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It's not Google's job to make sure every webmaster has a "fair shot" at rankings. It's their job to make sure the best results appear when I search for somethin

by shawnz 13y ago

It's not Google's job to make sure every webmaster has a "fair shot" at rankings. It's their job to make sure the best results appear when I search for something. In Google's eyes, having false negatives is worth not having false positives, and that's just the reality of the web. Besides, it seems to me that these "problems" are only really thought of as problems by the type of people who put "search engine" in the title of their blog.

adorable 13y ago
> Besides, it seems to me like these "problems" are only really thought of as problems by the type of people who put "search engine" in the title of their blog. or by all the people who have a site with traffic coming from Google
damoncali 13y ago
The government may some day think otherwise. Google's monopoly on search is substantial enough that they risk much by eschewing fairness in favor of quality. I would tread very lightly if I were in Google's shoes.
- magicalist 13y ago
  Good luck defining "fairness". That regulation is going to go really well.
  - Finster 13y ago
    The Federal Government never let a little thing like undefinability stop them before.
  - damoncali 13y ago
    I hate the word myself as it means little outside of sports. However, there is a very real perception of "fairness", and often the status quo defines that perception. Whatever changes Google makes will be interpreted as unfair by someone, and given their dominant status - that could be a problem if enough people get nervous.
ebiester 13y ago
The question is, of course, what are the best results when it comes to "buy viagra?"
nivla 13y ago
>It's not Google's job to make sure every webmaster has a "fair shot" at rankings. It is as much as it is the job of Microsoft to allow you to install 3rd party browser or OS on a desktop. When you have a monopoly in an industry, you don't get to choose favorites else it will considered an abuse of power.
- lukeschlather 13y ago
  Google's product is choosing favorites. You tell Google not to choose favorites, they just return a random list of webpages.
sharkweek 13y ago
Besides, it seems to me that these "problems" are only really thought of as problems by the type of people who put "search engine" in the title of their blog. Or anyone who runs an online business...? Let's say you're a small ecommerce site, your site is growing, your blog is gaining readership as it's become a great resource. One of your nasty competitors who doesn't like that your rankings are going up for all this hard work decides to hop on Fiverr and buy tons of terrible links all pointing at your site and your rankings all the sudden drastically drop because your site is now viewed as spam. That's a very realistic concern for a lot of webmasters and small business owners (the big guys suffer a lot less from negative SEO because their link portfolio is far more balanced out). I'd much rather have Google just give a ZERO value to low quality and shady links as opposed to a negative value.
- mattezell 13y ago
  "...hop on Fiverr and buy tons of terrible links all pointing at your site and your rankings all the sudden drastically drop because your site is now viewed as spam..." I saw this very thing happen in real life, actually... though it wasn't a competitor... A well meaning team member on a project which I was previously affiliated with decided "Hey, I know how we can get this project some exposure! FIVERR!"... Yes, I know that there are better, less shady, approaches to generating traction, but we will just blame inexperience and a temporary lapse in judgement for the expensive lesson in negative SEO... Long story short, weeks of organic link building and organic service/site promotion were completely obliterated within 72hrs of $20 worth of Fiverr backlink purchases... Needless to say, so far as I know, the team only uses 100% whitehat approaches for site and product promotions now...
  - sharkweek 13y ago
    I know plenty of people who know just enough to be dangerous like that -- they know that links are the one of the main factors in rankings and then get tunnel vision in increasing linking domains. "Boy that 1000 links for $5 sure seems a lot more efficient than the slow, organic process of building up a resourceful, industry-relevant blog!"
  - 13y ago
austenallred 13y ago
Nonsense; that is Google's one and only job. My parents run a small e-commerce business that has supported them for years; a team of a dozen people run everything from the little website to the shipping. All of their sales come from (mostly accidental) SEO and Amazon. The scary reality is that right now that entire operation could be destroyed by a competitor in a couple minutes if they knew how. It's not hard to find a package on Fiverr that includes 1,000 spammy links for $5, so a competitor could easily direct 5,000 spammy links (more than the entire amount of links directed at them right now) for $50. Is that use case emotionally loaded? Sure. But it isn't extreme. I recognize that the company only exists because Google gave it a chance to, but the idea that the livelihoods of a dozen people could vanish if someone got a little bit ambitious deserves a better response than what Google has given it. Google's current options for removing negative SEO are very hand-wavy, mostly because they don't really believe negative SEO is a large issue. Admittedly, potential for negative SEO is a cop-out black-hatters use to cover their tracks more than it is a real threat, but that doesn't mean Google can ignore it. Google's current solutions for combating negative SEO: "Ask webmasters to remove the links" - a complete joke and everyone knows it, and the Link Disavow Tool, which is pretty difficult to use, and Google admits that it may be several months before the rankings are updated after links are disavowed.
- shawnz 13y ago
  > Nonsense; that is Google's one and only job. Why? You're not paying them to list your website. Meanwhile I am paying them, in ad impressions, to look at your listing. If you want reliable returns, buy an ad instead. EDIT: What I am trying to say is, it doesn't matter to me if I see "Jack's Pastries" or "Jill's Pastries" in my search results. Your livelihood is not Google's responsibility, unless you buy ad space from them.
  - austenallred 13y ago
    Their job is to show the best results for a given search query. If my website is the best but it doesn't appear at the top because a competitor has attacked it, Google isn't doing its job.
tomjen3 13y ago
You are partly right, but you seem to think it is googles job to serve you, it is not. It is googles job to make money when you click on ads, so their job is to make you click on ads. And while you are right that some false positives may be acceptable there is a hell of a difference between accidental false positives and false positives created because of competitors actions. You don't want to live in a world where the scummiest bastard gets to put his links ahead of they guy who is actually providing a service. We already have that situation if you google for the names of certain appliances (eg. my dishwasher) where all the results are to meta-shopping sites.
ronaldx 13y ago
It is Google's job to make sure every webmaster has a fair shot - any unfairness ensures the top results will go to organisations who are best at gaming the system: unfairness harms the results. Google won search by being good at this when other search engines were not.
mikescoffield 13y ago
Is it easier to increase your rankings by a) building solid quality backlinks to your site or b) building tons of spam links to your competitors' sites? If the answer is b), which I suspect it might due to reading some comments here citing fiverr examples, then allowing negative SEO is decreasing the quality of search results. Also, my guess is where the damage is really done is w/ long tail searches. That's when I almost always encounter random, irrelevant, spammy sites - when I search for something very specific in Google.
brudgers 13y ago
It's their job to make sure the best results appear when I search for something. "Best" means best for Google, not most informative to you. The big deal about negative SEO is that "worse" means worse for Google - again, it has nothing to do with your or my needs. The combination of positive and negative SEO is intended solely for Google's long term benefit. Maybe goodwill enters into it, but only to the extent it creates value for Google's shareholders.
arbuge 13y ago
"It's not Google's job to make sure every webmaster has a "fair shot" at rankings. It's their job to make sure the best results appear when I search for something." I would think it's pretty obvious they have to ensure every webmaster has a fair shot to guarantee the best results. If a crappy website rises to the top by doing negative seo and denying the best results their fair shots, Google is not doing its job.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
cousin_it 13y ago
Do you think the world would be worse off if Google were fair to webmasters? Do you think perfect competition should trump all other values?

by shawnz 13y ago

adorable 13y ago

> Besides, it seems to me like these "problems" are only really thought of as problems by the type of people who put "search engine" in the title of their blog. or by all the people who have a site with traffic coming from Google

damoncali 13y ago

The government may some day think otherwise. Google's monopoly on search is substantial enough that they risk much by eschewing fairness in favor of quality. I would tread very lightly if I were in Google's shoes.

magicalist 13y ago
Good luck defining "fairness". That regulation is going to go really well.
- Finster 13y ago
  The Federal Government never let a little thing like undefinability stop them before.
- damoncali 13y ago
  I hate the word myself as it means little outside of sports. However, there is a very real perception of "fairness", and often the status quo defines that perception. Whatever changes Google makes will be interpreted as unfair by someone, and given their dominant status - that could be a problem if enough people get nervous.

ebiester 13y ago

The question is, of course, what are the best results when it comes to "buy viagra?"

nivla 13y ago

>It's not Google's job to make sure every webmaster has a "fair shot" at rankings. It is as much as it is the job of Microsoft to allow you to install 3rd party browser or OS on a desktop. When you have a monopoly in an industry, you don't get to choose favorites else it will considered an abuse of power.

lukeschlather 13y ago
Google's product is choosing favorites. You tell Google not to choose favorites, they just return a random list of webpages.

sharkweek 13y ago

Besides, it seems to me that these "problems" are only really thought of as problems by the type of people who put "search engine" in the title of their blog. Or anyone who runs an online business...? Let's say you're a small ecommerce site, your site is growing, your blog is gaining readership as it's become a great resource. One of your nasty competitors who doesn't like that your rankings are going up for all this hard work decides to hop on Fiverr and buy tons of terrible links all pointing at your site and your rankings all the sudden drastically drop because your site is now viewed as spam. That's a very realistic concern for a lot of webmasters and small business owners (the big guys suffer a lot less from negative SEO because their link portfolio is far more balanced out). I'd much rather have Google just give a ZERO value to low quality and shady links as opposed to a negative value.

mattezell 13y ago
"...hop on Fiverr and buy tons of terrible links all pointing at your site and your rankings all the sudden drastically drop because your site is now viewed as spam..." I saw this very thing happen in real life, actually... though it wasn't a competitor... A well meaning team member on a project which I was previously affiliated with decided "Hey, I know how we can get this project some exposure! FIVERR!"... Yes, I know that there are better, less shady, approaches to generating traction, but we will just blame inexperience and a temporary lapse in judgement for the expensive lesson in negative SEO... Long story short, weeks of organic link building and organic service/site promotion were completely obliterated within 72hrs of $20 worth of Fiverr backlink purchases... Needless to say, so far as I know, the team only uses 100% whitehat approaches for site and product promotions now...
- sharkweek 13y ago
  I know plenty of people who know just enough to be dangerous like that -- they know that links are the one of the main factors in rankings and then get tunnel vision in increasing linking domains. "Boy that 1000 links for $5 sure seems a lot more efficient than the slow, organic process of building up a resourceful, industry-relevant blog!"
- 13y ago

austenallred 13y ago

Nonsense; that is Google's one and only job. My parents run a small e-commerce business that has supported them for years; a team of a dozen people run everything from the little website to the shipping. All of their sales come from (mostly accidental) SEO and Amazon. The scary reality is that right now that entire operation could be destroyed by a competitor in a couple minutes if they knew how. It's not hard to find a package on Fiverr that includes 1,000 spammy links for $5, so a competitor could easily direct 5,000 spammy links (more than the entire amount of links directed at them right now) for $50. Is that use case emotionally loaded? Sure. But it isn't extreme. I recognize that the company only exists because Google gave it a chance to, but the idea that the livelihoods of a dozen people could vanish if someone got a little bit ambitious deserves a better response than what Google has given it. Google's current options for removing negative SEO are very hand-wavy, mostly because they don't really believe negative SEO is a large issue. Admittedly, potential for negative SEO is a cop-out black-hatters use to cover their tracks more than it is a real threat, but that doesn't mean Google can ignore it. Google's current solutions for combating negative SEO: "Ask webmasters to remove the links" - a complete joke and everyone knows it, and the Link Disavow Tool, which is pretty difficult to use, and Google admits that it may be several months before the rankings are updated after links are disavowed.

shawnz 13y ago
> Nonsense; that is Google's one and only job. Why? You're not paying them to list your website. Meanwhile I am paying them, in ad impressions, to look at your listing. If you want reliable returns, buy an ad instead. EDIT: What I am trying to say is, it doesn't matter to me if I see "Jack's Pastries" or "Jill's Pastries" in my search results. Your livelihood is not Google's responsibility, unless you buy ad space from them.
- austenallred 13y ago
  Their job is to show the best results for a given search query. If my website is the best but it doesn't appear at the top because a competitor has attacked it, Google isn't doing its job.

tomjen3 13y ago

You are partly right, but you seem to think it is googles job to serve you, it is not. It is googles job to make money when you click on ads, so their job is to make you click on ads. And while you are right that some false positives may be acceptable there is a hell of a difference between accidental false positives and false positives created because of competitors actions. You don't want to live in a world where the scummiest bastard gets to put his links ahead of they guy who is actually providing a service. We already have that situation if you google for the names of certain appliances (eg. my dishwasher) where all the results are to meta-shopping sites.

ronaldx 13y ago

It is Google's job to make sure every webmaster has a fair shot - any unfairness ensures the top results will go to organisations who are best at gaming the system: unfairness harms the results. Google won search by being good at this when other search engines were not.

mikescoffield 13y ago

Is it easier to increase your rankings by a) building solid quality backlinks to your site or b) building tons of spam links to your competitors' sites? If the answer is b), which I suspect it might due to reading some comments here citing fiverr examples, then allowing negative SEO is decreasing the quality of search results. Also, my guess is where the damage is really done is w/ long tail searches. That's when I almost always encounter random, irrelevant, spammy sites - when I search for something very specific in Google.

brudgers 13y ago

It's their job to make sure the best results appear when I search for something. "Best" means best for Google, not most informative to you. The big deal about negative SEO is that "worse" means worse for Google - again, it has nothing to do with your or my needs. The combination of positive and negative SEO is intended solely for Google's long term benefit. Maybe goodwill enters into it, but only to the extent it creates value for Google's shareholders.

arbuge 13y ago

"It's not Google's job to make sure every webmaster has a "fair shot" at rankings. It's their job to make sure the best results appear when I search for something." I would think it's pretty obvious they have to ensure every webmaster has a fair shot to guarantee the best results. If a crappy website rises to the top by doing negative seo and denying the best results their fair shots, Google is not doing its job.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

cousin_it 13y ago

Do you think the world would be worse off if Google were fair to webmasters? Do you think perfect competition should trump all other values?