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Google? Spam? Ads? No... No Conflict of Interest Here...

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Renegade:
Ahem...

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/google-search-and-search-engine-spam.html

January brought a spate of stories about Google’s search quality. Reading through some of these recent articles, you might ask whether our search quality has gotten worse. The short answer is that according to the evaluation metrics that we’ve refined over more than a decade, Google’s search quality is better than it has ever been in terms of relevance, freshness and comprehensiveness. Today, English-language spam in Google’s results is less than half what it was five years ago, and spam in most other languages is even lower than in English. However, we have seen a slight uptick of spam in recent months, and while we’ve already made progress, we have new efforts underway to continue to improve our search quality.

,,,

One misconception that we’ve seen in the last few weeks is the idea that Google doesn’t take as strong action on spammy content in our index if those sites are serving Google ads. To be crystal clear:

    * Google absolutely takes action on sites that violate our quality guidelines regardless of whether they have ads powered by Google;
    * Displaying Google ads does not help a site’s rankings in Google; and
    * Buying Google ads does not increase a site’s rankings in Google’s search results.

These principles have always applied, but it’s important to affirm they still hold true.
--- End quote ---

WHAT? Ahem... B^!!$#!+~!

I cannot count the spam I get from Google. They regularly rank sites in the top 10 that are nothing more than ripping content from other sites. This is particularly bad for tech topics in programming where there are TONS of sites that do exactly that.

They all serve Google Ads as well. What is anyone supposed to think?

If they are being genuine, they're not doing what they say they do very well then. Spam is worse than ever.

But it's not "low-quality" content. It's STOLEN content. To me, that seems like spam.

Deozaan:
But it's not "low-quality" content. It's STOLEN content. To me, that seems like spam.-Renegade (January 22, 2011, 05:36 AM)
--- End quote ---

I disagree. If I understand your description of these sites that rip content from other sites, the content is still relevant to your search terms. You just don't like (and I agree with you!) that these thieves are getting ad revenue instead of you being linked to the original source.

It's not spam, it's plagiarism. Or copyright violation or something. But not spam.

Renegade:
But it's not "low-quality" content. It's STOLEN content. To me, that seems like spam.-Renegade (January 22, 2011, 05:36 AM)
--- End quote ---

I disagree. If I understand your description of these sites that rip content from other sites, the content is still relevant to your search terms. You just don't like (and I agree with you!) that these thieves are getting ad revenue instead of you being linked to the original source.

It's not spam, it's plagiarism. Or copyright violation or something. But not spam.
-Deozaan (January 22, 2011, 05:44 AM)
--- End quote ---

You're right. It's not "spam". I meant "spam" in the derogatory sense.

But still, in a way it is. It's simply meant to get rankings for ad revenue. They're just not using "crap" content. They're using good content to get the rankings.

Dunno... Email spam as BCE is pretty clear. What search engine spam is doesn't fit that model.

Bamse:
And we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content.
--- End quote ---

Not like they don't know or are stupid ;) Be happy they make these posts so you have something to hold against them should they fail.

Why not report those sites? https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en&pli=1

Carol Haynes:
One of the things I need to find is technical info on various laptops.

Try find a manual or upgrade information for a Dell or Toshiba laptop (or any other laptop manufacturer).

I chose those two because they both publish information about their computers beyond the usual user manual (including service manuals).

The results of any search you make in Google ALWAYS come up with the same websites trying to sell freely available stolen information - and often they don't actually have the information you need on the page you are looking at - it is just spam filler to get a result from the search engine.

Conspicuous by their absence are the manufacturer's websites.

Why is that google NEVER EVER points you at a manufacturer's web site in the top ten results even when you put that manufacturer's name as the first search item - and doesn't even do a particuarly good job when you use site:.... to sepcify the site to search manually.

I think advertising and incompetence are rapidly making google's results unusable.

One simple innovation would be to have a thumbs up and a thumbs down link in the search results page for each link so that rubbish can easily be reported*. Bad sites could quickly be identified - and maybe they could then ban those people from the Google Ads system too - oh but that would affect the bottom line so there is no chance of that happening!

* Yes I know this could be abused but there could be safeguards introduced.

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