or informative -- to say, not because it means more people will visit their brochureware site, and certainly not as a means of getting (tricking?) people to click on no-value-add affiliate links or AdSense ads. That's putting the cart before the horse.
programminggeek 13y ago
re: "author rank" By this do you mean popular people will rank more easily like they do now? How is popularity determined? By links? re: How do you solve it? You don't. At least, not how Google does it. Google is trying to act like the government of the internet and tries to manipulate behavior into things that align with Google's goals - primarily making money via AdWords. To achieve this goal, they try to discredit competing advertising paid link systems because they break Google's system. It's akin to twitter making it all but impossible to have a successful twitter client. At some point, there is too much money in the current system to render what Google's webspam team does as much more than an elaborate game of whack-a-mole. They hit spam, more spam pops up elsewhere. The only way for Google to make their algorithm better is to take out or dial back the "buyable" elements - the social ones like links, tweets, facebook fans, etc. They did this pretty effectively with AdWords over the years. It's harder with organic results, but not impossible. Arguably, for many people you could put 10 reasonable, relevant, non-spam results on the front page of a given search term and it would be "good enough" for many people. Something akin to DuckDuckGo. Since this is a non-trivial problem what Google is doing is basically better than anyone else so far, and there is a lot of value in the social signals if only because it makes people care more about Google than they care about ranking on Twitter or Facebook. So, kudos to Google on what they're doing, but there is nothing inherent to search that requires a link to be a vote or for that to be such an important relevance factor.

damoncali 13y ago

As someone who has sold links and seen that income dry up completely, I would disagree.

Silhouette 13y ago

I think the biggest problem that Google can't fix is that they treat links as a voting mechanism They treat public links as a voting mechanism. Unfortunately, in the era of social networking, and maybe outside of their own Google+ network, they probably don't even see the majority of high quality links based on honest personal recommendations any more. Ultimately, I think this is going to be a good thing. Relying on a single, unaccountable source for most of your traffic was always a risky prospect for a small business, however good your products/services might be. I'm much happier with the situation we're seeing now, where search traffic represents maybe 30-40% of our total visits over a month, social networks are collectively a larger part, and there's also a substantial minority of direct traffic that presumably came from off-line word of mouth referrals and/or more traditional marketing channels where we use them.

joonix 13y ago
I wonder if Google is buying linkshare data from Facebook and Twitter. It seems obvious that they should.
- Silhouette 13y ago
  That's an intriguing idea, assuming that the likes of Facebook and Twitter would want to share that data with Google and would be able to do so without running into privacy concerns given that the links were presumably not public if Google couldn't see them in the first place. I've been wondering whether something like this might explain how one of my sites, which has about two incoming public links in the entire universe and probably a page rank of 0 but seems to attract a decent level of FB/Twitter interest, hits the first SERP at least once for numerous queries in its niche.