Google’s Matt Cutts: Don’t Be The Sucker That Buys The Spammy Domain
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searchengineland.com
"Spammy" domains is a a smokescreen. The issue is lack of transparency and accountability of Google when it comes to penalizing domains. We should simple be able to check this, just like with any RBL.
It's highly inappropriate to call those who fall victim to this "suckers", but it illustrates once again how Google feels about the little people.
At the end of the day, it's not Google's job to make your life easier. Their job is to deliver relevant SERPs and monetize them through ads. The extent to which they'll go out of their way to help you is the extent to which not doing so would hurt the relevance of their SERPs, and ultimately the consumer's trust therein.
There seems to be a tendency on HN to think of Google as the Guardian of the Internet, and ascribe powers and responsibilities to them commensurate with that role. They're not said guardians, though: they're a search engine and ad broker. They only protect the Internet out of self-interest, and expecting more of them is unreasonable and unfair for a publicly traded company.
If spam detection relies on obscurity of the signals used, then it isn't good spam detection and for every change it's only a matter of time until spammers adapt. If a trained human can recognize spam in its many forms, then it's possible for spam detectors to do the same without relying on obscurity.
Speaking on the subject, if a human can recognize that a domain is not owned by the same entity and doesn't have the same content it used to, then I don't see where's the problem in white-listing such a domain.
> At the end of the day, it's not Google's job to make your life easier
At the end of the day it's not your job to explain their reasoning or apologize for their screw-ups. If you're not a Google employee, then you've got no idea what their internal goals are or what their "job" is.
> They only protect the Internet out of self-interest, and expecting more of them is unreasonable and unfair for a publicly traded company
What I don't understand is why in the world should a publicly traded company be treated any different from a real person? If somebody behaves like a jackass, do you tolerate that person? If somebody betrays your trust, are you going to give a damn about that person's bottom line?
And forget about comparisons to people's interrelationships. Why should publicly traded companies be viewed any differently by consumers and clients? Why would I give a damn if a company is privately owned or public, as long as that doesn't make a difference to my own bottom line?
You mean... it's theoretically, some-time-in-the-future possible? What, we are all to put up with terrible search results until such time as strong AI has been cracked? I think not. It is perfectly valid for Google's spam detection to "rely on obscurity" if that is the best currently-available solution to the problem, and your criticism on this point is not very reasonable.
So? It works until they do adapt, then the cycle repeats itself. There's no such thing as perfect spam prevention. It will always be an arms race.
At the end of the day it's not your job to explain their reasoning or apologize for their screw-ups. If you're not a Google employee, then you've got no idea what their internal goals are or what their "job" is.
There's not much content for me to address, here. My statement was pretty self-evident.
If somebody behaves like a jackass, do you tolerate that person?
Google isn't behaving like a jackass. They're simply not going out of their way to do other people's work for them. It's not Google's responsibility to make sure your domain is kosher; that's yours.
If I'm reading this right, you are saying that's perfectly ok and if I get caught in the collateral damage, it's my problem and I shouldn't hold it against Google.
Completely agree. We bought a domain from a long-time competitor (it was our registered brand name we've had 12 years, but for another TLD) and were unable to check beforehand whether there was a Google penalty associated with it and whether the competitor wanted to part with it because we offered so much money or he had suffered from a penalty and needed to get rid of it. We just had to risk it anyway, for obvious reasons.
The way Google keeps its data and methods secret helps it get away with weak heuristics and from many (not all) people gaming them, but it also hurts a lot of people with legitimate concerns.
http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/
Edit: Here's a list of all removal requests: http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/...
Their transparency is also limited to what is forced upon them, not what they do themselves, quietly and secretly. Also note that other properties, like the massively censored YouTube, are completely omitted from their transparency report (unless it ironically enough involves removing links to YouTube...).
The little bit Google is transparent about when it comes to what they omit from "organizing the world's information and make it universally accessible" (Google's mission statement) is only what suits them.
It's a marketing tool to sell the message "it's not our fault". Transparency and openness are not part of Google's DNA, that bit is just marketing.
It's not the flaws in the system that bother me, this is stuff is hard. It's the marketing-driven pretense of caring and at the same time arrogantly telling us "suckers" to go f* ourselves.
It's not.
http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/...
"...It is a partial historical record that includes more than 95% of the volume of copyright removal requests that we have received for Search since July 2011. It does not include..."
"Remember folks! Don't use SEO! You're subverting das Googlebot!"
But play by all their algorithmic rules, or you may be randomly penalized.
This is called a False Positive. It's Google's fault, not the legitimate domain owner's. This is a hard problem(tm) for sure, but not an excuse.
The fact of the matter is that someone is always unhappy when it comes to spam control. If the restraints are too loose then suddenly everyone is screaming about how "spammers are ruining Google" and "Google is doomed because of spam" (this was very true right before the Panda rollout). However, if Google starts to crack down, then you get more false positives and more people upset for different reasons.
Unfortunately, no pattern recognition system runs at 100%. That's not a hard problem(tm), that's an impossibility. Relatedly, I don't really see what's wrong with assiging a "reputation" to a domain name. As the article states, it's possible to climb back up to "good" status, it just takes some extra work. Kind of like in real life.
My point is that Google suggesting you register a different domain because their href-based reputation sucks over time is a cop-out. This specifically falls under the "Things that are Google's fault".
Matt's suggestion here is definitely practical, but it's a fault in how Google looks at domain reputation. When he talks about "having to renovate a domain" he's talking about you the consumer of a domain legally acquired and without spammy content hosted on it, having to play Google's algorithm, because their definition of "spam" is absolutely massive, vaguely defined, and with way too long of a ttl.
And with a massive, undefined, long term concept of spam, you're going to have ridiculous FPs. Which Google has, and is now recommending is somehow your responsibility.
This is entirely their fault, and it has to do with how they are determining reputation, not that they have reputation at all.
How is that behavior any less "bait-n-switch" (or influenced by money) than buying a site or renting some links?
We've just been lucky enough they're looking at profit on a long enough time scale that loyalty through product quality is a metric they've thought about.
Usually they are correlated, not always though.
Are you saying that pages with great content typically have few spammy links? If so, the jury is out on that thesis, as many of the most popular sites have hundreds to thousands of spam sites that scrape just about everything the do & many of those scraper spam sites do link to the original source. And just by ranking for valuable keywords, over time you will likely get some spammy inbound links from sites that are scraping the Google search results.
http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ https://www.majesticseo.com/ https://ahrefs.com/
Even once you own the domain, the links Google reports in GWT can be rather hit and miss...
I can accuse you of being a murderer but the police aren't going to arrest or ruin your (financial) life automatically.
Give me your site name and I'll give you a $5 gift, a gift that keeps giving for life with Google :) http://fiverr.com/gigs/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=senuk...
Google sure loves to have all that power because it can translate it into tens of $ billions. Minus the responsibility of course because that costs money.
Obviously you can check the RBLs for email related spam issues but Google does not expose any interface that would allow you to accurately determine a domain was used for spam in the past.
The best way to build a company on the web is to build one that does not overly rely on single traffic sources to begin with, and that imo includes google. Lest the next update of their algo puts you out of business.
It is not uncommon to see market participants take profits from one line of business or one channel & use it to undermine competitors who were succeeding in other channels.
So lets say you avoid search entirely...how do you sustainably compete against a competitor who has a similar footprint to you AND is leveraging search-driven profits to come after you?
The best way would be for people to speak up about search engines, what they are doing and to give newcomers a certain benefit of the doubt so we get some diversity in online search.
Google controls as much as 90% of online search and spends accordingly to maintain and increase that share. It's hard to run a business without 90% of people.
Internet slums?
I wonder if this would bother highly-viral pop-up sites at all. Muxtape would have probably set a spammy domain positive in like a day. But, such is the nature of a transitional neighborhood—no corporations, just tons of art boutiques.
Google claims that they will "wipe" a backlink profile if they see a domain drop and later re-registration by a new owner.
That wasn't always the case. I think as recently as 3-4 years ago buying dropped domains for backlinks was a big tactic.
It's a nice idea, but will just make the spam problem worse.
For example, when Google first started the Panda updates, I read that some sites were being targetted via paid link buys NOT purchased by the actual owner. Would be nice if there was a tool that let the owner find out that was what was happening to his site.
There are probably a lot of people that would be pissed at me for displaying that information publicly, but oh well.
One of the problems of creating good content is that we are still competing with SEO spammers even if its short term.
Google Shopping is already 100% ads, the rest of the commercial results is 99% ads and advertiser sites (usually huge brands that spend billions on Adwords). Disclosure and ethics however aren't Google's strongest points, lobbying governments is.