Categories / Miscellaneous / Thoughts and reflections

Contradictions in Googles policy for search and the content displayed

Am I the only one who gets sick and tired of websites in Googles search results which only purpose is to generate traffic and revenue from ads?

If you try to take just a little bit of responsibility over what is displayed when people search for your name or brand in Google or any other search engine, it can be quite irritating to experience the sites mentioned above.

I was of that impression that especially Google would fight for clean search results. Over time many articles have been published about Googles effort to filter out black hat SEO sites, doorway sites/pages etc. But the fact is that they don’t. Or they do not fight hard enough.

When searching for my own name or the name of this site I get some page results from the site at the top of Google search page, but right after these results, I get a long list of links to sites whose only purpose is to show adverts. These sites are dynamically in the way they are built and the way they display content – they simply have algorithms which harvest the web and displays standard information about a given website mixed with a lot of adverts – yes you guessed it, from Google Adsence.

The information they provide are in many cases useless to most people. Who cares about keyword density on my website? Or what pagerank it has or the name of the name servers the domain is associated with?
The way they rank high on the keywords for my site (my name or brand) is to use the keywords of my site. Pretty clever!
I recon that some of these informations can be useful, but if you need it you will find it and know where to look.

Do Google care?

If you take a look at the Google Webmaster Guidelines listed here http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769#1 it is quite obvious that the above mentioned sites DO actually violate several of the guidelines which is required to take to get your site properly indexed in Googles search engine.

A couple of the most obvious of these guidelines are:

Keyword stuffing
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66358
"Keyword stuffing" refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords or numbers in an attempt to manipulate a site's ranking in Google search results".
The term is often used in conjunction with filling your pages with the same keyword over and over to make it rank higher in searches for that particular keyword, but you can also "stuff" your page with keywords with no relevance to your site to make that particular page rank high in searches for that particular keyword to attract more visitors to that page to - yes you guessed it; to show more ads.

Scraped content
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2721312
"Some webmasters use content taken (“scraped”) from other, more reputable sites on the assumption that increasing the volume of pages on their site is a good long-term strategy regardless of the relevance or uniqueness of that content. Purely scraped content, even from high-quality sources, may not provide any added value to your users without additional useful services or content provided by your site".
Some of the sites mentioned "scrape" their content from other sources, others do "scrape it" from the sites they try to compete with (your site, yes), but the concepts are equal.
If a site crawls this site and scrabe all the keywords, list them on a particular page containing info about my site (and sometimes not even link to my site), that particular page will maybee rank higher than my own site, or maybee it will come right after in search. No matter what, the site owner will generate a lot more trafic from the kaywords "stolen" from my site and will again generate more ad views/clicks.

Automatically generated content
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2721306
"Automatically generated—or “auto-generated”—content is content that’s been generated programmatically. Often this will consist of paragraphs of random text that makes no sense to the reader but which may contain search keywords".
Don't try to tell me that these kind of sites are made manually and page by page ;)

It would be bringing it too far to actually link to those sites from this article. First of all I would be beneficial for the sites in terms of building them even stronger in search results and boosting their pagerank. Secondly I don’t believe they should get any attention at all except of just mentioning their existence.

I know I should propably don’t care about this but its annoying that something so useless as these sites really are, can get this much credit from Google, who in my opinion should fight hard to ban them as they bring absolutely nothing to search at all.

The only thing they do is to filter out relevant pages of information and generating revenue to the site owners, and of course, to Google.

03-12-2012 by Thomas Møller Nexø
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