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Comment by nivla | Hacker News Reader

>In general, if you weren't trying to create spam links, then it's very unlikely that any of this is an issue for you and the burden isn't on you to fix it.

So if Bing wants to rank Bing.com higher than Google.com on the keyword "Search Engine", all they need to do is to pay link farms to link to Google?

Like everything this could go both ways. If you penalize sites for having links from link farms, what is stopping your competitors from paying link farms to link to your website? or worse yet, some link farm owner comes up with an ingenious idea to hold other websites hostage until they pay up?

It would be more understanding if Google din't have any other resources on hand to make smart decisions but heck you guys have hands on realtime experience with most traffics via Google Analytics, Google Adsense and even DNS. All these resources and can't even distinguish a link farm from a legitimate site? Doesn't sound believable.

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> All these resources and can't even distinguish a link farm from a legitimate site? Doesn't sound believable.

The Google webspam team seems to prefer psychology over technology to solve the problem, especially recently. Nearly everything that's come out of Matt Cutt's mouth in the last 18 months or so has been a scare tactic.

IMO all this does is further encourage the development of "churn and burn" websites from blackhats who have being penalized in their business plan. So why should I risk all the time and effort it takes to generate quality web content when it could all come crashing down because an imperfect and overzealous algorithm thinks it's spam? Or worse, some intern or non-google employee doing a manual review wrongly decides the site violates webmaster guidelines?

>prefer psychology over technology<

yup.

>Nearly everything that's come out of Matt Cutt's mouth in the last 18 months or so has been a scare tactic.<

the bizarre thing is the gap in perceptions internal to Google versus external. https://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/449008706655510528 https://polldaddy.com/poll/7916680/

>IMO all this does is further encourage the development of "churn and burn" websites from blackhats who have being penalized in their business plan.<

Absolutely. churn & burn sites, and then some mixed in parasitic hosting on sites which are already highly trusted.

>So if Bing wants to rank Bing.com higher than Google.com on the keyword "Search Engine", all they need to do is to pay link farms to link to Google?

During this "crackdown campaign" Google has been on, I have sat in on meetings at large clients where they've pulled sites that are supposedly link farms (according to google) and put together an ad buy on behalf of competitors meant to cause these penalties to be levied and WMT messages to be sent.

Sounds like a classic Bait and Switch, albeit a good 10 year long one on Google's behalf.

They needed to provide a useful service to begin with to get the traction (good search algorithms for the web-that-is), but now that they are the incumbent, it is more in their interests to penalise website owners and force them to buy ads.

It's sad, but it's normal monopolist behaviour.

Now you're talking about a malicious attack. If that's what it takes for this to be a real issue then I don't think many people need to be too concerned.

The cost of building a quality website & promoting it can easily hit deep into 6 or 7 figures.

The cost of throwing scummy links at a website is under $100.

And if their first $5, $10, or $20 test doesn't work? Then so what for them. They put it on cron job and throw another $20 at it again and again. http://www.seobook.com/images/sape-sape-sape.gif

The key point here is that there's a 100X or 1000X gap between 4 figures & 6 to 7 figures. The cost of burning things to a crisp is much lower than building them up. Whenever incentive structures have a 1000-fold difference in outcomes the path of least resistance becomes a popular path.

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