12 ms·

This just adds to the list of why to hate Google. Basically if you are either a big brand or a spammy company or have a nimble operation, you can afford to do

by pknight 13y ago

This just adds to the list of why to hate Google. Basically if you are either a big brand or a spammy company or have a nimble operation, you can afford to do grey & black seo. If you are a small business/ up and coming company white seo practices are the safe choice.

chaz 13y ago
> This just adds to the list of why to hate Google. Aren't all search engines susceptible to the same practices? How would you like to see them fixed?
- PaulHoule 13y ago
  You could rank #1 for Viagra in Bing and get maybe two visits a day.
  - mgkimsal 13y ago
    You gotta rank high for V14GR4! then you'd get more visits. That's apparently how the kids spell it these days...
PaulHoule 13y ago
Note that the worst content farms either evolved from or bought second and third tier search engines (About.com, AOL) because they could sue Google in an antitrust lawsuit if they ever got burned for their crappy content and linking schemes.
- acgourley 13y ago
  That's pretty interesting if true - do you have any evidence?
  - declan 13y ago
    It's not true. First, it's wrong on liability under federal antitrust law. Second, just look at (ick) Demand Media, home to eHow.com and Cracked.com, which operates no search engines.
hkmurakami 13y ago
The most hilarious example I know for black hat seo is in japan, where expired domains for congressional candidates get bought up by these spammy companies for their link quality. (The Japanese govt pages have high page quality, and link directly to these candidate domains, thus giving these candidate pages high link quality status in google's eyes. The candidate pages become info-spam-blog pages that peddle things like cosmetics and link to the mother payload pages to impose so rank.)
- davemel37 13y ago
  google resets PageRank on expired domains.
  - hkmurakami 13y ago
    Correct me if I am wrong, but if the govt pages continue to link to these newly reborn link spam pages, certainly these expired domains have higher link value than a brand new fresh domain?
    - davemel37 13y ago
      you are mistaken. This was the case until about 2008 or so... here is a quote from matt cutts. "On expired domains, Matt said Google tries to reset pagerank/links for all expired domains to zero when they are registered by someone new. They don’t try to penalize the expired domain, but they also don’t want to give credit for the previous owner’s links." http://www.seo.com/blog/conferences/matt-cutts-does-domain-roundtable/ http://www.seo.com/blog/conferences/matt-cutts-does-domain-r...
      - hkmurakami 13y ago
        Thanks for the correction! :)
      - girvo 13y ago
        The keyword there would be "tries", I'd wager...
throwaway420 13y ago
Even if you use nothing but white-hat and above-board SEO strategies, you're at risk of your page getting penalized or delisted. This happens to people every day. Only unlike Rap Genius, there is literally zero way to communicate with somebody at Google unless you manage to get a popular thread going at HN. I'm happy this Rap Genius incident happened because it's driven some attention to how Google's business actually operates, how poor their algorithms actually are, how arbitrary their search engine actually is, how poor their customer service practices are, and many other similar ideas. Granted, these are monumentally hard problems to solve and Google still does it better than anybody else, but it's good that some attention is directed here because there are numerous problems with how ranking in Google currently works.
- my_username_is_ 13y ago
  While I agree that it is necessarily difficult to create a search engine ranking algorithm that isn't gamed, customer service isn't something that should be lumped in with the 'difficult problems'. Google has been notoriously terrible at customer service for years and it's amazing that they've been so successful despite this.
  - camillomiller 13y ago
    This. What I despise the most is their hypocrisy and the clean face their Head Hypocrite Matt Cutts always wears when answering those SEO questions. So you have the biggest search engine in the world and all the transparency you can think of consists on putting a man in front of a camera like a country preacher, always saying things that leave open spaces of interpretation?
    - Shog9 13y ago
      Because, what? You expect Cutts to be on the phone handling calls from irate webmasters instead? If Google sells me ad-space - or a Nexus - and then doesn't respond when I have a problem, that's bad. But if your pages drop in the search result rankings, suck it up and maybe pay a bit more attention to the spirit of that preaching - Google owes you ZERO customer support if all you're paying for is snake-oil from some 3rd-party SEO "expert".
mesozoic 13y ago
The problem being for any competitive keyword you're almost assured not to rank with completely white hat practices.
richardw 13y ago
> If you are a small business/ up and coming company white seo practices are the safe choice. Not (entirely) true. Here's a 'small business' sans any big-brand protection that is obviously spamming the heck out of electrician/plumber niches and has been succeeding for years. If you're near one of the relevant areas and Google "[area] plumber" you'll see a few of their sites on page 1. Not one or two. Maybe five. My fiancee got an electrician in from one of those sites and he was so clueless he claimed that his people were building an oven element (rather than buying it for $20 and just installing it.) http://find-sa.co.za/directory/category/a1_plumbing_services/index.php http://find-sa.co.za/directory/category/a1_plumbing_services... See two pages with the same layout, and if you click around you'll see they're barely trying to hide it. http://find-sa.co.za/directory/category/a1_plumbing_services/page_e.php#pagelink_654082 http://find-sa.co.za/directory/category/a1_plumbing_services... This is 90's stuff. Google's being gamed badly by the most unsophisticated techniques. The guys who actually work in those areas and provide relevant services must be going crazy.
- PaulHoule 13y ago
  I know a really good restaurant with a non specific name that has made a point to have landing pages at many different sites so if you search for them the top 20 or so results are all about them
Achorny 13y ago
I read the article, and obviously Google isn’t as good at filtering out overly optimized anchors as they claim. But I don't understand how this favors big brands over little ones (other then the fact that big brands probably have more money to throw at people to write the overly optimized anchors in the first place)?

by pknight 13y ago

chaz 13y ago

> This just adds to the list of why to hate Google. Aren't all search engines susceptible to the same practices? How would you like to see them fixed?

PaulHoule 13y ago
You could rank #1 for Viagra in Bing and get maybe two visits a day.
- mgkimsal 13y ago
  You gotta rank high for V14GR4! then you'd get more visits. That's apparently how the kids spell it these days...

PaulHoule 13y ago

Note that the worst content farms either evolved from or bought second and third tier search engines (About.com, AOL) because they could sue Google in an antitrust lawsuit if they ever got burned for their crappy content and linking schemes.

acgourley 13y ago
That's pretty interesting if true - do you have any evidence?
- declan 13y ago
  It's not true. First, it's wrong on liability under federal antitrust law. Second, just look at (ick) Demand Media, home to eHow.com and Cracked.com, which operates no search engines.

hkmurakami 13y ago

The most hilarious example I know for black hat seo is in japan, where expired domains for congressional candidates get bought up by these spammy companies for their link quality. (The Japanese govt pages have high page quality, and link directly to these candidate domains, thus giving these candidate pages high link quality status in google's eyes. The candidate pages become info-spam-blog pages that peddle things like cosmetics and link to the mother payload pages to impose so rank.)

davemel37 13y ago
google resets PageRank on expired domains.
- hkmurakami 13y ago
  Correct me if I am wrong, but if the govt pages continue to link to these newly reborn link spam pages, certainly these expired domains have higher link value than a brand new fresh domain?
  - davemel37 13y ago
    you are mistaken. This was the case until about 2008 or so... here is a quote from matt cutts. "On expired domains, Matt said Google tries to reset pagerank/links for all expired domains to zero when they are registered by someone new. They don’t try to penalize the expired domain, but they also don’t want to give credit for the previous owner’s links." http://www.seo.com/blog/conferences/matt-cutts-does-domain-roundtable/ http://www.seo.com/blog/conferences/matt-cutts-does-domain-r...
    - hkmurakami 13y ago
      Thanks for the correction! :)
    - girvo 13y ago
      The keyword there would be "tries", I'd wager...

throwaway420 13y ago

Even if you use nothing but white-hat and above-board SEO strategies, you're at risk of your page getting penalized or delisted. This happens to people every day. Only unlike Rap Genius, there is literally zero way to communicate with somebody at Google unless you manage to get a popular thread going at HN. I'm happy this Rap Genius incident happened because it's driven some attention to how Google's business actually operates, how poor their algorithms actually are, how arbitrary their search engine actually is, how poor their customer service practices are, and many other similar ideas. Granted, these are monumentally hard problems to solve and Google still does it better than anybody else, but it's good that some attention is directed here because there are numerous problems with how ranking in Google currently works.

my_username_is_ 13y ago
While I agree that it is necessarily difficult to create a search engine ranking algorithm that isn't gamed, customer service isn't something that should be lumped in with the 'difficult problems'. Google has been notoriously terrible at customer service for years and it's amazing that they've been so successful despite this.
- camillomiller 13y ago
  This. What I despise the most is their hypocrisy and the clean face their Head Hypocrite Matt Cutts always wears when answering those SEO questions. So you have the biggest search engine in the world and all the transparency you can think of consists on putting a man in front of a camera like a country preacher, always saying things that leave open spaces of interpretation?
  - Shog9 13y ago
    Because, what? You expect Cutts to be on the phone handling calls from irate webmasters instead? If Google sells me ad-space - or a Nexus - and then doesn't respond when I have a problem, that's bad. But if your pages drop in the search result rankings, suck it up and maybe pay a bit more attention to the spirit of that preaching - Google owes you ZERO customer support if all you're paying for is snake-oil from some 3rd-party SEO "expert".

mesozoic 13y ago

The problem being for any competitive keyword you're almost assured not to rank with completely white hat practices.

richardw 13y ago

> If you are a small business/ up and coming company white seo practices are the safe choice. Not (entirely) true. Here's a 'small business' sans any big-brand protection that is obviously spamming the heck out of electrician/plumber niches and has been succeeding for years. If you're near one of the relevant areas and Google "[area] plumber" you'll see a few of their sites on page 1. Not one or two. Maybe five. My fiancee got an electrician in from one of those sites and he was so clueless he claimed that his people were building an oven element (rather than buying it for $20 and just installing it.) http://find-sa.co.za/directory/category/a1_plumbing_services/index.php http://find-sa.co.za/directory/category/a1_plumbing_services... See two pages with the same layout, and if you click around you'll see they're barely trying to hide it. http://find-sa.co.za/directory/category/a1_plumbing_services/page_e.php#pagelink_654082 http://find-sa.co.za/directory/category/a1_plumbing_services... This is 90's stuff. Google's being gamed badly by the most unsophisticated techniques. The guys who actually work in those areas and provide relevant services must be going crazy.

PaulHoule 13y ago
I know a really good restaurant with a non specific name that has made a point to have landing pages at many different sites so if you search for them the top 20 or so results are all about them

Achorny 13y ago

I read the article, and obviously Google isn’t as good at filtering out overly optimized anchors as they claim. But I don't understand how this favors big brands over little ones (other then the fact that big brands probably have more money to throw at people to write the overly optimized anchors in the first place)?