I have been reading about some of the latest updates from Google and I wanted to basically vent as to how biased the search engine is towards adwords buyers. The two websites that should be penalized by Google if they apply what they say fairly are: oil-price.net and gold-quote.net Both of these sites are being rewarded by Google yet go against everything Google says it stands for. They command top rankings for very powerful Keywords: Oil Prices, Crude oil. Why should they lose top rank? 1) They illegally distribute exchange data – cmegroup.com have been in touch with them about this illegal data distribution. 2) Their website is Spammy and offers nothing but widget distribution and the occasional article once a month (which are spammy and poorly written. Google also gave an update regarding links in widgets: Which basically says that links embedded within widgets are to be discounted – this is the only way these sites obtain backlinks – through their widgets – as no-one in their right mind would link to their content. It specifically says: [TABLE] [TR] [TD][TABLE="width: 100%"] [TR] [TD]Links embedded in widgets that are distributed across various sites[/TD] [/TR] [/TABLE] [/TD] [/TR] [/TABLE] Yet despite this and their spammy domain name they are still being rewarded by Google – I was hoping you could tell me what I am missing? Is this the type of site we should be building? The Google EMD update has had no impact on these sites – when I would have thought that they would have been the first to be penalized as they lack any real quality content and were purchased or created in hopes of an easy win, an article that is added once a month – basically the site was built to game the search engines and offers visitors almost nothing. Their main content is stolen and illegally distributed – and yet they are handsomely rewarded for re-distributing this stolen data. Yes I’m annoyed – as we are in the same verticals – oil and gold, yet have been hit hard by these changes – yet this big adwords buyer remains unaffected. Does anyone have any idea how this could be? I have written to Google about this – but of course there has been no reply.
Google knows better then us, why they don't banned those site. May be they are making money through those site....
Did you just send an email or make an actual webspam report? If the site is illegally using data that is copyright to cmegroup, for example, then they can make a DMCA request, for example, for the violating pages. The EMD update will happen again, so what wasn't caught before will (hopefully) be the next time. Although one can argue their domain name isn't EMD due to the hyphen. Also, an EMD is not by default spammy, it needs certain characteristics (in the domain and on the site), so it's not certain these domains would be caught by the EMD update. With regards to the widget issue, take a look at the webmaster guidelines again. The example below this rule. It doesn't look like they have violated with their widget, as it doesn't have irrelevant keywords in. Sorry, but it has been a good marketing strategy for them (just like prchecker.info). Just giving you an objective view that you might not be able to take as the matter is so personal to you. That doesn't mean I believe it it should rank there. (Looking at the site, it seems very 1990s style and not a pleasing user experience.) You just need to come up with a better strategy, give more people a reason to link to you or embed your data on their site, instead of using gold-quote.net. Obviously, if they are using copyright data without authorisation then that should be brought up with Google in the appropriate way (DMCA, for example). Good luck!