Again with the SPAM sites. Same as it ever was.

It isnt just these kind of spam sites but al lthe stupid 'info portals' that are just links to other info portals. It is getting harder to find info on the net these days.

 

Agreed. I'm sick of those freakin portals. And google seems to love'em in the SERPS. I have no idea why. But you can bet most of those portals are nothing but referral links and ads. How is it that we can all see this so clearly and yet google appears to be blind to it?

I'm telling ya, until it actually hurts google's bottom line, we're not gonna see any changes in the terrible serps we're seeing now.

 

Not if it's Google Ads that these pages are serving up. You noticed how alot of these things are FILLED with Google Ads?

Google is definetly getting their money's worth. I don't have the experience or the personal knowledge of Google to actually say that they give a certain preference to site's promoting their ads, but it hurts me to say that it does looke that way, especially for smaller, less competive keywords.

But in today's internet world, what isn't a competitive keyword? I mean, let's say toyota corrola door handle. Ok, in my estimation, the only person who is searching by that term is LOOKING for either how to buy a door handle or how to fix a door handle, or how to "pimp" a door handle.

So we have a little site that is dedicated to selling, repairing or pimping door handles. Don't laugh, there is a market for everything. Ok, that little search term only produces about 50 pageviews a day, and of that, let's say 30 actual (and in this case) qualified visitors. Marketing rule of thumb, you can close about 6 of those visitors with the right sell. Ok, those 6 little sales might be a very good profitable business for the website owner. Enough to feed his/her kids and pay the rent and not have to "punch in."

Now these jerks come along and push the position you've been fighting for down in the SERP's. And what CONTENT do they bring? Just more ads. And those ads pay who? Google.

Hey, I don't really think that Google WANTS to spam the public. They've said it before, their business is SEARCH RESULTS. But the glitch in their alg is in their favor, for the most part.

The theory behind Page Rank and Trust Rank is pretty straight forward. The alg is supposed to look at your page, figure out if you're really talking about what you SAY your talking about, find out how many other sites think your snake oil is worth it. Find out if those sites are trusted sites. Google, right now, is a technological giant, with brainiacs all over the place. I don't have anywhere near the brainpower they do, but if I can see the way it's supposed to work, why the bugs?

And guess what. The original sites in question, at the beginning of the thread, their indexed pages just WENT UP! 21 thousand to 34 thousand on one, and CrankyDave pointed out one that has gone up from 344 thousand to half a million!

Again I say

C'mon!

 

I can see more people using ad-free less spammy services like wikipedia for finding info rather than with search engines which are filling up more and more spam. Sometimes when I need info I just go to wikipedia and if i need more info I follow the links at the end of each article.

Google is too powerful, IMHO. Pagerank still does matter contrary to what alot of selfproclaimed experts claim. Alot of these spam sites can rank well cause they all link to eachother and so if 10 spam portals each link to each other they may all get a PR or 5-7 and then move to the top of google. And with crap RSS feeds google still interprets it as real content even though it is just autogen garbage.

 

Great post!

 

To answer the original question about whether to spam google or not, to compete for what you believe is your legitimate position is great question, with no simple answer. If you value you domain don't use black hat tactics, it is that simple. Eventually Google will catch on and discredit your back links and your page will never get good SERPS again, and your domain could be worthless. The real problem here is weighing risk, there is much grey area here, what will get caught what is worth the risk.

If you want to turn and burn domains, or pages on domains you can get good results with black hat link strategies. I have seen many black hatters get top 10 ranks for extremely competitive terms in less than 2 months. But usually they will reap these benefits for short periods of time, sometimes less than a month.

Google is not perfect, but it is much better at qualified search results, at least Google is trying to eliminate black hat tactics and has made attempts at monitoring these methods. Unlike MSN and Yahoo who basically condone these types of link strategies, Google is way ahead of the curve and in my opinion and no where near legitimate competition from Yahoo or MSN in Wiley's "wars"

 

rumblepup, the site I pointed out on the first page is showing more than 1.7 million pages of SPAM on the DC I just checked.

Dave

 

Who says that Wikipedia is not full of spam as well? We have a competitor that set up a chill site and was able to get a link in Wikipedia as being an objective authoritative source. We added one of our links which was very informative and original, and that same competitor deleted it.

Granted Wikipedia is harder to spam, but there are lots of people doing it. It just might not be as obvious.

1/7

 

Yeap, now I'm pissed, cause they stole my postion in SERP

"patio umbrella canvas wood"

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B2GGGL_enUS177US177&q=patio+umbrella+canvas+wood

 

Oh that's just ugly. This is the main cloaked site: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=site:s168897611.onlinehome.us

43,000 pages of cloaked and redirecting garbage. No cache tags on every page. All subdomains. Took me approximately 10 seconds to find it all.

How can the SEs be missing this stuff?

 

It is still very well moderated though. I im sick of seeing 'find top 10 info on keyword ' type sites when I do google searches. IM sure alot of other people are tired of it too.

 

Now they are gone. Wow!

I wonder how that happened?

I know that I posted at Mr. Cutts about this thing, and I reported it as spam to Google. Wanted to see if it actually worked.

Actually, now all of the sites listed in this thread have been removed. I'd like to know what really got them removed.

Was it the reports of spam directly to Google?

Was it posting the issue on Matt Cutts?

Or was is the complete stink that this and other blogs and forums that picked up on this sucker? Hmmmmmm?

But I guess that from now on, this event will go down in history.

We'll be saying things like "Remember when that guy, the owner of that site, SPAMMED THE HELL OUT OF GOOGLE?"

..
..
..
TWICE!!

 

I used the Google spam report form. I wonder if that thing works on the basis that the sites/pages with the most spam reports get the most attention?

 

1 of 2 things could be happening:

1. Google modified their algo to what would bring in the most ammount of clicks to paid ads and it just so happens that this combo of supplemental pages, bigdaddy, and spam sites is the "optimal" algo for profits instead of search quality.

2. Google doesnt want to fix the problem because it would require a tighter algo for indexing and ranking that would do more harm to good sites than bad ones.

 

Very miserable spam, he risks his own site just to be in top of Google's index