It's Time For Google To Take A Stand On Paid Links
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
This is starting to sound more like the RIAA complaining about a new business model undercutting its revenue. Google is not keeping up with people or technology in this case. People have figured out how to exploit (to a great enough degree) Google's ability to tell a spam site from an authority, and their response is to declare that people are in violation.
Were they supposed to foresee people buying links back in 2003/2004?
You have to have new policy or terms for new use cases.
*the article feels like a bit of a 'hit job' on conductor / I would like to offer up that things might be at least a little different than they seem from one side/point of view.
It started with the whole nofollow issue.
To be fair, the post misquotes Matt Cuts. He didn't say terms of service. He said:"paid links that pass PageRank are absolutely a violation of Google's quality guidelines"
Danny Sullivan's comments below the Business Insider article are spot on.
In his words, "Plenty of people get this stuff already. It's been out there again, for years."
* i would assume that the problem parallels with spam emails. i think webpages offer more clues to what the page is about than emails though.
Spam passess a single toll gate on the way to each user. You have an address book with contacts and previous conversations and a whole pile of data about previous 'known good' emails in the inbox.
Spam filtering has gotten pretty good. A lot better than google at filtering out 'bad' search results.
Spam: thin site, lacks original content, few pages indexed, crawled infrequently, ranks for a small selection of keywords, weak backlink profile
Authority: many pages indexed, thick site, loads of original content, crawled frequently, ranks for a variety of keywords, diversified backlink profile
Page Rank used to be a strong indicator of this, but currently a better indicator is how often your site is crawled. That's why one authority link can do worlds more for you than hundreds (or thousands) of spammy/low quality links.
Not everybody blogs about everything going on in his/her life.
I would expect that these true spam sites exist as a link network somewhat seperate from the rest of the web. You could start manually defining filters based on what sites are actively selling links on the digital point forums.
We may have actually had this conversation in the real world, come to think of it.
Their TOS is more of a spec than an agreement. It says that if you sell links, they may flag you as a spam site. I don't think that's unreasonable at all.
If they are flagging sites with a legitimate purpose and with original content, simply on the basis that their evermore dated method for determining authority is not working so well anymore, Google (as an authority themselves) should not be flagging them with such a label. I think it is unreasonable, not for denying them traffic, but for labeling them as spam. It's not impossible to find out who's in the supplemental index all of a sudden.
As an internal policy or part of their algorithm, do whatever you want. But that is not what they are doing. The point of the policy, the point of this publicly declared part of their secret sauce is not to recognise and flag spam sites, it is to intimidate sites into stopping a practice which hurts Google. It is the effects of the intimidation not the effects of the flagging which are substantial. I think it is also safe to say that they are the purpose of the policy.
Sure it is, spam makes search less useful for users, keeping it out is most definitely a quality assurance issue.
> it is to intimidate sites into stopping a practice which hurts Google
Which hurts Google's users as well, spam hurts us all, spam sucks. Google is correct here in removing sites which partake in such practices.
Not exactly. Site X with text links on it is not (necessarily) less useful then a site with declared ads on it. The quality assurance issue is the effect these have on Google's ability to analyse the web. Google's way of preventing site X from doing this is by intimidating. They are not removing the site because it is so spamy that they don't want it on their search results (a case that is equivalent to HN deciding to ban a site). They are doing it because they want these sites to comply with some sort of practice. It is the publicity and threat of these penalties which are their 'raison d'etre.'
I have no problem at all with Google using whatever policies they want to make up the search results. Including kicking sites off. I do have a problem with Google threatening to do so in order to achieve some other goal.
> Which hurts Google's users as well, spam hurts us all, spam sucks. Google is correct here in removing sites which partake in such practices.
Perhaps. But it is doing so by exercising its power to shut down the internet (for that site) to enforce a standard. Google decided at some point that all paid links need to be marked in a special way. This is the standard for disclosure. They then use their power to enforce it.
I think that the policy of enforcing Google's nofollow guideline by removing sites from their index is not directly about keeping their index free of spammers. It is about enforcing a standard for disclosure specifically designed for their purposes. It's not about disclosure to users, it is about disclosure to search engines.
I don't want anyone purposely deceiving the search engines. I have a problem with the way Google is enforcing this. I think this hints at the issues with having such a powerful Google.
Again, so what. I don't care how they do it, but I'm glad they do. The idea that Google is doing something wrong by using their size to try and make a site comply is simply absurd to me; of course they are, that's what they should do.
The practice hurts Google because it hurts Google's users, so of course they want to stop it. As a frequent Google search user I want them to stop it as well. Buying your way to the top of Google results should be made as difficult as possible.
I think Google is allowed to remove sites from their index. Is that what you mean by 'whatever they want'?
If they want to remove sites from their index because those sites are no good for their index, etc. ..Fine. But, if they remove sites for reasons other than 'We don't want these sites in the index or in the SERPS,' that is a problem. In this case, I am arguing that they don't want to remove those sites from their index. They want those sites to comply with their nofollow policies. I don't even have much a problem with these policies. I have a problem with Google being able to set policies and enforce them directly with the threat of removal from the index. It is almost equivalent to the threat of removal from the web entirely due to the way people use the internet and Google's role in that. Many sites get more traffic from searchers Googling the name of a site then direct traffic.
Sure they can. They wouldn't survive very long. That's why they don't.
There is not a perfect marriage between what is good for Google and what is good for the world.
There is a trick to save you the obscene costs of being indexed -- simply make your robots.txt like so: User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /
I personally think that the problem lies in the rules of Google's system. A more robust system should be able to account for and adjust for the market realities created by it's own rules. Maybe it is technically impossible but I doubt it. I'm sure the clever people at google have thought of this as well but perhaps they are starting to face 'legacy' system issues themselves.
Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems, so we attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. The spam reports we receive are used to create scalable algorithms that recognize and block future spam attempts.
I think Google have made it pretty clear that as far as they're concerned they don't want people selling links to other sites in a way designed to manipulate search-engine rankings, and if you do so you may be delisted or have a lowered ranking on their site in the future. I think that's specific enough, personally, and think that anyone wanting a more specific policy either wants to work around them to violate the intended spirit and complain if and when Google punishes them for doing so.
It's fine to have an algorithm to prioritize sites. And it's fine for sites to manipulate that algorithm to their own ends. Both of these things are completely natural.
Trying to keep this list of who's cool or not -- secretly updated by god knows who -- and forcing the rest of the world to do as you say or suffer economic punishment by de-listing from your engine? Not fine, although Google is certainly in their rights to do so.
A better strategy is for Google to adapt, not dictate. As it is, they've created this entire system where everybody games the system but nobody talks about it, and that's counterproductive for the net as a whole.
Google should become better at what they are doing, work harder on identifying spam sites. Crawl more frequently to get a better grip on provenance.
Maybe set up an 'announce' service where you can dump a url before linking it to establish provenance for your original content.
Dictation is not a solution to anything it is a show of weakness.
Google forbids us to sell links not because it wishes to do away with linkselling, but because it wishes to monopolize it.
If someone wants to buy a link but isn't interested in only receiving the traffic it brings (and not any pagerank), they are probably up to no good anyway.
And similarly: "We crawl your stuff; but our search results are off-limits." Of course, anyone can block Google, but given the asymmetry in business models and market power that's not much of an equalizing factor.
I like Google and think they mean well. Individually each of these policies has a reasonable basis. But Google is now so dominant -- and the positive financial rewards they get from self-serving policies so large -- that their actions deserve close scrutiny.
(The Freud-inspired quote I led with was originally about the state; Google's influence on the net is so large that they are a lot like the net's government.)
Most reputable SEO firms refrain from paid links nowadays and rather focus on "killer content" creation to get links naturally.