I think there just trying to do PR, damage control, to try to make it LOOK like it wasn't so bad. If they are correct, which I don't think they are...oh well, having 'BILLIONS' in the title is great for a news story!!! If it had been just 'thousands', this thread would of died before even geting started!!! Google would of probably done nothing, and the spammer would continue to get rich quick and driving the searchers insane, oh, and Google wouldn't have a new nickname, Spamoogle.
Okay, let's give Matt the benefit of the doubt just for a moment. Site: operater was pushing numbers 5-6 times too high. Okay, let's double that shall we? Let's make it 12 times... no let's make it 20 times... hmmmmmmm better yet let's make it 100 times. That's still 70 million pages. Almost forgot, everyone who saw the site operator pushing numbers 100 times too high for their site, raise your hand. That's what I thought. Benefit time over. Dave
Bingo!! The rest of us have our site: number crashed in the dumps, but...oh, wait...if it's a spammer, then it's actually way to high, er that's what we'll say to the public!!
'Damage Control' is exactly what they're doing! I'm pretty new to this (had a website for 7 years that I never optimized), but I don't really believe that Google wants to get rid of these kinds of sites (well, I guess they wouldn't want there to be sooooo many of them that people start to lose confidence in their search engine). And, here's why: Google's stock price is around $400 a share - with earnings of less than $6 a share, or about 1.5%. If Google liquidated all their stock and put the money in the bank - they'd make more money! That being said, there must be an unbelievable amount of pressure to get revenue (and profit) up - or at least not let it drop - from the business community. But, Google makes most of their money on clicks... A good click-through rate (white hat) is what? 2 percent, give or take? What's a good click-through rate on a made-for-adsense (MFA) site? 20-30 percent? Judging from my own experience, about 99.99% of results returned by Google this last year have been completely useless and spammy. But, for argument's sake, let's say that just 10% of all traffic from Google goes to an MFA spam-site (if most of the results are MFAs, but they don't get the top results that the better sites get, 10 percent sounds about right, yes?). So, if 90 percent of Google traffic goes to sites with a 1 or 2% click-through rate - but 10 percent of it goes to sites with a 30% click-through rate - that means that the vast majority of Google's revenue is actually coming from spam sites! The VAST majority. So, do you really think Google's going to do anything other than make it appear that they want to shut these sites down (even though they really don't)??? Even if my numbers are WAY off - it would kill their stock price to do anything at all about it whatsoever... Sad... Cheers, Bob
Ha! I hadn't actually seen Google advertising MFA sites before! Perfect! As I think about it more, it's getting really scary... Let's say my numbers above were ridiculously far off. Let's say that only one in every 30 times you click on a result from Google you end up getting an MFA site (more like one in three, but we'll go with one in thirty). And, let's say that those sites are only getting a 10% click-through rate (which is pretty low considering most of those sites hide ads where the navigation links should be - and they make those ads look exactly like navigation links to further fool you into clicking them). Even with numbers ridiculously low like that - Google's still making a third of all their revenue from the made-for-adsense sites (assuming a 1% click-through rate on the other 97% of sites that are actually legitimate)! Can you think of a single Fortune 500 company that would willingly lose a third of their revenue stream - just to make their customer's lives a bit easier?
Yes, I stand correted. It would be estimated size as expressed as a power of ten. So 5 to 6 orders of magnitude would be 10 to the 5th or 6th power = 50-60 I think Dave
I am a scientist and have a BS in mathematics. So I can say with authority that 5 orders of magnitude is 100,000 and 6 orders of magnitude is 1,000,000 best regards wiz
I agree. Besides, subdomains are cool. I'm using them myself now for my blog categories. This could be meaningless, but I use Measuremap (now owned by Google) and already I noticed that my inbound links/day jumped. These are clicks from my subdomain tag category pages.
I find it quite amazing that virtually any half savvy web explorer can find countless examples of the new "style" sites cropping up all over the place yet Google seem to be so far behind the game. A little more delving and you find that there are a range of "destination" domains being targetted through standard cloaking. What I find amusing is that the destination domain never needs to be indexed to be effective! For your delight and delectation try this: http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=n87.org Vertical growth websites are clearly a new phenomenon. BTW most of the "pointing" sites have already been subject to about a 300,000 page bad data push each and based on my monitoring of their growth they should double in size approximately every 6 days. Let battle commence.
Lets also not overlook EPC. Well ranked, WH sites will always be many times greater than what BH sites are. H
BBC = Bad, Bad Cpammer (english spelling) http://64.233.167.99/search?q=site:...n&hs=D9O&lr=&safe=off&start=990&sa=N&filter=0 "Results 791 - 798 of about 240,000,000 from bbc.co.uk" 5-6 orders of magnitude seems about right