Google's Fight Against 'Low-Quality' Sites Continues

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."

Does that mean

[Kokuyo]

we can expect google to get better, e.g. closer to what it used to be in the early days?

Re:Good, now I can really depend

[Anonymous Coward]

on Google to send me exactly where they must know I belong because I can't make that decision for myself.

If you knew the location of the web site where you "belonged", you wouldn't have to search for it to begin with.

Re:Good, now I can really depend

[jeffmeden]

Yes, that's what this is about. Freedom to have spam served to me on a silver platter. Please Google, stop filtering all that spam in my gmail inbox too! I hate that you feel the need to protect me; I am a big boy and enjoy sifting through 1000 messages a day looking for the 2 relevant ones! Let freedom ring! /sarcasm.

Re:Does that mean

[Anonymous Coward]

Google didn't get any worse, the spammers are the ones who got better.

I understand them if they are rather slow in making significant changes to their algorithm. In this sue-happy society they have to keep any collateral damage as low as possible (i.e. valid sites that move only a few spots down the ranking - can you imagine the outcry?). It's the disadvantage of being number one.

Re:Does that mean

[dagamer34]

It's not so much as google getting worse or better, but people and companies building businesses around pagerank, and thus the need for very aggressive SEO. Were you to dump the same "low-quality" sites onto the Internet in 2000, I'm sure the results from Google would have been FAR worse than what we see today.

Re:Does that mean

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep repeating the moronic claim of Google's overarching villainy. When Google does turn evil, no one is going to care because they're already ignoring you.

Re:Does that mean

[HeckRuler]

Some of us actually use that shit at the top left. Suck it.
Also, what the hell is with you people. The slogan is "don't be evil", not "do no evil". It's a minor grammar error, and you're probably confused with monkeys, but this pops up time and time again. Is this some talking point kind of thing that I'm not aware of? Did I not get the memo?

Re:Bayesian tagging

[0123456]

Let people tag sites they've found as a result of a search. Build a tagging system which will allow people to exclude linkspam for example.

Because no spammer could write a program to repeatedly search for and tag their site.

Re:alta vista

[asdf7890]

I think you are missing the point of Google's business model. Their core product is our attention, which they sell to advertisers by various means. In order to maintain their product, that is: keep our attention, they need to keep their search results relevant and useful (or at least as relevant and useful as the competition). Pushing the aggregators/copiers/similar further down the search results than the original good content sites helps to keep my attention and that of many other people (who would prefer to see, say, the original StackOverflow page instead of a copy that has 613 advert slots added), so this helps them maintain that sector of their product. And if those sites give up and concentrate on getting a high rank at Bing or somewhere else instead then that will not harm Google (they won't, of course, the listings war will continue battle after battle).

Google won, over AltaVista and others of the time, in part because the results were better - because AV's algorithm couldn't screen out the less useful results as well. They also won by just being a search engine rather than spending countless $ on becoming a "portal" when people didn't actually want a portal they wanted a search engine - perhaps AV would have done better if the $ that went into the portal thing went into improving their search functionality instead? Of course Google's keep-us-interested schemes involve much more than just the search engine these days so they could potentially fall into the same trap eventually, but unlike AV their other tools are just that: other, by which I mean that they compliment the search engine product (and the more general "information location and management" focus) or are not even related to it rather than trying to replace it.

Re:Does that mean

[Omestes]

Perhaps the communal view on the issue is much more complicated than you'd like?

Perhaps Slashdot isn't a mono-culture yet, and still has plenty of dissenting views?

Perhaps the author has a point, there is a line between open culture and exploitive culture. Remixing is fine, sharing can be fine, plagiarism is not fine.