Google's takes ACTION with SEO and SPAM... BEWARE

[designerjack]

According to Google's January 21st update posted on GoogleBlog, quotes

Google absolutely takes action on sites that violate our quality guidelines regardless of whether they have ads powered by Google;

Posted by Matt Cutts.

Guess those days are over where you can easily rank onto Google with a simple xrumer spam or automated backlinks building, or blog commenting using scrapebox, or even submitting thousands of spun content for search results.

This was never a long-term method... And long-term SEO is important when working with search engines and relevant content (in my opinion)

Google has been onto something and 2010 was their big year of improving search spam. The reason for this article is to give you the updates on what's happening in SEO and how to avoid being marked as SPAM.

Earlier today, someone posted search strings and keywords that you type in Google to find .GOV sites to place your links onto them for the obvious reasons... Well, The truth is... you better be careful because Google isn't playing around with fire. Especially when it means spam going into .GOV Sites.

Here is more about Google's latest action. Google's Plan to Combat Search Spam

[smwordsmith]

Thanks for the head's up. With Google, it is all quality.

Instead of trying to stay one step ahead of Google, I would rather work with Google and add only quality to the Internet.

And, I sleep better when I do!

[thebitbotdotcom]

Here is my favorite excerpt from the article:

"At the same time, Google is adding a new measure to combat “content farms.” These controversial organizations, ... utilize cheap, contracted labor to write articles of questionable quality. Cutts says that Google has implemented two algorithmic changes to stop these low-quality sites from rising to the top."

So much for cheap articles...may they RIP...

[Fernando Veloso]

You guys really believe something is going to change?

[thebarksmeow]

Originally Posted by Fernando Veloso

You guys really believe something is going to change?

I was going to say the same thing. Unless a google employee "manually" reviews every site they think is spam, they can forget it. This is just like the war on drugs and piracy. Sure they'll crack the whip a little more but it's not going to stop.

[moralde]

"Google’s new classifier is designed to detect spam on individual web pages by identifying spammy words and phrases".

What are these spammy words and phrases? For all we know, we might all be using some of those in our content even without meaning to be spammy. ):

[rankinghero]

Oh god... when are we going to understand Matt Cutts job is to the spokeman of Google...
do you think that Google will say

"hey guys, we just noticed that we can't really detect paid links, specially as blogroll... so more or less we are scr*w so please don't push the algorithm"

Let me guess... what's next? Ah yes... content is King yes?

It’s SEO Ethical? Wel…. good question my little Grasshopper | SEO consultant

[cagliostro]

Yeah, sure.

Google is all about quailty. You can judge this by viewing the "quality" of the adsense ads appearing in my websites. Work from Home, MLM, Loans etc etc.

very high quality i must say ...

hahahahaha

[thebitbotdotcom]

Originally Posted by thebarksmeow

I was going to say the same thing. Unless a google employee "manually" reviews every site they think is spam, they can forget it. This is just like the war on drugs and piracy. Sure they'll crack the whip a little more but it's not going to stop.

They won't have to. If you have the GA tracker script sitting in your footer, which most of us do, then we are already handing them that information on a silver platter.

[thebarksmeow]

Originally Posted by thebitbotdotcom

They won't have to. If you have the GA tracker script sitting in your footer, which most of us do, then we are already handing them that information on a silver platter.

And what information are we sending them exactly? That this site is an autoblog? "Hello Google, Welcome to my spammy autoblog" in the title. People get scared for no reason. They said they were cracking down on blog comment spam almost 3 years ago. Guess what? It still works. I could care less what they "say". I personally have to witness the change and then adjust.

[faceblogger]

This is not the first time they are telling this But seems they are bit serious this time

[gittar1122]

If Google has a team of thousand programmers trying to improve search engine quality then there are hundreds of thousand programmers trying to dominate google in their own way. The difference is Google employees have a lot of tasks to be completed while other force is only working for dominate...dominate..dominate...

I am not saying that Google's efforts for quality improvement are useless, no, such steps bringing quality to search engines. But Google has to face tough competition in this regard.

I am not supporting spammers and I will definitely appraise Google's efforts for Spam removal.

Thanks

[KristofferIM]

Yeah, people are going a bit to far with the spamming. Just a few weeks ago I saw a big list of auto approved blog posts. The funny thing is, it was on the FTC's blog among others...

[sylarrr]

Originally Posted by smwordsmith

Thanks for the head's up. With Google, it is all quality.

Instead of trying to stay one step ahead of Google, I would rather work with Google and add only quality to the Internet.

And, I sleep better when I do!

I agree with you 100%! In long term, adding quality data is more successful.

[Fernando Veloso]

Right.

Google is going to stop all nasty content and spammy autoblogs.

Cool. I love the idea.

BUT didn't they said a couple years ago they would remove all the spam/bluefart/paidlinks from their index?

I guess they should solve that one first BEFORE promising more lies.

But hey, thats just me, tired of working my ass off just to see my competition buying links and rankings above me!!!

[TZ]

Oooooohh. I'm afraid....very afraid.

[scott g]

To respond to that challenge, we recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly.” Google’s new classifier is designed to detect spam on individual web pages by identifying spammy words and phrases.

Uh Oh! Time to stop keyword stuffing and time to start writing actual "stuff!"

If you've got a keyword density of 20%+ for a 2- or 3-word phrase on your site... A 2nd grader could determine that site to be SPAM! And 2nd graders don't like SPAM! Lol!

Good post!

CHEERS!

[yukon]

Originally Posted by Fernando Veloso

You guys really believe something is going to change?

Just another day in IM, not a biggie...

[dotcomken]

I don't think I have ever seen in a respectful seo strategy to use XRumor. people who tend to pay for it or contract services for it are usually people who are looking for a quick dollar. They even tend to do more then xrumor, buy email lists, cloaking, fraudulent sites trying to get people to login with their worldofwarcraft/twitter/other paid service account info, and flood the world in any possibly way with bull****.

bottom line: you play with bull**** in the end you will just have smelly hands.

also, if google says pay no attention to Pagerank you really should listen. I've asked 3 Google software engineers in the past 5 years on different occasions and they all have said it is nothing to be worried about. I take that as this. Its not accounting for the 1500 algorithmic touch points in the indexing formula. So if PR has any weight its very very very low.

[xxxJamesxxx]

Personally I wouldn't worry about it.

Just dish out good content and get backlinks from a whole range of sources and you're golden.

James

[designerjack]

Originally Posted by xxxJamesxxx

Personally I wouldn't worry about it.

Just dish out good content and get backlinks from a whole range of sources and you're golden.

James

Yes, nothing to worry about for most people as they aren't a target for those sort of spam.

Just like you said, Good Content + Good source of backlinks..

[terryd]

Originally Posted by designerjack

Yes, nothing to worry about for most people as they aren't a target for those sort of spam.

Just like you said, Good Content + Good source of backlinks..

Yeah that will sort the crap sites out......hope I mistakenly don't scrapebox or Xrummer your sites by mistake cause that would be bad for you ....... apparently.....

[cma01]

"At the same time, Google is adding a new measure to combat “content farms.” These controversial organizations, ... utilize cheap, contracted labor to write articles of questionable quality.

So they are going after eHow and everything in the Demand Studios network?

[designerjack]

Originally Posted by cma01

So they are going after eHow and everything in the Demand Studios network?

That's a great question. I believe the website who allows publishing of content show need to review the writers and the content posted.

I think eHow has a good staff that mods out the spam stuff. I don't know too much about demand Studios.

Could you simply touch on why you think those two sites might be affected ?

[iAmNameLess]

I don't think this would effect me much anyway. I doubt this is really going to change all that much. Even if it does, there will always be new strategies.

[attorneydavid]

This sounds to me more like an onpage filter thing. Need to make sure your site is original. The links coming from these sites should still count. 99% of links now are either spam, a side product of a commercial relationship, or at least non-spontaneous.

The gold standard is bounce rate and if a consumer reperforms the same search. Google could pay 10k people 1k a year to monitor their surfing but they aren't going to do that in all likelihood.

Until that all the "linkbuilding" we do is a proxy for an owners investment in a site and as good a rank criteria as any.

[Zeb]

That's what google said last year...and the previous year...and the previous year....and the............

[jimbojack]

Originally Posted by Zeb

That's what google said last year...and the previous year...and the previous year....and the............

Yeah it starts to become a myth...

[cma01]

I think eHow has a good staff that mods out the spam stuff. I don't know too much about demand Studios.

Could you simply touch on why you think those two sites might be affected ?

Actually my comment was meant to be sarcastic, but Demand Studios creates the content for eHow, as well as a number of other sites. I don't remember them all but Livestrong is one of them.

Their articles are all about writing to keywords. They are the dictionary definition of a web "content farm."

[JackPowers]

Watch what Google does and not what they say.

[Dan B Rusu]

This is very interesting. The question comes down to how can google know who builds the spammy backlinks? Can I build these for my competitors and get them sandboxed? That would be an extremely dangerous thing for google to do.

I think Jack's right, we just got to watch what google does.

[designerjack]

The latest word is about the 'spam' refers to the content on web pages and hacked sites.
Not so much pointing to link building or backlinks. You're okay there.

For Example, today, I was searching to find out about medication on Google.
I was on Google for a new game made by EA Sports for my son.

Looks like some of their pages showed up on Google pointing to Prescription Drug Stores
And it didn't look right.. nor like an ad or adsense ad. You can tell it was spam.

[Kysersoze]

A little late but just read this thread. Very interesting, it definitely shouldn't have much to do with backlinks, no one needs to over react about this.

If they were gonna stop or check massive low quality backlinks and actually penalize sites for it the next step webmasters would take is to purchase thousands of low quality backlinks to competitor sites and ruin them.

Google can do anything they want as they are the BIG BOYS on the block but I'm sure they also don't want to just randomly allow their system to punish sites which can be manipulated by competitors.