No More Public Access To Google PageRank Scores 43
campuscodi writes: Google has confirmed with Search Engine Land that it is removing PageRank scores from the Google toolbar, which was the last place where someone could check their site's PageRank status. Many SEO experts are extremely happy at this point, since it seems that PageRank is responsible for all the SEO spam we see today.
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Oh no, they would never do that. They work tirelessly to make sure that their client's pages show up as high as possible when you search using appropriate terms. Anything else is purely incidental.
Re:SEO experts? (Score:5, Funny)
Heh... (Score:3)
IE Google toolbar
responsible for all the SEO spam we see today
My elderly grandmother lives a secret double life as an SEO expert? Damn, her disguise is truly unbreakable...
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IE Google toolbar
responsible for all the SEO spam we see today
My elderly grandmother lives a secret double life as an SEO expert? Damn, her disguise is truly unbreakable...
On a more serious note, I don't work with SEO and search engine rankings at the moment, but did this toolbar really have a large impact on the field? I've never heard of people using IE's Google toolbar for anything more than a prank on a family member...
Re:Heh... (Score:4, Informative)
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"did this toolbar really have a large impact on the field?"
No, evidently. SEO is in my opinion a very dysfunctional area of business, which is basically built on making clients vague and unverifiable promises about their sites doing better in search results and hence more users seeing their pages. Most of the common SEO practices are actually things that the search engines actively penalise, and SEO companies get away with that partially because their clients are MBA idiots who'll believe anything and parti
Re:Heh... (Score:5, Insightful)
I do not know your grandmother dear, but I dare say that she knows at least as much about SEO as most self proclaimed SEO experts.
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I bet she's charges less though.
Repetitively we get clients that pay thousands each month to a SEO companies that apparently does nothing.
When we ask for documentation for their work, they are very elusive and never able to produce anything.
They say they do all this work, but I can see from the log files and login history, they in fact do nothing at all on the website itself.
Sure, they do some linkbuilding and stuff, but that's not worth thousands each month!
SEO Experts is a scam, pure and simple.
Re:What SEO spam? (Score:4, Funny)
Are you referring to expertsexchange?
Well, if someone were seriously considering a sex change, I would hope they'd look for the best doctor available. It doesn't seem like something you should trust to some bargain basement discount physician you found on Craigslist.
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Are you referring to expertsexchange?
Well, if someone were seriously considering a sex change, I would hope they'd look for the best doctor available. It doesn't seem like something you should trust to some bargain basement discount physician you found on Craigslist.
I dunno, I've got some pretty good reviews on yelp. Come in for some new junk and I'll do your kidneys for free. Now if you'll excuse me I have a client coming and need to fill a seedy motel bath tub full of ice.
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When you get a bad result? I have a default string collection of "-site:..." I pretty much have to tack on any search.
Wonder if there's a plugin that does it for you.
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I recall that Google used to have an option for this sort of thing (it was an option next to the cached page link that would remove that website from the current and future searches) but it wasn't around for very long and my google fu isn't strong enough to find any useful mentions of it.
If you do happen to find a plugin (perhaps a custom search engine for firefox?) that does this, I would be interested to hear about it.
Re: What SEO spam? (Score:2)
Google block list... By Google.
Available for chrome.
Re: What SEO spam? (Score:1)
Re:What SEO spam? (Score:4, Informative)
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I added a captcha field to my blog's comments section and that really cut down on the spam. I didn't opt for a "letters written so weirdly that even humans can't read it" captcha, but for a math based one. For example, my comment form might say: One + [ ] = 5. If you type in "4", your comment gets through. If you type in anything else, your comment gets nuked. The math problems are simple enough for even the most math-challenged commenter but wind up being tricky for comment spam bots. (Some spammers
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Thing is, computers happen to be REALLY GOOD AT MATH! I can't imagine that it would take much effort at all for bots to start solving those.
Compared to image-based captchas, where one has to enter text from a horrible photograph or just select an image matching specific criteria ("pick the image below that has a cake in it"), I'm surprised that the math captchas have lasted for as long as they have...
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It's not just the math. It's a mix up of which place the requested number is, whether the number is spelled out ("ten") or written using digits ("10"), and what operation is being requested. For example, my captcha could be any of the following:
5 - two = [ ]
[ ] + 1 = 7
12 + [ ] = nineteen
Combining all of these makes it harder for computers to solve the captcha while keeping it easy for humans. I was getting 80+ spam comments daily until I implemented the captcha. Then it dropped to one or two a day. No,
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The truth is, spammers will eventually get around any form of captcha, if it's important enough to them. As long as a human can decipher your captcha, there's always Mechanical Turk [mturk.com].
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Did you really have that much problem? 99% of the issue went away for me (on a blog that was averaging around 1 million pageviews a month and ~1000 real comments a month) when using Akismet. The rest went away after banning common /16s and /24s which were problematic.
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Won't matter to my SEO... (Score:2)
As long as PageRank exists so will SEO spam (Score:3)
Google is still using PageRank, they just aren't showing the numbers to the public. This makes objectively measuring the effectiveness of SEO spam difficult. However, the effect on search is unchanged so I don't see the spamming going away any time soon. Email spam has never had useful measurements of its effectiveness and what there is mostly says it doesn't work. Yet it persists.
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