If you have a paid link on your blog Google will throw you out of their results.
If you have any links hidden on your blog the same happens.
If your site has been compromised and links inserted the same happens again.
If you are seen as harming Google they punish you. That’s fair enough because it’s their business but what it should be doing is looking after people whose work is being stolen. And it’s not just stolen it enriches the thief and also Google. Is there therefore an incentive to do what I’m going to describe? probably not…
The point here is that Google can tell a lot about your site.
Like many bloggers I can spot a splog in less than 10 seconds. The common features:
- Every entry has “wrote an interesting post” “read the rest of the post here” “..talked today about”
- Most entries are uncategorised
- There is an absence of comments
- The theme is one from a selected range no doubt sold for the “SEO friendliness”
- The posting frequency will be high and fairly regular
- There is no easily obtained webhost information (so no ToS, AUP, DMCA addresses)
- ads. And more often than not contextual ones which means Adsense.
- there are more clues but scoring more than half the above means you are looking at content theft.
Now if I can join those dots why can’t Google? Why can’t the other search engines? After all if the big advertisers don’t care about content theft why should the other guys? Why is it not possible to suspend those accounts that meet most of the above? Why can’t you grab the publisher id and suspend automatically? Why can’t the above raise some flags and a single abuse complaint ensure it is seen faster? I really do find it amazing that a company which can bring us so much good cannot add up what a splog looks like without being told.
And the bonus is that your blog search would be cleaned up - which pleases everyone.
Matt Cutts wants an idea of something to do - there you go.
6 Comments
Hey, I appreciate the feedback. We do work quite a bit with the Blogger and Blogsearch team to reduce the amount of splogs that would show up, and we’ve worked to reduce the amount of AdSense spam to not only kick spammers out of our index but out of AdSense as well.
I’d love to hear more about where you run across splogs these days: surfing, searching on blogsearch, doing link: searches on blogsearch, searching on the main Google index, etc. Any examples are welcome, and feel free to email me any time you see splogs and that will be a good independent sample–I’d be happy to hear any time you notice junk like this.
You are onto something here Mark. The bottom line is that G and Co profit from content theft.
[I work for Google, but this shouldn't be taken as representative of the company's position.]
I disagree with Root’s comment above; Google would not benefit strategically from systematically encouraging junk or spam in the index - it would be ultimately damaging to people’s trust in the brand as providing the best possible results. Google is known for providing high quality search results and, in a very “unsticky” market like search, the only way Google can stay ahead is by maintaining this reputation. Relaxing antispam efforts would be a sure path to destruction, and I am absolutely certain that the quality team are aware of this.
Colm - my point is that I can spot a splog in seconds. Google should be able to code their engines to not just recognise it but also do the other stuff I mentioned.
Root’s point is that right now there is adsense on blogs which are stealing content. These are the splogs I can see. Now if on such a splog someone clicks an adsense ad then Google does indeed profit - that’s how adsense works. Intention aside this is a fact.
I wrote the above because I’m tired of telling people to click the ‘Ads by Gooooogle’ and then report abuse. Google has the technology to do this. Google has the ability to send out a clear message that not only does it want to prevent adsense being used this way but that it does care about content theft and that it does want to improve it’s own content. How any times do we hear that dupe content is penalised?
I think Google should not only do more but be seen to be doing more - and in the end everyone actually benefits.
Let’s take adsense out of the equation. Let’s de-personalise it from Google.
These blogs steal from people and they pollute your results. Being in search engines to attract traffic to get the clicks is their entire reason for being.
Throw them out of your index. You do that and your competition will do the same. Win-win.
You can do this.
I am not in any kind of Anti Google rant. They are certainly commercially driven to provide a satisfying end user experience by delivering good search results. Oddly enough I have recently been contemplating how different companies behave when all their users could leave overnight. As opposed to the lock in you get with certain OS vendors.
But the adsense revenue must be causing a very uncomfortable conflict of interest for them.
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[...] a very good summary of how Google can put an end to one the biggest blights on the web: splogs. In A big free clue for Google, he points out: Like many bloggers I can spot a splog in less than 10 seconds. The common features: [...]
[...] a very good summary of how Google can put an end to one the biggest blights on the web: splogs. In A big free clue for Google, he points out: Like many bloggers I can spot a splog in less than 10 seconds. The common features: [...]
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