For a long time, if you asked me about spamming the search engines, whether with hardcore black hat tactics or merely gray hat link acquisition, I'd say that in the long run, neither was the right move. Building a great site and a great brand through hard work, white hat links, solid content and marketing strategies has always been my path of choice. It still is today, but my faith is definitely wavering.
Why?
In the last 12 months, I've seen (or, at least, felt) less progress from Google's webspam team than in any previous year I can remember. Popular paid link services that Google's search quality folks are clearly aware of have worked for months on end (some have done so for years). Crummy, low quality directories and link exchanges have made a comeback since the big shutdowns in 2007-8. Even off-topic link exchanges, which experienced their own blowback in 2006-2007 have started working again. Horrifyingly bad sites are ranking atop the results using little more than exact match domain names and a few poor quality links. There's even a return of the link farms of the early 2000s, with operators creating (or buying old domains and converting them into) junky, one-page sites to boost their own link popularity.
On nearly every commercially lucrative search results I pull up these days, I see bad links pushing bad sites into the top rankings at Google.
Examples of Web Spam in the Rankings
I made a promise to Aaron that I wouldn't "out" spam, and although I still don't believe it's the wrong thing to do morally (it hurts everyone's search/web experience, why should SEOs band together to protect it?), I do want to keep that promise. So, while I can't point you to any particular links or sites, here's a good set of queries where plenty of link manipulation is keeping a few, some or many of the top (5-10) ranking sites in those positions:
- SEO Software
- Starcraft 2 Strategies
- Birthday Party Supplies
- Currency Trading Online
- Tennis Racquet Reviews
- Leather Crafting Supplies
- Nanny Services
- Home Business Ideas
- French Doors
- Vietnam Tours
- Antioxidant Supplements
- Home Espresso Machine Ratings
Just run a few OSE reports on some sites that rank well here and you'll see what I mean. There are numerous players in these listings who don't have a single natural or editorially endorsed link. And you don't need to limit yourself to these queries either.
3 Steps to Find Lots of Link Manipulation
Step #1: Search for "SEO Friendly Directory" and visit a few of the sections included in the resulting sites that come up.
Step #2: Search for the primary keywords the directory-listed sites are targeting in their title tags or the anchor text they've gotten from the directories.
Step #3: Check out the top 5-10 listings in the rankings and you'll find an abundance of sites with few to no "natural" links whatsoever
Why is Google Letting So Much Spam/Manipulation Go Unpenalized?
I don't know. But, I do have some guesses:
- Scalability of Spam Fighting Tactics - it could be that the ability for Google's team to combat web spam has diminished due to the increasing size, complexity and demand in search. Perhaps fighting spam is a much tougher problem in the 100s of billions of pages than it was in the 10s.
- They're Working on Something Big - for many years, Google would let lots of spam they clearly knew about pass... for a while. Then, they'd release an algorithmic update to defeat a huge layer of spam or seriously cripple certain types of link manipulation. If that's the case today, this would be one of the longest times between updates we've seen (MayDay had a small impact, but it wasn't link-manipulation targeted from everything I've seen).
- Too Much Baby Thrown Out with the Bathwater - perhaps, as link manipulation and spam have grown in popularity, Google's found that they can't penalize a technique or sites employing it without dramatically reducing the usefulness of their index (because so many "good," "relevant" sites/pages do some dirty stuff, too). If this is the case, they'll need to work on much more subtle, targeted detection and elimination systems, and these might be substantially harder to employ.
- WebSpam Team Brain Drain - The spam fighting team put together by Matt Cutts from 2001-2006 was Google's cream of the crop. He personally hand-selected engineers from search quality (and other departments) to combat the black hat menaces of Google's early growth days. SEOs could frequently interact with many of these crazy smart folks, from Brian White to Aaron D'Souza to Evan Roseman and many more. That interaction today is largely limited to the webmaster tools team, which may be an appropriate PR move, but it's hard to know whether the new team is up to the task. We do have one new, semi-publicly contributing webspam team member, Moultano, on Hacker News (you can see all the threads he/she has participated in on the spam topic with this query).
Matt himself is finally taking a well deserved break, but even at home he's much less public on the web, much less active on webspam topics on his blog, visits fewer conferences and now invests in startups, too (which surely takes up time). I don't mean to criticize Matt in any way - if I were him, I'd have left Google long ago (and he's clearly put in more than his dues), but the possibility remains that the team he built is no longer intact, or no longer of the quality it was in the early years. - Live and Let Live - It could be that although Google's public messaging about webspam and link manipulation hasn't changed, internally their attitude has. Perhaps they've found that sites/pages that buy links or run low quality link farms aren't much worse than those who don't and having relevant results, even if they've used black/gray hat tactics, isn't highly detrimental to search quality. Certainly in some of the examples above, that's the case, while in others it's less true. I recall that years ago, the MSN Search team noted that they'd much rather fight poor quality results in the index than fight high quality results who happened to buy links. Maybe Google's come around to the same philosophy.
- They're Counting on New Inputs to Help - Part of Google's initiative in acquiring social gaming companies, building social platforms and making data deals with folks like Twitter could be to help combat spam. They may have hopes that leveraging these new, less polluted (or, at least, more easily trackable) forms of recommendation/citation can be a big win for webspam and search quality.
Why Rant About Spam?
"Blah. Blah Blah. So what if Google's not doing as much to stop spam as they have in years past?" I hear you ask.
My concern is primarily around the experience of searchers and what it might mean if results become polluted not just by good or relatively good sites that happen to buy or manipulate links, but by really bad crap - the sort that makes searchers want to find a new way of getting information on the web (Facebook Q+A? Twitter? Yelp?). Search today is an amazing marketplace of web builders, marketers, suppliers and customers. If the last of these - the customer - slowly becomes disenchanted with Google, the world of search marketing and the amazing utility of search in general may come to an end.
If you use search engines or work in search marketing, that should be the last thing you want.
That said, if you believe that most of the "spam" will eventually be beaten out by either legitimate results or by better sites that also spam/manipulate links, then there's much less to worry about (I'm not fully in either camp and can see both sides).
So, What Should Legimitate Marketers Do?
Please DO NOT go out and spam the results, buy links, submit to crap directories and open up link farms. Even with this current trend, I believe that would be terrible advice. Plenty of sites do get caught and filtered, and I'd rather know that my site was safe and every piece of content I added and link I built would help bring more traffic than constantly worry about the small but real risk of being penalized or banned.
One thing Google has done is continue to make the experience of penalization a horrific one. It's hard to know if you really have a penalty, nearly impossible to figure out what triggered it and onerous, almost Kafka-esque, to attempt to get back into their good graces. If you can live with that risk, as professional black hats do with their churn-and-burn strategies, then it's less of a concern. But if you're building a real business, Google is still driving 70%+ of the searches on the web in the US (and 90%+ in many other geographies), and it would be foolish to take such a terrific risk.
As to the question of reporting the spam of your competitors - that's up to you. However, Google has certainly made it a less likely, less rewarding activity. Nearly every day, we answer PRO Q+A related to the question of link manipulators outranking legitimate marketers and sites, and I can recall only once in the hundreds of questions I've answered in the last few years when a spam report actually led to action (to be fair, I don't follow up consistently on every one, but many of our PRO members will send a regular ping with updates).
What we can do is to re-double our efforts to build great sites with amazing value for people. No matter what the "search" experience of the future is like, those sites and pages that provide a remarkable experience are sure to surface near the top and receive the added benefit of word-of-mouth praise, viral spread and citation in whatever forms it may evolve to, both online and off.
Some Caveats to My Experience
There are millions of queries that are remarkably spam free and Google has done a consistently exception job fighting spam over the years. However, the recent past has me concerned that they are no longer as interested, diligent or capable of combatting even the most basic spam techniques.
It's also certainly the case that I'm regularly exposed to many queries and topics that SEOs, both black hat and white, focus on, and thus might see more spam than the average searcher (though anecdotally I'd guess they're seeing more, too).
What Do You Think?
Have you been seeing more results in the rankings that are performing well despite having virtually no "natural" links? Have you seen Google take action on spam reports? Why do you think the recent past has many fewer examples of big spam-cleaning updates?
I'm looking forward to some great discussion - and this week I'll be at SES San Francisco (on 5 different panels!) - feel free to grab me and chat privately there, too!
p.s. With regards to Bing, the only other major US search engine now that they're powering Yahoo! (or on the verge), my opinion is that they have been making substantive strides. They're still behind Google in many areas (and ahead in a few), but at the current rate, we might actually see Bing surpass Google's spam detection and filtering in the next 18-24 months, though they will probably still be playing catch up in long tail relevancy/quality.
Great post Rand - I'm seeing change, but I think the change that I'm seeing is actually towards devaluing ALL links. Bear with me... Obviously links still "count" and are still a large part of the ranking model but I've seen sites rank for very competitive terms with really hardly any links at all.
Could it be that the trend towards using the social graph has already begun and that although the end resutlts are not changing too dramatically, behind the scenes there's some fairly major re-achitecting going on?
I think that as you (and others) have pointed out, too many of the "good" websites now engage in "bad" tactics for Google to really take any action and I think it's this that is causing Google rely more heavily on completely new ranking factors.
This is just a hunch but I think that Google either IS or will be shortly using the following much more often to rank results:
Of particular interest would be some kind of ranking model which is no longer homogeneous, i.e. depending on the type of query, the user intent and the search volume Google will rank different results based on link metrics, user metrics, A/B testing, hand edited results, social mentions etc etc.
I think we have seen the start of this with QDF terms and Universal Results and that this trend will only continue.
Looking forward to chatting about this in person when I'm in Seattle!! :-)
I think just pure "mentions" would be something extremely hard to use as a ranking factor. What all would consitute a useful mention?
Would it be just a mention of the business name? Surely not, or I'm changing the name of my business to walmart.
Would it be mentioning the url of the website? If so, how would you use this in a way that reduces webspam?
I can definitely see user metrics playing some sort of role, but then once you get past the first page or two and results stop seeing "clicks" then how would you move up the ladder?
I just have a hard time getting my head around ways in which third party referrals can make a difference without including actual links to the site.
I think you (and Seo-himanshu with other examples) above are pointing at the right direction... and social graph can be a way to determine the popularity of a page. But my skeptical nature makes me also think that is still quite easy to cheat the social graph and that still a lot has to be done on the spam detection on that side.
On the other hand, there are many markets or industries that don't have a real reason to be on Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin IMHO (or maybe I'm not so smart to see the need).
Also in the local business arena, I see that it is not 100% spam free and that it is still quite easy to break the rules in things like Google Places or, talking about Social Graph, in FourSquare (how many of you are receiving not desired shouts on FourSquare?).
Looking at metrics as Bounce Rate, CTR and so on could be an idea, but could also open the Pandora box of privacy... and Google is dealing with too many privacy issues lately.
It's a shame (not for him) that Matt Cutts is actually still in Africa for his vacation heading to Mt. Kilimanjaro, because to hear a Google voice here would be overly interesting.
I think manipulating Social graph of a site/business is much more difficult, time consuming, risky and expensive than manipulating the link graph. You can easily buy 1000 links but can you easily get 100,000 followers? Even if you somehow buy those 100,000 followers, you need at least half of them to talk about you periodically. Which means you constantly need to pay them to talk about you. So even if you spend $10 per follower per month, you will be spending half million dollars a month to maintain your social graph. And above all , you need just few bad reviews of your scam (which will go viral like wild fire) to demolish your online reputation.
under that example, the negative social response going viral would just improve your strength in the serps, right? If Google is considering mentions and tweets, and other social interaction, how does it discern between positive and negative?
Google can't. Google will be ranking the most 'talked about' sites/businesses. These sites can get positive reviews or negative reviews. But they are still talked about. Which means they matter to the people in general and are relevant. Besides google can always use other signals like usage metrics to determine the relevance of a website.
@cnoble and @seo-himanshu -Actually, Google probably could tell if social media mentions were positive or negative towards a company. Facebook can already tell the difference between positive or negative status updates, and I imagine their technique could be applied and tweaked by Google.
"How Happy are We?": https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=150162112130
"Gross National Happiness on Facebook": https://apps.facebook.com/gnh_index/
That said, I don't think using social media mentions would result in less spammy SERPs. Creating accounts is easy, and I get enough Twitter spam friend requests to know it can be done somewhat on a mass scale already. I can already envision networks of people agreeing to send out positive messages for a company for just a small fee (the social media version of link farms?).
You're right on the big numbers.
But when we talk of Little Boys, you don't need those numbers, but more more less. I was referring about that kind of market (sorry if I was not clear), were the bad practices are quite common.
unfortunately search industry is not developing in favour of small boys (small businesses) whether it is organic search or social media.
Isn't that sad?
I think with the hyperlocal searches playing a more prominent role, that this can help out smaller businesses, more than SEO could have done in the past - but I agree with you. If you own a small business that say operates online so people don't use geo-modifiers to find you, then it seems like you will soon be pretty screwed trying to compete - especially if you are in a smaller niche that just doesn't get a lot of followers in social circles
@Tom Im sure the social graph has started as I see its usually the same blogs that show up each time there is some breaking news and they are not the trusted CNN sites they are the new web2.0 properties that are mostly powered by social media traffic.
I looked at my own blog to see how it can be beneficially for link buildings to use spam Blog Spam Works! but the most common result was that none of the authors dropping links were ranking at all or in the top 100 results. So has Google started to devalue Blogs or just finally clicked about not ranking those nofollow author links, or are they just getting disperate?
So the problem is that with CTR of close to 6% does that signal to Google that is a quality link and user metrics should weight that link higher even though its dropped into the comment field?
@Critchlooooooooooow!
These ideas were on my mind throughout this article, especially through this comments section.
Since I'm not a scientist and do not have the patience (or time) to quantify the clues, I will share them all as a general "feeling". For the last 6 months I kept picking up on clues indicating that timeliness, community participation and the social graph are major forces. Or it could be that Googlers have come outright and said it.
Let's not forget that the interface to Google's Real Time search failed but the intent has never left them. Link endorsements will never go away but we are definitely moving into a hippie-like internet ecosystem that I'll call the Digital Commune.
Reputation, Buzz, Community ... interconnected web presences and active participation ... all belong in our new world.
Google will eventually get an algorithm for it.
That's why the focus is now over the Influencers and less over the Linkerati.
True
What are you supposed to do when pure white hat doesn't always work?
https://www.wolf-howl.com/seo/i-listened-to-google-and-failed/
I think the Google taking action on spam reports is the biggest cause for concern. I've never seen personally nor heard of a case where they actually looked into the spam report and did anything as a result of it.
It's obviously a bit of a wimpy tactic to report competitors and it can be used for evil but I think Google should either remove the option to make such a report or follow-up on them and keep relevant parties informed.
*Worth noting that I'm sure they do listen to some of these reports, just speaking from personal experience and from people with whom I've spoken about this.
Thanks for the post Rand, it's definitely a concern for me too and it makes the argument to a client to "do things the right way" a tougher and tougher sell.
I think you need to know someone in google to get any kind of action taken. And this would be more along the lines of a persoanl favour.
Spam is a massive problem and unfortunately isn't going away anytime soon. I side with Rand and only go for ethical good quality link building. In the long run I know I'll be safe as I'm sure the algorithm gets better all the time (as the beetles put it).
Great post.
I believe that Google acted on a spam report I submitted because an irrelevant website was ranking. Other than that, nothing. The current spam team only seems interested in what appears in the Search Results and not how a website got there.
I'm also seeing a lot of fraudulent sites which are ranking on thousands of low quality back links. Even with my whiter than white site that's built upon the strongest back links, there's little I can do against a site that's gaining 2000+ back links per day! The Chinese sure know how to link build en masse -and I thought the Indians were bad for spam.
In the end our commerce site has been forced to invest in other lines until the Brand acts on the exact match URL domains which are infringing upon its brand name.
Easy bud...Those are some pretty broad generalities about ethnicity. I would also suggest that it's possible to beat black hat tactics because it's done every single day.
I've sent a spam report to Google more than a month ago about a Turkish music website which has backlinks (hacklinks) from Uruguay Ministry of Tourism, an Australian College, International Gymanst Magazine etc.
Nothing happened and this site is still at number one spot..
You ask us what we think...
What I think is that is hard to be a knight in a White shining armour today EXACTLY because we see how webspam is not only still there, but even in a better health than ever. So the temptation do wear the armour of the Black Knight is tempting as far as seen as the only way to defend your online business.
The inaction of the Webspam team. if it's due the huge amount of website to control is just causing a even bigger and harder control problem. I'll try to explain better:
1) Several websites dominates the rankings using Black to Grey tactics (some are big Names)
2) Google does not react, and when it reacts it is punishing small fishes
3) People see that Gangsta SEO is tolerated simply because the Police is missing
4) More webs start using unethical SEO methods
5) Restart from 1
Periodically we discuss about educating clients, about how to teach the magic of White Hat, ethical and editorial SEO & link building. About how to create a longstanding dominating precence in the SERPs means to plan an holistic web marketing plan, which sees great editorial, great service, great social and user engagement... but then someone else comes (or the client himself makes you notice it) saying... ok all those words are "kool", but I can make you jump on the 1st page of Google with this methods, in lesser time and spending a third of the money.
On the long run all this is very tiring.
And if we look to other web marketing platforms (FB, Twitter, FourSquare and so on...) the panorama is not that great as well.
What could we do then? To create great users experience is a wonderful idea, to increase and even better the education of ethical SEO practices too... but what I feel the most is that we all should unite our force and start doing something more serious and coordinate. Are we influencers? our voice is listened also out of the SEO field? So, let use this voice to make of the Internet Pollution a mainstream issue, because Internet is now the people "Second Life" reality and surely it should be of its interest to be aware of the problem.
Ok, I finished my rant :)
P.D.: Just to make it clear, I'm still wearing my White Shining Armour, even if it weights
Great points G. I see you in my minds eye as don Quijote de la Mancha, in your armour charging the windmills of spam.
I just wish I won't get crazy and abandoned as he was ;)
Yeah, but didn't he end up with the girl?
Not really... Dulcinea, his beloved, is considered an imagination of Sancho by all the people he knows.
And the two books don't end so good for him. In the first one he is arrested and returned to his hometown in La Mancha. And in the second literally die.
Ok... I justify the thumb down if it is because I wrote Sancho instead of Quijote... if not, I do not understand that thumb down.
Probably someone who's bummed out that Dulcinea wasn't real. I know I was!
Over the last 6 months paid links have become a LOT less effective. The end result of this is that free links from what might be classed as "spam" or low quality sites are much more effective.
You just have to roll with it, give Google what they want and make sure you always have enough trusted natural links and good content to pass a manual review.
Hey Patrick - you know, thinking about this, I've got a pretty US-centric perspective. I wonder if things are different in the UK/Europe with the Dublin and Swiss-based webspam teams?
We'll have to compare notes at the London PRO Training :-)
in Spain and Italy things are not that much different. I still see Flash website with cloaked hidden seo optimized text ranking in the first positions, see seos in linkedin groups offering 2 or 3 link exchange schemes, directories that promote themselves because of the PR advantages, a too big importance given exact keyword domain names that rank good with almost no significant link...
things aren't much better in the Uk! Many of the sectors I work in are clutterd with awful websites breaking both onsite guidlines and benefiting from spammy links - the best of both worlds! :)
The link building of choice among greyhatters currently seems to be profile links (often referred to as Paul & Angela's links as these guys sell the lists of sites to get profile links on).
Google's recognition of these low quality links mixed in with Google's preference for keyword domains is creating a growing spam problem.
It's unfortunate these work so well, but Google's history has told us they tend to come down hard on manipulation tactics in the end, and unless you are a big brand they will be quite happy to take a few right out of the index altogether.
That said, the longer it goes on for the harder it becomes for the pure whitehats to compete, and the overall quality of the index starts to tank as site owners start to focus more on dirty shortcuts, than quality content and more genuine promotion.
That said I still see the best results acheived through real editorial citations, social media sharing and high quality links.
If Google could devalue links built through article spinning then I think that would make a big dent in spam results. I'm very positive that is completely plausible to detect with high accuracy.
I've had to resort to a few spammy directory listing in my time just to keep sites up there, as much as i'm 100% in favour of natural white-hat links, sometimes you just can't compete with the sheer volume that webspam can generate, and for such little outlay.
My concern is that should google be working on something big, my efforts to keep sites at the top of the serps now could hurt in the future, maybe google should be a bit more open, if I new there was a fix for this mennace in the works i'd be happy for our spammy competition to have their spot in the sun for now knowing that the white-hats shall inherit the earth, but we just don't know!
Wow. Here I thought it was just an unspoken, industry secret that all SEO is nasty, black, sludgy stuff. And that SEO bloggers in their advice to be white hat aren't really telling us the truth.
I joined this industry relatively recently and work on local small business websites at my company. Boy was I in for a surprise when I ran competitors' websites into Yahoo Site Explorer.
I'm talking about suburban, "mom-and-pop" types of real American apple pie businesses. All propped up by garbage. And for all the niches I compete.
I would have to think that for a small business website such as "Cleveland garage door repair," buying links is cheaper and a safer choice than a white hat link-building campaign.
I mean, when does anybody ever naturally link to a local garage door contractor website? It'd take one hell of an amazing link-bait campaign, and I bet that's a lot more expensive than a few paid links.
This is an ugly truth of Google's index. I've been analyzing competitor and client links in a variety of industries for several years now. Time and time again I find high ranking sites with nothing but pages of pages of web spam in an excel export from Yahoo or OSE.
I explain to the client that these tactics may have worked years ago and some may still be effective but the day will soon come that these sites will be knocked down and our clean white-hat site will rise to the top. In many cases I'm still waiting for that day to come...
- Evan
This probably won't make me very popular.
I agree from experience Google don't seem to react to the SPAM reports they get sent. So don't bother. Send the offending webmaster the information you would've sent to Google, and tell him/her you're going to send it to Google.
This works.
I actually had been wondering if anyone had done this with any kind of success. I'd be reluctant to do it myself since I just represent our site and business (as opposed to owning it), but I did laugh at the thought.
Maybe Google isn´t doing everything they can to fight SEO-Spam cause a lot of those sites implement Adsense. People with a large amount of low-quality sites usually just put some Adsense on their sites cause its so easy and fast to do.
Also, If you have a legitimate business website that is being killed in the SERPS and want better exposure without going black-hat, buying Google's sponsored listing ppc placement might seem like the only option.
That and the alternative, punishing all the sites that are not big brands reek of anti-trust. So either way I think Gooogle might have some trouble down the road.
THEN (From Google, 2006)
Today the Internet is an information highway where anybody – no matter how large or small, how traditional or unconventional – has equal access. But the phone and cable monopolies, who control almost all Internet access, want the power to choose who gets access to high-speed lanes and whose content gets seen first and fastest. They want to build a two-tiered system and block the on-ramps for those who can't pay.
Creativity, innovation and a free and open marketplace are all at stake in this fight. Please call your representative (202-224-3121) and let your voice be heard.
NOW (From New York Times August 4, 2010) WASHINGTON — Google and Verizon, two leading players in Internet service and content, are nearing an agreement that could allow Verizon to speed some online content to Internet users more quickly if the content’s creators are willing to pay for the privilege.
The charges could be paid by companies, like YouTube, owned by Google, for example, to Verizon, one of the nation’s leading Internet service providers, to ensure that its content received priority as it made its way to consumers. The agreement could eventually lead to higher charges for Internet users.
So what does net neutrality have to do with this discussion? Nothing. But the point I wanted to make is that Google changed from what they were saying was important to stop, to being one of the major players.
I know this sounds cynical of me, but Google's mission is to make money, not satisfy people. So if they are able to satisfy most people with crappier SERPS, but continue to make money then it's a no brainer for them.
Perhaps they are banking on the fact that these higher results with spammy link profiles will still be perceived as useful to the majority.
I think your mentioning Google's position change on net neutrality, in conjunction with this post by Rand, could be a sign of a larger issue:
Wired magazine's September issue features an article titled The Web is Dead (also featured on NPR with Chris Anderson). For those who haven't read it yet, it suggests an idea that while the internet is becoming more popular, the web is dying. As the Wired artcile points out, most people associate the world wide web and the internet as being the same thing... but in fact it's only one application of the internet, which is giving way to mobile apps, social media, and other behemoth's like Netflix, etc.
With what we're witnessing from Google's recent actions (which as the cliche goes, speaks louder than their words), does that mean Google is setting the stage to let their cash-cow go to the wayside, while they try to secure the next gold mine? Assuming Rand's analysis in this post is accurate, Google is choosing not to invest the necessary resources into making their search index more "valuable". Couple that with Google now sleeping with the enemy (read: phone monopolies) who service the number one smart phone operatiing system (Android), and suddenly... you start to feel like a conspiracy theorist that's predicting the decline of an entire SEO/SEM industry in the coming years. If the money follows the masses... and the masses are moving... then ?
Yup...Google is a business...and as much as I may not like Microsoft I hope Bing can at least be competitive and keep Google honest. Also I just read Aaron Wall's response to this post, and it's interesting. I think this quote about sums it up:
"Thus the role of SEO today is not to remain 'spam free' (whatever that is) but to create enough signals of quality that you earn the benefit of the doubt. This protects you from the whims of search engineers, algorithmic updates, and attempts at competitive sabotage."
And he makes a good point in relation to spam reporting and manual checking - setting up a spam checking bureaucracy is possible, but really inefficient.
Great post Rand.
Maybe Matt can answer this directly in a comment?
Ps: "So, What Should Legimitate Marketers Do?" ;)
Matt: Thanks for the comment carfeu. After thinking long and hard about this issue here is my recommendation: Design for the user, not the search engine.
Love, Matt
I think social graph can save us from web spam and it has already started saving. See how citations, reviews and ratings are affecting rankings in local business listing. Google is becoming more people centric than ever.You can buy links but you can't easily buy loads of recommendations from tons of people spread in different geo locations. I can imagine a future in which links no longer drive ranks. Only sites with enormous social media presence are dominating SERPs. When you will search for a local product/service, only the most talked about products in your area come up in top 10. People trust peer recommendations much more than any form of advertising whether paid (PPC) or organic (SEO).And this is reflected in the way we purchase products/services today. I don't remember when was the last time i booked a hotel ranking at 1st position on google without looking at its reviews on tripadvisor.com. So it perfectly make sense for Google to promote the product people recommend.
I completely agree with Himanshu & I think Google has started to implement result based on the social media.
I have noticed social circle results in bottom of the page when i am logged into google account, its shows me results of the links shared by my friends. Hence I think SEO is sooner or later merging with social media.
As for the webspam I many results which are spam in the listing in India search results. May be its becaus of the caffine index that they are testing this spam are going through their filters.
I agree with Himanshu and Nikunjlist, I'm seeing more recommendations from my social circle in Google results too. Matt Cutts is spamming my social circle :) j/k FYI I'm following him in Google reader so its how he is in my social circle.
Citations will still be important though, if the New York Times mentions a hotel in some list they make it will carry more weight than some guy in Tripadvisor telling me how great this hotel is (there is spam on Tripadvisor too). And its possible, probable even that many of my friends didn't visit this hotel and have nothing to say about it.
That is absolutely true. Google seems to be people-centric nowadays with the evolution of social media. Google is giving more importance to sites deriving more social media presence. This may result in no importance to the site's quality backlinks in the future.
It's coming true...I see over at the Converseon blog they have a screenshoot of a Google query where the first page has no traditional organic listings at all.
It's all Local Business Listings which are mostly being pulled from review sites like Yelp and Citysearch...and of course AdWords.
Apparently it's just an experiment but obviously a sign of things to come.
Agree and it seems to make sense for both visitors and Google who will undoubtedly make more money through it.
Have read a couple of blog posts on these new experimental local SERPs. Evolution...
My guess is that "citations/reputation building offers" will soon fill your emails. On most review sites, you can use whatever name or alias you want to write a review. Offers like "a 1000 citations in one month" are to be expected.
You can also expect a war on reputation in the coming years with organized online reputation destroyers services. I am not part of this, but I see how easy it would be.
You can fool bots but not real living breathing people. Fake reputation will be short lived and will eventually put a company out of business for good. And in this case there will be no re-consideration request.
You're right... or you're a copywriter genious (and - then - you have to ask to yourself why aren't you doing a better and presticious job), or inevitably your comments from 1000s fake users will finally sound as coming from the same voice. And that's something people find out very easily.
Yes and no...Who read all the reviews ? Most people probably read less than five before making up their mind, and all the "false" review will be agregated among the real reviews, but they will still count as citations. I recently read a lot of reviews about products I am interested in. Some pretty nasty negative reviews made me back off some products, although I could not tell if they were made by real users or made up by a competitor.
I think this line of thought is a bit naive. If there is money to be made, and a way to capitalize it, it will be done.
In our case there is alot of money to be made and a pretty straightforward way to monetize it.
Sure some companies will get discovered. Doesn't this happen with link farms and other blackhat tactics? Does it stop its effectiveness or discourage SEOs from doing it?
Are there not any companies who already flood review sites with comments and sculpt " review" SERPs? A poster above referenced trying to find an unbiased webhosting review website.
"If you build that foundation, both the moral and the ethical foundation, as well as the business foundation, and the experience foundation, then the building won't crumble"
Henry Kravis
Social media is just as easy to manipulate and fake than anything else.
Google should be stricter on web spam otherwise they will continue to stir the vortex of countless websites pushing the limit and definition of whitehat.
You're doing well in the results doing 100% whitehat for years. One day your competitor spends $10,000 on links and shoots to the top spot in a few weeks.
What does a business owner do? They go and buy some links too. After that competitor buys some more...etc.
I am personally growing sick and tired of the whole loop.
For example : a link from a website for mobile devices for some frozen fruit products should not be taken into account, right? I always thought that Google only considered relevant links with the content of this website. I guess it would be difficult to buy so much relevant links ?
Let's be honest here, what is a spam result?
A relevant quality resource that built links using directories etc.....
Or
An unrelevant page showing for and off topic term with trusted natural links (like when Google was position 1 for caffeine)
Users want to see relevant results and couldn't care less about the link profile of the sites they visit, 98% won't even know what a link is.
As long as Google is showing relevant quality results, that are on topic with the query then everyone is happy.
As SEO's we of course need to make sure that were involved in building quality resources, but we also need to understand what it takes to get that resource in front of searchers on Google.
Let's face it if Google devalued directories and other types of cheap links we would lose 90% of the great resources the SERPS currently display :)
Rand, this post is spot on... in my humble experience on running sites on the other site of the Atlantic I can say that the situation is actually getting a bit ridiculous with target keyword-chosen domains often dominating top SERP positions with virtually no even a decent amount of inbound links, not so much in the Uk i can say of , but in in the Spain and France.
I agree that some weight can be given to domains including some keywords but it is just getting too far.
In the last year I have seen plenty of instances where one master website is supported by a bunch of keyword-rich-on-domain-name mini/niche sites that with only a a small count of 4-5 directory links are winning on the SERPs vs much bigger sites with no kws on their domains but with stronger and more plentiful editorial content and far more deep links.
The result is many webmasters are starting to take the mini/niche site + directory link building combo approach to stand a better chance against the competition, I have personally tested this approach and it works!
The reality is that unfairly Google is not making easy to those genuine white hat SEOs out there that are employing ethical and natural content production and link building techniques to develop their own and client sites.
Indeed. The same thing appears to be occurring in the US in the personal finance niche. Exact match domains with just a few links are getting the top spot for tons of queries, no matter how poor the quality of their content.
At the same time, the big boys like Mint are buying tons of links with impunity.
It's got me a bit concerned.
I concur with Carralon totally
For my target keyword in the UK, the results are dominated by sites that have multiple interlinked domains with similar content, for no other reason than to manipulate the Serps.
If I look through the first 100 results, all of them are running additional sites to boost the PR and keyword relevancy for their main site. Often the additional sites are filtered down the serps, but the benefit to their main site is quite clear.
My single site is nowhere, despite having as much, or in most cases considerably more unique quality content.
The message Google is sending out is clear, "Build Mini Domain Farms !!!"
Creating a main site with 50 pages and another ten sites with 5 pages each pointing to the main site, Will achieve significantly higher rankings compared to One Site with 100 pages.
Regarding reporting the spam to Google, I have provided G with numerous detailed reports, except for one, no action was taken. The one that action was taken on happened to have 30+ interlinked sites all with similar content etc. the result was it went from page 1 to 4, so just a bit of link devaluation.
A few months ago I mucked around and bought www.buyanipad.co.uk to test exact match domains and threw up a handful of meaningless harvested articles on a standard wordpress template. I have maybe 1 link pointing to it from my linkedin profile.
Its been in the top 10 since the day of the ipad name announcement pretty much. It gets overtaken now and then by QDF newspaper stories.
Currently for this valuable keyword term (PPC is cheap to it too ^^ )
#8 buy an ipad#50 buy a ipad #50 buy ipad
Exact match is kicking butt here, with no useful content or links to make and 0 PR
Organic traffic is about 10 visits a day if Im lucky. There is no reason for my site to be in the top 1000 let alone top 10.
One of the many recent lower quality serps Im seeing
Does anyone know why you cant edit your posts on seomoz? is it a technical reason or psychological?
I did the "birthday party supplies" search and ran the top result in OSE. Top do-follow links: charlotteokay.com, jacksonokay.com, tusconokay.com, fargookay.com... the list goes on. Obvious link farm. All of their top 50 links are from these "local directories".
This post made me think of Oatmeal's widgetbait gone wild fiasco. I'm not sure what is black, grey, or white hat sometimes. Maybe I will wear a camouflage army hat and go to war with my competitors :)
I do my best to be white hat but everyday I look at my competitors links and shake my head while looking at their backlinks. Spam is obviously a huge problem but in my experience a big percentage of the websites I've done research on have crummy links floating around. Google can't penalize everyone lest their search results become terrible, maybe they are focusing more on fighting paid links?
I feel its almost equivalent to direct mail at home. Everyday you get crap in your mail and throw it out - its garbage you say. Until one day you really do need a car wash. Just saying what was once spam in your mailbox became a half-price pizza coupon which you thoroughly enjoyed. Its hard to distinguish between them, for you, me, or a billion dollar search algorithm.
"Camo SEO". Love it! Can I use it?
Yes - put on your fatigues and join the battle! That would be a nice Youmoz post - sort of like the Ninja SEO thing that I've seen a few times. Thinks like link-bombs and Social Media blitzkrieg come to mind.
And maybe that is what Google is thinking - they are losing some battles but they will win the war with some Spam-nuke they are working on in the Googleplex.
ICBM=Internet Combating Bad Marketers?
I think anyone seriously worried by this needs to chill out a bit to be honest. For me Google has proved itself enough over the years for me to have a little faith.
Firstly, I agree with the post that more spam does seem to be creeping back into the index, but in my experience the overall level is still very low. Let's not forget how bad things were in the early 2000's and we a million miles from going back to that.
I really don't think Google is resting on it's laurels, and sometimes I'm sure you take a small step backwards to make a bigger leap forward. I remember about a year ago there was doom and gloom that Google had lost the plot with more irrelevant international search results appearing in Google UK results, but that's been fixed by-and-large.
It seems a little melodramatic to say:"the world of search marketing and the amazing utility of search in general may come to an end."
Really? I mean really, do you believe that is going to happen even if Google self-destructed? Obviously you don't because you qualified it in the next paragraph! Maybe one day another method of search will usurp Google from it's massively dominant position, but if it does, so what, Search Marketers are an inherently adaptable bunch. People looking for stuff online, one way or another, isn't going anywhere. Businesses need help to be found online, and that's where we come in. If it means one day I do more Social Media than Google lovin' then so be it.
The worst case scenario to me is: "SEO is dead, long live Search Marketing."
That still seems like a win to me.
Scalability may no doubt create a challenge to Google. However, shouldn't a company with the resources to drive a camera car down every street in America and abroad have the resources to protect the integrity of its core product?
I also hope they are not relying on social cues as the silver bullet. A thousand low wage workers creating crappy links can just as easily be re-purposed to writing crappy tweets, etc.
While we haven't been looking in the results so much lately, we have been contacted by serveral companies of late, one of which I spent some time on several calls with to see what their SEO methods were to help us out.
After telling us that they are a reputable company with 750 clients (including some major UK sites) they outlined their strategy, which eventually boiled down buying links.
It was really disappointing; some of the clients they quoted were big fish and it would appear that they too are in on the link buying.
Its tempting to give it a try; we're sticking with natural link building.
I've been interviewing SEOs for legit link building, and despite stating I only want whitehat links with a focus on editorial citations over 90% try and get me to buy greyhat links (profiles, crappy directories, mass article submission etc.) and at least half offer paid links.
Those that offer paid links only a tiny handful warn of the risks.
It's the lack of risk warning that worries me most; the client in question that I took the calls for had been caught up - completely innocently - in the Top Pile Salsa saga. If their domain has an asterisk next to it somewhere in the bowels of Google, getting paid links may spell the end of it.
(I had to speak with 2 different people and the second one for about 45 minutes before it was clear they were paid links...)
I hardly ever see a good link profile its mainly rubbish. Its really frustrating and makes me wonder why I'm such a god boy and don't just join in! Its nice to hear that its not just me seeing this.
Great post but in a way a sad one...
Really great, spot on post Rand, thanks!
I've recently seen some of our competitors pass us by using these techniques. It's frustrating, and unfortunately, there's nothing that can be really done about it unless Google decides to crack the whip.
I was told recently that I was "too white hat" ... if there is such a thing, I definitely gave the subversive tactics idea a once over out of exasperation. This post definitely reinforces that I'm doing the right things.
Waiting for Matt Cutts to chime in... i redirected some forum spam and its now showing as 35k links in my webmaster tools... if the blackhat spam campaigns are getting clean links by spamming forums then I sure hope your right about a big update on its way... ive also seen a bunch of microsites working again when they were all already old, and the exact match has them ranking for all kinds of terms
Wow, that site isn't too worried about that 100 max link recommendation.
The micro sites I find are usually exact match as well. I wonder if Google is working on cutting that back? With the addition of new TLDs like ".cc" and ".co", certainly anyone could own an exact match domain and then rank for it.
What kills me the most is how long Google lets some things go on. Toally long enough to rip profit from a deserving, white hat company and cause them to loose market share, or perhaps even go out of business. The fundamental economics of that situation happening widely can have devastating effects on the Internet-Food-Chain.
That being said, Google does have A LOT of weight on its shoulders, and I understand that not everything can be fixedat all times.
One of our clients has been sitting comfortably in 1st position for a relatively competitive keyword for a while now. All of a sudden at the start of the week, a competitor that had been previously mid-way up the second page, flew into first and has remained there. Absolutely nothing had changed to their site or its architecture, so I took a look at their backlinks.
What I found was that over the past few weeks they had acquired around 20 to 30 links from powerful porn sites. Their anchor text was just stuffed with porn related terms; not even moulded into a coherent sentence, and a long way from the term they were now ranking 1st for.
It seems that Google has deemed their site better than our clients based solely on the power of these new links, and ignored any other aspects!
Fuming, is an understatement...
Maybe Google just knows, better than anyone else, that organic results are getting less important. With the steady increase of adwords slots over the years, and now the aggressive Places 7 box (sometimes 10 box), it won't be long before there is no room for organics on Page 1. So why invest resources in a diminishing market?
I suspect that part of the problem is something that's come up in a couple of recent blog posts - how do you tell the source of spammy link-building? More and more people seem to be getting hit by competitors creating spammy links to try to get them into trouble. There are patterns that can help tell if someone created links themselves or it happened without their knowledge, but I don't think the algo is up to the task yet. In that case, Google will understandably err on the side of caution (which, in this case, is not penalizing the links).
Pete,
One think is PENALIZING and other is DISCOUNTING. If they really want to be on the side of caution, than they should not count some of the crap people are manufacturing
This aspect is very simple for me. If G sees loads of links made from dodgy sites, or hundreds of profiles created in a very short period of time, they should in my opinion DISCOUNT them.
Even infamous Angela said this: there is no danger for you in using my links, worst case scenario is: G will not give it a value. It was a reponse to the concerns of some members of the infamous forum.
So even spam manufacturers themselves are probably pretty surprised with google's behaviour. Geezers are buying old domains with good PR, and organizing their own networks, then selling links from this networks and....... this seems to work. Unfortunately
The real injustice is that so many people are playing by the rules and being beaten by cheats, ah, no, wait a minute, that's just life right?
In the last 12 months we've been approached by some big hitters in the world of publishing, household names here in the UK, offering links on their websites, for a fee obviously. I was so very nearly sucked in but managed to resist but there's scarcely a day goes by that I don't wonder about 'joining in' with the whole link cheating game.
As others have said, it's a mess and isn't going to change any time soon unless, as Rand suggested, Google release something significant with respect to algo change.
One of the hardest things is explaining to clients why their high effort site is being trounced by zero effort sites. Business people are not interested in the ethics and whys and wherefores, they just want results.
We live in interesting times.
For those waiting for pure white hat to beat out grey or black in any sort of competitive non-tech (i.e. not appealing to the blogosphere)niche... keep holding your breath.
No one likes to hear this and the mantra is "you aren't going to outsmart Google" and its just patently wrong. Just like saying crackers wont be able to outsmart Microsoft's anti-piracy efforts on the latest version of windows.
There will always be black-hats pushing the envelope and getting away with hardcore engine manipulation. There will always be Matt Cutts saying "Thats wrong and we'll catch you" and there will always be "white hats" (which for the most part, though not always, is a way of saying people who aren't very good at off-site SEO) complaining that its unfair that their "pure methods" aren't getting better results.
As with most things in life... the good bits lie in the grey area in the middle. From what I've seen over the last year and a half the effectiveness of grey-hat hasn't changed at all. Tactics vary over time but the big principles of grey-hat have remained fairly static and are roughly as effective today as they were 18 months ago.
Less progress from Google's webspam team you say? ... Matt Cutts deserves a vacation too:
https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/climb-kilimanjaro/
I think Google needs to reach out to the SEO community in order to open their eyes to the massive amounts of spam out there...
Maybe the SEOs should band together to protect the integrity of the web!
For instance, should I report this link farm ... OH LOOK! here are two more identical spam looking, useless link directories --
How are those not penalized? Do they REALLY provide value to the user? I don't think so.
MAYBE if there was a way to search and some descriptions of what each site was about.
I love this post Rand... I've seen so many spam techniques work and have been tempted by the dark side. The force is strong with our company because we are scared of Google "working on something big" -- stay whitehat.
Rand! Covered the topic very well! This problem is faced by people in almost every geo-locations. This may result in more spamming by webmasters in the future for getting a better position in the SERP. Hope Google addresses the problem sooner.
Good post as usual. Thanks.
Strategically from Google's point of view - web spam could be a good thing.
If a user clicks on a spam link in an organic result - they will likely then click an AdSense link.
If a user loses trust in organic, and then looks to the sponsored links -then they click that and Google wins again.
And perhaps this is the biggest sign to start to show the death of SEO (it's something people talk about from time to time - but if spam is beating Google and Google is not putting up much of a fight, then the time is ny).
I think thats correct. Why should Google invest engineers and engines into a problem most people don't care about ? In a world with perfect organic serps there is no need for Adwords at all.
Great post Rand - I agree that the SERPs are showing more and more spammy results, however I also think people are generally getting better at filtering through these.
I wonder if this means that the higher results are actually losing value as they’re skipped over by people assuming that they’re spam? I thought it’d also be interesting to compare Google and Bing for the search terms mentioned in the article. What I found was that Bing was less spammy due to more local results appearing in the results. I’ve documented the findings here:
https://www.scotiasystems.com/blog/seo/web-spam-serp-comparison-google-vs-bing/
The strategy I've been seeing lately that has been having a lot of success for many of my clients' competitors is the link wheel (possibly because shoemoney endorsed one of the major companies who use this technique a couple of months ago). I've come across a whole lot of "blogs" that don't appear to be written by a native English speaker and contain predominantly 200-300 word posts that go something like this:
"My daughter got bitten by the neighbor's dog today. They deny it, so I guess I need a good St. Petersburg personal injury lawyer".
Then the next post goes a little like this:
"My husband wants me to have breast enhancement, but I don't want to. Maybe I could make a trip out of it and have breast enhancement surgery in Las vegas. That would be fun."
Most of these blogs link to each other with a few links from spammy directories and article sites. Linkscape gives most of them domain authorities greater than 50. The links from the blog posts (really, the posts themselves) are sold as part of a search engine optimization package to businesses. I'll leave it to you to guess which words provide the anchor text for the links the businesses bought. I have one client whose competitor is ranking #1 for their target keyword and 95% of their links are from these "blogs". Really, the business owners don't know how they're ranking so well. They just are and it's money well spent in their eyes.
Personally, I think the way to deal with this and the spammy directories is not to penalize the sites who buy the links, but to devalue the links themselves. Let the worthless purchase be the penalty. That way if the technique is working to outrank "whitehat" tactics, then the "whitehat" site can employ the tactic without worry of being removed from the index. When the links get devalued, both sites will take a hit, but the whitehat site should still remain well positioned based on its "legitimate links".
I really can't fault people for doing what works. I wonder what percentage of webmasters are paying attention to what the engines say is "right" or "wrong" and assume buying spammy links is the "right" thing to do because it's working.
I guess the problem that remains is how to algorithmically decide whether the above mentioned blogs are spam or not. I'm confident none of them would pass a hand check, but to a machine things probably look pretty natural.
I see it exactly the same way.
Devaluation of it would sort this thing out.
I know the "technique" you're talking about and it's annoying clutter on the web.
What is happening is devaluation of google's serps and creation of tons of crap with no value as everybody got a signal to create these little crappy blogs. Now the common practice is to outsource it to Asia and ex Soviet Union countries to get it done cheaper.
Well brevetoxin, They are not considered spammy :) They are just small blog posts. If someone would indeed write a post about let's say breast surgery, do you think would write it differently? Yeah, of course they didn't know how to create neither a proper anchor text nor the correct link. But it still time consuming to write it and post it and change it... so, if that post didn't repeat itself endlessly on 5423534 blogs and it's unique, gets a proper importance.
At least that's my humble opinion.
ChiefRA
I have seen the same strategy work. Even sillier is that it really is easy to spot as many times posts across the link wheel are in sequence. 50 blogs that share an interest in personal injury lawyers and breast enhancement - all at the same time! They're not getting quite as much bang for their buck as they could be, since many of the blogs do not have unique domains and are still on blogspot.com. But it is, or at least has been, working. In any case it certainly hasn't hurt them.
I think the scalability has a lot to do with it, as Google have made getting the number 1 spot to damn attractive, everybody wants it and most will do whatever it takes to get it. It's kind of like Google are at war with millions of people who use millions of different kinds of machinery, some of which they've never seen before.
I'm starting to lose hope in the "Working on Something Big" theory...some of the spam results I've seen in Australia have been around for so long I'm starting to think they are normal.
I think the baby in the bathwater is spot on. Right no Google has way better and less-spammy results than Yahoo! and especially Bing. Although Google's SERPS aren't perfect, a big algorithmic purge of all sites that have manipulated with links would be catastrophic for the relevancy in the search results.I am not too concerned about spam. It seems like they manage to stay high in the SERPs for 3-6 months, but they are going down eventually. Have to admit that keyword rich domains are really annoying though..
Also, it seems like there is a pretty strong correlation between the development of affiliate infrastructure in a niche and spam.
For example, I was looking for a new webhost, and it took me hours to find a decent and not-overly-biased site. Only sites who loved 10 web hosts equally. And probably loved their affiliate links even more...
Yes... I totally understand where you are coming from when searching for a webhost. Many clients ask about manipulating keywords like review. I totally understand where they are coming from, but it is dishonest to pretend to be a 3rd party reviewer.
Since Google called time on paid links I can honestly say I have not seen a single competitor of ours penalised for such a practice. Even though we are told by respected figures in the SEO industry that paying for links should always be avoided I have yet to see a single example in practice which backs this up.
A lot of the spammy companies are trying to push diet pills and other health and financial related info.
By not taking action, many people are suffering.
To give one example, "allergy relief". natlallergy.com is showing up in the top three.
Webmd is the only quality result in the top 5. The rest are domains with the word "pain relief" in it and natlallergy who paid for anchor text links.
They have "allergy relief" anchor text links from 181 different domains. Each of those domains has lots of spammy links.
Without control from the web site, why would 181 different bloggers decide to give an anchor text link and describe this site the same way? They dont sell anything that is allergy relief. They dont sell allergy medication. They sell allergy control products like air purifiers that help you better deal with your allergies.
They also have 147 domains with"allergy bedding" and 72 with "allergy mattress covers" anchor link.
No other variations exist. Bedding typically has lots of variations, pillow cases, sheets and dozens of others.
So 400 different bloggers decided to only use one or more of these three phrases to describe the site.
It is often quite easy to establish paid link networks. Google is not taking action and lots of people are being referred to spammy sites instead of quality sites with responsible health and medical content.
Funny things is, if you or anyone with some SEO knowledge can find out those dodgy links how come Google with spam team can't?
.
Well, I wouldn't suggest that they are being penalized (ranking no. 2 doesn't seem like an effective penalty) but if you compare them to the top ranking site www.allergyrelief101.com (which is also selling the same type of product) it doesn't seem necessarily obvious that they should be #2 and allergyrelief101 should be #1.
Natlallergy has a domain age almost 10 years older, and many more links.
Allergyrelief101's anchor text distribution seems much more natural, but their links are far, far, fewer.
I agree it's a shame that Natlallergy is even in the top 3 at all. Then again, allergyrelief101 may very well be coasting on its domain match. A ranking factor which I like some others here are ready to see go...
they bought links over the past 6 months from a network.
If you are #4 or #5 in your category, there is little risk.
They are doing well with the three terms they purchased. natlallergy has been adding a couple of links per week.
It is obvious as they purchased anchor text links to three different phrases and all their anchor text links are going to those phrases.
The network of bloggers are selling lots of links to dozens of sites. Network is easily identified.
Buy.com purchased the term "sale" and "cyber monday" from this network.
Anchor text links from a low pr, spammy site is far more powerful than a legitimate link from a higher PR site.
it is quite easy to buy hundreds of anchor text links to your site for $20 each from triangle direct and others.
If you are #4 or #5 in your category, $1000.00 per month can get you in top three for a couple of keyword terms within 4-6 months and you can keep going.
It is easy for google to detect the network as there is no reason for the blogs to be linking out to the same people.
A prime example of Google failing to tackle webspam can be found by performing searches related to any "labido enhancing" drugs like viagra. For example, look at the number of .edu hijacks there are for "cheap viagra".
Come on Google do you really think that a .edu domain has a legitimate reason to rank for "cheap viagra"? Edu domains have no overall topical relevance for "cheap viagra", so surely you could be algorithmically dampening such rankings!?
I guess it could just be bait to track the latest blackhatters, but it damn sure makes for an awful user experience for those who genuinely are buying viagra...
Here is my take on it.
Google came out with Matt Cutts (whom I respect greatly) and tried to be more open about SEO in order to LEARN FROM SEOS and make themselves more safe from webspams. And of course they succeeded but also we learned many things from them too directly or indirectly.
Also, in one your points as you mentioned, Google still cares about the websites that spam. In fact, majority of websites make artificial links that are against Google guideline.
You have used the case of "ehow" in your previous article but I also have inside information of big companies such as Forbes buy links too but they do it in a very causios and sneaky manner that can go unnoticed by Google's filters.
At the end of the day, Google detects a website to have high value and good amount of content, and since Google's bread and butter is content, they must still index and allow those sites to exist but they keep changing their algorithm in such ways that would penalize the website on some traffic and ranking but can't overlook importance of the website and its content (for example ehow and forbes)
Anyway great article written by you as always.
Rand, I REALLY wish I had seen this before I left for SES. I was there and I would have loved to chat with you on this subject, especially since this has been a huge topic with me lately. In fact I pulled Debra Mastaler aside after a session with her to talk about combating stuff like this when you are in a search space dominated by sites clearly using spamy practices.
I haven't seen a big success with reporting spam through the traditional means. That being said, we were recently able to knock out a huge network of blogs on blogger that were being used for spam purposes fairly quickly. Its sad when the blog platform is tackling these issues faster than Google as a whole. But then again, maybe the ability for them to combat spam just isn't scalable to the size of Google.
I saw someone a while ago ask if even 2 paid links would be enough to get Google to take action, that seemed a little ridiculous to me when even sites that are setting up thousands of unlabeled paid links are not being penalized, in fact it is quite the opposite, they are accomplishing what they set out to do.
I think there needs to be a more rudementary disscussion on paid links. If I have a blog that I have worked on for the past 4 years and I want to sell a link to a relevant website that I think my visitors will appreciate, what is wrong with that? Why should it not count towards their ranking?
Google makes billions a year doing the same things they are telling us not to do and that is not really fair.
Linking from one quality site to another quality site whether money has changed hands or not should be irrelevant.
Cleaing up the millions of made-for-adsense websites that are purely designed to make ad revenue and purposely not answer visitors queries are a much bigger problem. The only difference is Gooogle makes money off the latter.
If there is no punishment for doing wrong, people will begin to think they are in the right.
There needs to be incentive to be white hat. Our sites rank very well through white hat tactics and I don't want to lose out to unethical operators. It isn't fair on users, customers, SEO or searchers.
This is evident in many other keywords. But what bothers me most that keyword.com version almost always beats many other top informative websites. A good example is --> keyword online degrees. Eleaners is probably the best site on the topic but onlindegrees.com beats all the other top informative sites with a low page and low links just due the keyword.com.
Further a lot of people use blog commenting to get on top as well, good example is ->MMo "make money online" the guys ranking on top are pretty much pumping it out day and nigh.
I reckon they will do a good large update sometime soon to clear most of the junk but as Rand mentioned it is hard to clean it all without hurting real legit sites that also take part in these tactics for certain keywords.
so if you build a brand out of a generic domain or spend money buying a relevant domain and build content around it shouldn't it be fair that you rank better.
obvious there are spam elements that may benefit but really its effective and a very good strategy to pursue.
I agree 100% with most people here, something needs to be done, and if something is in the pipelines then that's great but if not then this needs to be taken seriously.
Google claim to be trying to get the best results for users, that's in their universal search strategy, so if so why are there so many sites still appearing that are not there "legitimately"?!
I've seen so many terms where there are sites ranking from low quality links and other cases where an exact match domain appears, especially in local searches (how are these relevant when they are clearly mainpulated there)
I think we all deserve a reponse from Google on this one!
Great post Rand
Joel, I totally agree with you. Who does SEO matter most to? SEO professionals. The average Joe surfer has no clue what goes into SEO. Google is looking out for Google, not for us. They are a business and are looking out for their best interest. With all the data they've collected, they know more than we ever will.
They have reason behind their rhyme and this is being done on purpose. If Google gets heavily into the App world, Search will slowly die as Apps are now a search portal.
Rand - Awesome post. I would also love to hear from Matt. As a blogger working hard everyday to produce quality content and natural links, it's extremely frustrating to think that Google would be resting on its laurels. I would like to think that they are not and they are indeed working on something big.
Your results, however, clearly show that it's still possible to dominate with "spam" tactics and I would like to believe we have come a lot farther than that.
I have seen tons of spam shoot straight to the top since the May-Day update, and in Feb and also last Dec. The SERP's look pretty close to what they did before the October update of last year. Google is cooking up something special and here is what I am thinking.
There are signs that non link indicators of authority could be being tracked:
Those are just a few ideas bouncing around in my mind as possibilities. The future of search is going to be dominated by collective intelligence. It's do or die time when it comes to diversifying your advertising sources. Customer retention is the name of the game now. Wise up and smell the coffee!
I didnt give you the thumbs down, but all those signals can be manipulated and/or benefit companies with large advertising budgets.
I've been noticing a TON of vacation rental spam, both in terms of organic SERPs and in the 3-10 pack local results.
It seems (IMHO), Google isn't alarmed by 5 very similar web sites (including designs) that each have their own (very similar of course) Local Listing.
Lately, I have been seeing one company, command 40% - 60% of page #1 for MULTIPLE target keywords! Needless to say, this has been extremely disheartening for customer-expectation management.
Our saving grace has been Rand's economic formula of short term gain vs. long term business viability and the opprotunity cost of investing in not-so-white hat SEO tactics.
Interesting post Rand. I have definitely seen more of a return of competitors outranking far higher quality pages because of crappy links.
My hope is that Google is still working on scalable ways to fight this, and soon. At the moment there is still something of a line (a blurry one to be sure) between sites with legit links and those who go out and spam. However, if the spammy techniques continue to work, the white-hat seo's will be increasingly pushed towards the grey, simply because clients demand results.
It's going to make it way harder to play the game the right way if no one's following the rules and the rules aren't being enforced.
I agree totally, with the added bonus of not really understanding what all the rules are in the first place ...
I'm seeing the same things too for a client of mine. Newcomers outranking established legitimate sites. Doing back link analysis on one site showed thousands of spammy sites. Hopefully, and this is just positive thinking, is that Google's Caffeine is a Trojan Horse of sorts that somehow brought the spam to the top to better identify and filter them out eventually. Who knows though.
It seems a great shame, but my competitors have employed all these tricks to achieve top rankings.
In my business that is website based property marketing in a small island in Thailand, unless I use the same tactics I will not survive. Our business is based on leads, and clients arriving on out paradise island to be welcomed by eager estate agents.
I cannot afford to be no.7, 8 or 10 on google because my competitors hog the top spots.
The clients that do find me, tell me I am by far the best to search for property on.
I caught with no alternative but to follow the tricksters!
Hmm...nothing much to add but that I agree with you - I've seen spam take our competitors to the top. It's so pervasive that it's difficult to imagine Google outright penalizing sites that have such backlink profiles. Directories for example are a weak point (and one my brain is constantly hung up on) - why is Yahoo's necessarily so much better than a crappy directory? Just devalue them all. Of course, new spam types would evolve...
Google should devalue spammy links and not blacklist you.
It would be to easy for your competition to buy a heap of spammy links and get your website black listed.Not all links to your website are created by you. It's always a double edge sword I guess. But I do agree keyword rich domains that are new that rank highly is really irirating.
the ease of which your competitors could destroy you by purchasing spammy links is (in my opinion) the reason why the majority of active link buying campaigns are so succesful.
At best I tend to find that links just appear yo be devalued somewhat, as after the initial boost, the website will slowly drop down and then stabalise
Maybe what Rand saw then was Google's dance? Being highly competitive keywords there will be a lot more people trying to rank with websites that provide no real user benefit compared to the others.
Its true at times you see a website outrank you for a few weeks and then disappear off the first page.
Maybe Google's Algorithm already takes into account low quality websites but the rate and which it filters them out is not as we'd like as humans.
All this is very disconcerting. What I do know that is that as SEO thinkers we will be able to overcome any obsticle. The true nature of SEO is the ability to adapt and work our way through the puzzle. This is why most of us get up in the morning and have fun all day long. No matter what happens good quality content using white hat SEO developed for the user will always win in the end.
When I look at how much I could be making by gaming the system it's tempting. However, I've avoided any blackhat methods despite Google's inability to act on reports. When I look at how much some of the local blackhat guys are making it's pretty frustrating. Google needs to do something before they force it to get worse. A lot of the crap robotic content we see on the web is a result of Google's algorithm.
All this is very disconcerting. What I do know that is that as SEO thinkers we will be able to overcome any obsticle. The true nature of SEO is the ability to adapt and work our way through the puzzle. This is why most of us get up in the morning and have fun all day long. No matter what happens good quality content using white hat SEO developed for the user will always win in the end.
Take a look... jewelry.com ranks 1st for the term "jewelry" I don't think they deserve it
I agree that exact domain matces are still way too powerful and lead to abuse by many spams sites. I'm more of a blogger as a hobby than to make money with ads or affiliate programs, but I do keep up-to-date on SEO issues.
In my niche which is comprised of health and fitness blogs, there's an abundance of spam sites. To rank under a popular three-word search phrase is pretty challenging in some cases.
One example, is "health and fitness blog" which is surprisingly difficult though it wouldn't be flagged as competitvie by most SEO software. Why? There's at least two pages of sites that use various combinations of "health and "fitness" in their domain names. Many are nothing more than spam sites and several haven't updated content in over a year, but they still rank very well.
I think that although this is a really worthy discussion, I think rather than trying to beat the system you will always have better results working with what you know and keeping it all above board, at least then you can sleep easy.
If jewelry.com doesn't deserve to be #1, then who? Your site? Some site a bunch of 12 year olds are tweeting about? Get real.Yes, MFA sites with exact match domains ranking for physical items is kind of annoying. But if I want to make a site about "red widgets", I guess I should just get a -950 penalty for making sure my domain has that in it.I consider what all the white hats here to say to be the real danger. Guess what guys: it's 2010, the Internet is ubiquitous, and no this isn't some magic Utopia where you blog gets to be #1 because you wrote an article you thought was good. And Heaven forbid businessmen work at building up a site laser focused to a specific product. Funny how when it bothers you it's spam. But when you toe the party line of "build good content for the user" (such a vague and useless credo), you get to cry at how all those nasty evil black hats beat you.
You mentioned that Google "may be focused on other things." Let's be more specific... They had a failued launch of a cell phone earlier this year and are gearing up for a launch of TV - which may have the same fate if they are not careful. Seems to me that they have decided that things are "good enough" and are using their sizable lead on the competition to grow into new areas... Probably not a bad strategy when you think about it.
You mentioned this before, Rand, and I totally agree -- there will be a human filter. Or rather, the human filter will have more influence on the overall SERPs.
This human filter will be a combo of social signals, aggravated personalization data, and human spot-checkers employed by SE's.
Why? Because humans are more creative than machines (a.k.a. technology). At least until the singularity.
If dot coms are getting worried about the effectiveness of webspam than the regional league must be horrified. On Google regional search sites (i.e. google.ro) the EMD technique is strong enough (maybe as it was a decade ago) and no algorithm seems to break it down.
OK, I admit it. I purchased a link through a link broker, to test it out on a competitive keyword. The link was a site-wide and was in a section full of other paid links.
I moved up the rankings a little bit.
But then I got a conscious and decided I shouldn't mess with it, so I stopped buying the link.
So what happened? The site dropped 2 pages on that exact keyword match. Big drop.
Unfortunately, link spam works. I hope that Google finds some way of improving this situation soon. Before I get tempted...
So does this mean sites like Build My Rank and linkvana would be considered spamming to influence rankings?
Well, I think it's a matter of mixing. WHAT is quality content anyway? Someone said Jewelry.com does not deserve the 1st ranking, but if that's the case, then WHO should get the 1st spot? Cmon be honest.
At the least, it's still a lot better than a jewelry splog, right?
There is NO ONE that is 100% ethical and whiter than white, not even Google. This is just the facts of life.
For me, produce great content and get links. Isn't this what SEO is about? Why are many of you complaining when you lot are SEOs yourself?
I only take issue if the site is obviously low quality and it's hogging the top SERPs....
Another thing, those exact match keyword domain MFAs are really annoying since they are so crappy, but considering that Google is actually encouraging this crap, I don't see them doing anything about them anytime soon.
If anything, Google is in on it too, but if there's somethingI like Google to do, it is - put a stop to this circus!!
Rand,
If Google gives spammy results, people think THEY made a mistake and refine their queries
Because of people’s obedience to a brand, they try to make the engine work, instead of letting the engine work for them.
Webmasters are often driven by immediate cash flows rather than wait for year/s to see IF their efforts to create compelling content will eventually pay off; so they see an opportunity / incentive in manipulation attempt.
Social graph being layered over link graph to drive rankings? Easier said than done. The going rate is $25 for FB page with 5000 fans, There are API less apps mimicking humans auto generating tweets, solving captchas, etc, etc, etc -
Welcome to the world of social spam !
The cold hard fact is that stealth spam appears to work just as fine like those stealth link buyers wearing mask of legitimate marketers!
search "wedding rings" on google to see how horrible the first listing www.weddingrings.com is. Rand, now that you mentioned it, the more I see it.
Google re-penalised my directory about a month or 2 ago, the pagerank was dropped, it was hit with a -40 penalty and lots of the pages were dropped from the index, amazingly I still get quite a few submissions.
They have deindexed lots of pages from lots of directories, even the good ones. Finding cached pages is really difficult, I would stop using them altogether, but linkbait on its own doesn't always kick it.
I don't know the current situation but Matt Cutts attempts to give an answer on youtube about this topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScgXiqqxrM4&feature=channel
So is natural link-building becoming less effective enough that a lot of strategies need to be re-done? How adversely does this affect current white-hat SEO strategies overall?
Overall, I think these are good points to keep in mind when dealing with the frustration of competitors getting away with darker stuff than myself, but even in the unlikely case of link-building "going obsolete", it's a bit early to push the little red button on the keyboard and panic. I'd really like to see a follow-up post at some point when we hear more from Google on this, or an algorithm update/change occurs.
Google New Mocha Algo will take care about this small problems.
I have been thinking that some major change has to be made to pagerank and linking out, there was a time when I reflected my opinon on websites with a link, until I found out that linking out leaks pagerank, since that day I really think hard before linking out, this means we are not seeing true opinions being reflected in links. If we could link without fear of losing rank, we would link out more often and the ratio of good links to spam links would be better. I understand there are pros and cons, but as more and more average website owners learn not to link out, the true opinions of website owners is diminishing and that of cheap spam links is gaining
I think that are studies that say that linking out well helps rankings... I'm quite sure Rand tweet a post yesterday about this; please Rand could you remind me (us) which post was?
Yes matt cuts said in a video that to link out to a few high authority sites is good, but he did not elaborate, how authoritive do they need to be, he worded it in a way, that left me wondering if it was positive enough to equal the page rank you lose
Yes, he talked about it, but I was referring to this article posted on Nature.com
I had to digg into Rand timeline in Twitter to find it (I know Rand is way too much occupied in San Francisco these days to answer to my request here).
Interesting article, and I think deep down I already had this concept in my mind, but will I link out trusting that the same holds true to websites, I don’t know. Let me also say I do link out, but do so sparingly, I also link first to a page on my site that has a link to very other page in my site as well as external links so that the amount of link juice going to any one link is minimal, not the prettiest answer to the problem. I understand that if there was no penalty for linking out it would be abused by spammers, but let’s say the penalty was very mild, say 1/10 of the page rank lost, but still pass the usual amount of rank to the linked to page, I would then link out freely but spammers would still have a problem creating thousands of links. We would then have a network of links that would be more meaningful. I rather doubt my post is going to rock the world of search engines and maybe I’m missing something, but it seems a good proposition to me.
Ah yeah but some niche verticals appear to have no join but to join in... i don't think all the results for "seo software" are spammy, there are lots more more related terms that are bulk on landing pages with email capture forms...
I think google has realized the unintentional effects of their penalization system, and are working on the most effective ways on implementing the user intentional model into the algo.
Great post. I've seen a huge improvement in our industry with regards to paid links. The page 1 results made a huge shift just after SMX Advanced when Matt Cutts said they have better software to tackle paid links. Ironically, the players that had tons of paid links dropped considerably.
However, the spammy off-topic forum links and profile links I don't think they have a handle on and so that's what I see is working now.
I'd think for some keywords there is not enough pages that are obtaining ANY links so the search engines are pretty much forced to rank the ones that do, even though the large amount of them are spammy. In our world, we get linkbuilding. But I still think it's still a complete mystery to a huge part of website owners still.
Very good post Rand, glad you shed some light on the topic. I've been seeing the same thing happen on Google.no (Norway). The SERPs for the generic keywords in many of the highly competitive industries, are often throned with "crappy" websites with poor content, supported by low quality inbound links. It's frustrating to be beaten by people doing shady SEO, and even more so when the sites that've been reported to Google months ago are still ranking just as well.
Nobody likes spam but as an SEO you just have to go with the flow and change with the industry.
It's about finding smarter ways of combating spam and competitors and I'm sure google will come through in the end.
Rand, great post and it validates a lot of what I've been thinking for some time now.
Question though...why did you make a promise to Aaron not to "out" any sites? That's pretty much all he's been using his blog for lately, outing people! Anyone read his posts about Mahalo? I wonder if, in his opinion, only he should be outing folks for spam? Why place you under a restriction while he does it freely himself? Just sayin....it don't add up!
I recently asked Aaron about this in the form of a comment his blog and his reply was, as usual, thoughtful and well-reasoned.
Both Rand and Aaron love the internet and fight for it in their own way. They both use their blogs as a platform for change to make search better. Yes, they disagree strongly on this one point, but their limitless contributions have more in common than most realize.
I really liked Google back when it first started, I even remember who told me about it, (good old fashioned word of mouth) it's still my homepage on my browser after nearly a decade, while I am onto my third different browser ... I don't think google are getting worse, but they are standing still. You see this in Formula 1 racing all the time, a team gives up on developing the current car in order to work on developing next years car which will operate under new rules and regulations ...we just have to wait and see what google unviels.
The problem that Google is facing is that it is now easier than ever to engage in greyhat (possibly moving into blackhat) methods than ever before..
tools that generate 400 profile links in about 6 hours, tools that we build 24 blogs then post unique content to those blogs in minutes..
tools that automate social bookmarking, tools that automate comment spam, tools that automatically submit 100s of spun articles...
If you are an SEO and you work for a few hundred dollars a month, for a client with a crappy website, with crappy content in a competitive sector, then all your left with is building crappy links.
If it didnt work, no one would do it, but alas its still achieving position 1 ranks.
Great post, Rand.
I think it's funny how a lousy site built on black hat tactics that doesn't deserve to rank and has poor user experience is obvious to a moderately or non-trained human, but evidently often invisible to anti-spam software.
Ergo, couldn't Google train a few hundred people to double-check results, starting with the most frequent search queries?
That would be just to weed out the worst of it. Okay, sure, they'll never get to really low volume searches, but what improvement fixes everything?
I understand the billions of pages thing. This would just be to improve what they're doing via data alone... not a replacement.
Figure, largest searches, multiplied by 300 anti-spam folks multiplied by maybe 100 searches per day per person and Google would quickly improve the results.
So, not adding more humans to the process is really just a profit margin question. Isn't that unusual... a U.S. company cheaping-out it's product?
It's like the difference between a handmade thing and a mass-made thing. More often than not the handmade thing is of higher quality.
Google already has tons of people doing manual results checking - but it's just not scalable. There are hundreds of billions of searches on Google every month. And if the old stat of 25% of those searches being completely unique, then that leaves a simply impossible number to manually sort through.
I don't think it's a profit margin issue. I think it's a question of realism.
Well, then they see the value, but aren't applying enough to it.
The 25% unique thing doesnt come into their manual checking.
Its the hig volume results that should be manually checked and they should know those very well
Your making the assumption though that once they check those high volume searches it will be fixed. There will always be someone else knocking on those keywords and what happens if I send all the top 10 results spammy links in order to get them black listed? Is that fair on the site if they didn't create the links?
Fellows,
I'm just pointing out that their software often misses what is obvious to a person. Just as a consumer, I'm tired of clicking on results to find that it's a page full of adsense. Never mind professional frustration.
If they have a tool in their box that can tell which result is low quality, i.e. people, and they already use this tool, maybe they should just use it more.
The "not scalable" argument ignores how much better they could make the top million searches. I'm not talking about the low quantity searches.
I would also add that "not scalable" sounds just awful, until you compare it to the cost of giving back bad results via scalable but increasingly faulty software.
Finally, you guys should appreciate any suggestion that rewards good content. The current choice by professional seos, at least as voiced here, often seems to be either cheat or lose.
Here is Matt Cutts saying `negative SEO` is an extremely hard thing to accomplish:
https://www.forbes.com/2007/06/28/negative-search-google-tech-ebiz-cx_ag_0628seo.html
How can an algorithm punishing spam links I bought for my site and it does not punish spam links put out by my competition. Can an algorithm do that? I don't buy it.
Maybe the thing is negative SEO is on the rise so Google webspam team needed to reduce the penalty effects of spam to balance things out.
I'm totally agree with you, Rand. We need to defend our profession and the importance to believe in the results that we get from a given search on the search engines. If not, we'll have to find another way to surf the web..
One of my client's competitors also recently lost top ranking positions, when doing an analysis of the inbound links the competitor received there was one decent link with brand name anchor text, then several clearly paid or spam links with targeted anchor text... the sites the links came from were websites I had skipped over as they were clearly spam directories and PR0 low authority websites that advertise that their links are cheap o_0... Oof.
I see 2 major scenarios to reduce Google spam:
1st scenario: Google should reduce a little the importance of backlinks and rise a bit the importance of another known factor.
2nd scenario: Google prepares a brand new factor to be taken into consideration when evaluate the relevance of the information and implicitly listings.
I work in Social Media, and have used internet monitoring tools like Radian6 to monitor conversations, and the amount of spam that gets picked up due to Google's indexing of the crap is ridiculous!
Additionally on my own site, pnwbemani.net, I had been trying to get a pagerank (using only legit seo methods) for over 2 years, but was stuck at PR 0, while I would see horrible spam/link-building sites with pageranks of 2 or 3! My site was penalized for who knows what (I was still getting indexed properly, just no PR) while the spam sites ran free. Google's quality for *everything* has gone WAY down the past couple years, and my dislike for the giant keeps growing. Jon - @BLueSS
Good topic to read about also..I think Google,Yahoo & Bing should be strict with drop domain link building policies.Now a days some of the companies are making money and cheating clients like anything. Now the question arises why I am saying this because, most of the link firms buying the fake domains which has pr1 to pr2 range of to pr4 and pr5 , they simply buy it make it new thematic website without caring what is its past theme. So this is ridicules this days they are only concentrating on making money by selling links from this crappy website which we used called "drop domain links". According to me Google, Yahoo, and Bing should be strict about that fact that peopls are cheated with this crappy link building policies, which is not stable, ethical as well. How this process is recycling: Suppose you have a website which represents health related services of your(as you are on this field) now after some time you are not interested to carry your website any more and you sell it on the auction, then the main movie started, most of link building companies going for pr ranking domain auction, randomly they buys yours as you got a good page rank, then they will buy the domain and turn it according to there need in like then can make it even porn if they need to sell links from there, then put free template and start link building from the home page it self, after massive link building when your domain lost its page rank then they left it. Start looking for new domains, so that way they are doing there business, if Google, Yahoo, Bing changes its algorithm to track down to this kind cheating link building services, they some common people will get some relief and they wont be cheated by this ugly manner.
The problem is that Google is obviously putting a lot of importance on links. Everyone knows that links are the most important part of SEO. Since it is much easier to get some links (especially if you have a budget) than create a great content, spammer will always abuse it. Let's face it, number of links is sort of bullshit way to measure how "good the website is". What you really measure how good is your SEO efforts. Sometimes I would not even pretend that top 10 websites are most relevant but they are the most optimized. Do you think "normal" people links to a website? I am more talking about business websites. Does a person who just been at hairdresser thinks:"Gee that haircut was good, let me link to the their website!" May be social graph is the answer. But how long it will take to spam social world?
I think that having links to website as a major indicator of website popularity and relevance is quite stupid. But since it is what Google wants everyone will have use it as technique. For spammer it is much easier to use dodgy techniques rather than "proper" marketing. Don't forget about the pressure there is to be on the top, can't blame companies to use grey hat.
I must say I am 100% for white hat because I believe it long run it will always be better.
Here is why I think links is sort of bad indicator. What should Google really need to know? How much people like the website and business.
What Google gets (sometimes) instead? How much effort company put into the SEO.
Do normal people link to websites? I mean people who are actually buying product and visiting websites. How many of them have a blog or digg or something what let people link to websites? Does a person who use a service let's say bank think I have to link to those guys?
I think that majority links are created by SEO and bloggers. Nothing wrong with that but if you want to measure popularity and relevancy of website that might not be the best.
Who knows one day Google will be gone and we will have better search... Or no search...
May be social graph is a way to go. One of my websites is getting more visitors from Facebook than from Google.
There's always PPC! ;-) And it appears with the changes Google has made to SERPs page layout lately, that's what Google wants:
-sponsored image links (still in beta I think)
-Plus box
-prominent placement and highlighting of sponsored ads
-"is rated" star system
-big Google Checkout button
I've probably missed a few. And now you can even pay to make your Google Places ad stand out with Tags!
hi,
my first comment here and I'm relatively new.
As per the post - I noticed this right when I started (not so long ago)
For me SEO, rankings, SMM etc - is all fundamentally manipulative whether it's a white or black hat. Similar to the 'rights of ecnomy' which were made to be a 'science' but has nothing to do with the science, the 'rights of internet' are totally arbitrary and conventional thus manipulative. The question is what works at any given day. Somebody building a long term business, have to be careful, and - as you mentioned - rather use what is called 'white hat'. But at the same time, when he'll see his business going to the 'black hat' competitor buying links from god knows who, he'll have no choice but to turn into illegal practice.
If I were some affliate, or simply someone with a single and simple in terms of promotion product, like 'learn to play guitar' crap, I wouldn't think twice and go farming right away. Build an army of little smart Chineeseguys making thousands of spamm, crappy links, etc (I have on my blogs sometimes they come in bundles - cheap viagra crap etc). Because to make any money I have to be on the first page of google.
For me internet and laws of it, are alltogether a fictional world, arbitrarily ruled by a giant company, something totally manipulative and not of the real world. The rules of it can change at any given day.
I don't know if you noticed, but this way - I mean giving a boots to the crappy spammers - google is actually lessening the "turnover of the web". It's simple logic - crappy site's conversion rates are usually much lower than the 'proper' ones, build more 'natually' and 'white hat'. For example in my niche 1-2 of the top sites in the first 10 of google arenot only crappy because of the use of crappy techniques, but are outright and boldly crappy and their conversion rate is probably around 0.1% if an, whereas good sites, with nice products, good descriptions, run by legitimate people, are buried in the 2+ site of google. If it will continue, they'll have to: a/ start farming and doing all the crappy things b/go bankrupt
It's exactly the same situation as in every market in the world - the worst product is forcing out the best. If that's the case everywhere else - with just a few exeptions - than why it shouldn't on the web?
Rand, I like the post and what you said about the internet and its billions of pages being too much for Google. You may be interested in the company I'm working for; FindTheBest.com. We remove the clutter from the internet and give users unbiased facts, thus allowing them to make more informed decisions. FindTheBest is like you said "a new way of getting information on the web."
I think its a tough job like the article mentions when the spam goes from 10's of billions of pages to 100's of billions, all spam problems become exponential for Google, I think you have to look at it long term and it is still hard to take when a company buys in lots of links, unfortunately these are some businesses ethics. LT
While I am trying to come on first page with a keyword from 1st rank on second page with every white hat technique since last one and a half month, I have seen other sites moving ahead with the techinques you mentioned. Some are on top since last many years.
If it takes too long to penalise don't you think everyone will follow same root and after penalising Google will show
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