Google's Fight Against 'Low-Quality' Sites Continues 220
nj_peeps writes
"A couple weeks ago, JC Penney made the news for plummeting in Google rankings for everything from 'area rugs' to 'grommet top curtains.' Turns out the retail site had a number of suspicious links pointing at it that could be traced back to a link network intended to manipulate Google's ranking algorithms. Now, Overstock.com has lost rankings for another type of link that Google finds to be manipulation of their algorithms. This situation has led Google to implement a significant change to their search algorithms, affecting almost 12% of queries in an effort to cull content farms and other webspam. And in the midst of all of this, a company with substantial publicity lately for running a paid link network announces they are getting out of the link business entirely."
Can the car parts spammers be next? (Score:5, Informative)
Please tell me they are going to start going after the myriad car parts spam sites that flood the google rankings when searching for anything but the most obvious automotive items. I am sick and tired of sifting through a dozen completely worthless sites when googling for a part number I am trying to track down. Ebay is more reliable than google for almost everything I am looking for lately.
Re:Good, now I can really depend (Score:5, Informative)
I run a spider. It seems over 95% of pages on the internet are content farm and similar randomly generated crap. They take a hundred sentence fragments, string them together, then see if they can fool Google and other engines into crawling them.
You will not be very happy if they stop filtering the garbage for you.