Google's latest webspam crusade 'breaks' search results Google's latest search engine algorithm update – dubbed Penguin – is proving to be something of a dud, according to website owners not happy with the latest tweak. The Chocolate Factory debuted its latest search engine optimisation (SEO) change last week, at which point its engineer Matt Cutts penned a blog post explaining the …
Isn't that what mainsleaze always says?
If spammers are getting upset that Google no longer gives them an easy way to spam the rest of us, well ... good.
OTOH, Google's SERPs have been getting worse for ages. And they keep changing the way they do their results redirects. The bastards
Vic.
I never did understand those sites... whether they just list the phone numbers because they're sad or whether it's all some secret code made of phone numbers that some secret agent will understand when they visit the pages 50 years from now...
They are annoying when you just want to look up who called you, but I have found a few websites where you can do that and now go straight to them rather than Google.
Anonymous in case I'm right about the secret code thing...
I know someone who almost by chance managed to game the search engines for adult site referrals. In his own words, he's 'worked' a total of around 16 hours over the last 6 years, simply collecting the aff. cheques from the mail and handing his bank statements to his accountant. He has an above average house with plenty of toys, owned some very expensive cars and spends a fair proportion of the year watching TV and going away on holiday. His only real skills are writing HTML to a level that was fairly average even 10 years ago.
I'm not envious of his lifestyle - he got lucky. But I find it hard to have a shred of respect for the fact provided with this golden opportunity of money for (next to) nothing he has done nothing to further his own skills or operation.
Changes in Google ranking factors since the previous update are seemingly giving him new cause for concern and a reduced income. If this latest Google update is another slap in the face for these so called 'internet entrepreneurs' then I'm all for it.
When you search for, "michelle knight" then you instead get a page showing the results for "michele knight" (single l) with a clickable entry below asking if you really wanted to search for "michelle knight".
You can draw your own conclusions from this, but as you can probably tell, I'm not very happy with this behaviour. In fact, my old BT page (which I haven't been able to access for more than a decade and has been stale for all this time) is rated above my regular sites which are much, much newer. So I don't know what Google is playing at, but early indications are that they've really cocked something up somewhere.
They're new catch phrase should be, "Do no evil, unless someone has paid us money to do otherwise."
This post has been deleted by its author
Michelle K wrote:
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When you search for, "michelle knight" then you instead get a page showing the results for "michele knight" (single l) with a clickable entry below asking if you really wanted to search for "michelle knight".
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They've been doing the same to me for quite a while. It's quite infuriating to be told you don't know how to spell your own name.
I assume someone is paying them to do that.
I think that one may be a difference between the US and the USA. Do you see a difference between google.com and google.co.uk?
But it does look as though a checking system is over zealous. That does seem an obvious case where Google should give results for the search term as entered, while giving the option for the alternatives. I know the typing errors I make.
I've got two damn good websites that have been online for over ten years, hundreds of pages, and authoritative. I used to be in the Top Five results for my targeted keywords. Hell, one is/was the top website in a $15Billion semiconductor segment.
Now, I am on Page 2. Everyone before me is a large corporation. No one before me has less than $2Billion in sales/year! Some pages before me rank for no reason that I can see.
My last AdSense payout for the authoritative website is the lowest in six years, and half what it used to be.
Google is crapping on the little guy.
You're right, I'd expect that too, but in fact Microsoft are listed in 6th place on Google.co.uk. Below such office software giants as "Money Saving Expert", Wikipedia, and "Software For Students".
I know a lot of spammers are complaining, there are some legitimately terrible results out there on Google at the moment.
A drupal run blog I am involved with was suffering from 5+ hours of load per day from Google spiders. After much poking about it was discovered the spider was wandering on and going round and round in circles munching bandwidth and CPU and never leaving! Luckily the connection isn't metered or there really would have been problems.
As it is it has just been bogging the site down.
Brutal application of robots.txt excludes has brought it down to a far more manageable 15 minutes a day.
I'm not surprised SEO "experts" are upset by this. I'm sure there are some innocent mistakes but it may be a sign your cotent is a bit shit.. the problem is it's far too easy to knock up a spam site. Bigger names that are proven are easy to guarantee safe but it is probably quite hard once you get down to the smaller sites especially if they're relying on a lot ads for revenue
Google ranking has dropped a couple of places in my own user ranking.
If I dont find it on duckduckgo.com or yahoo then google might get a go but its no longer my first choice of search engine.
Google used to be good when real page content outnumbered junk pages.
You could search, spot new keywords and use them to refine the next search usually finding what you wanted while watching the number of page hits dwindle to show how close to either hit or miss you were.
Now google seems too scared to say "I dont know" and returns a load of crap just to try and convince you it knows everything and really has looked everywhere.
When was the last time google didnt have enough hits to fill a page ?
I'm sure there are lovers and haters of every change they make. I'm in favor of thwarting the SEO schmucks. But not every change has been in favor of searchers.
For example, you used to be able to do a search like:
+"Worker MPM" +MySQL
...and get pages that MUST include "Worker MPM" and "MySQL." Now the plus sign is interpreted as part of the word. If you exclude the plus signs, you get a crap load of "worker MPM" pages that don't mention MySQL at all, and I DON'T want the phrase "Worker MPM MySQL," either.
Uh, what was the question?
Of the people that have been canned and complaiend about it.
I saw brokem image tags broken image place holders. SUPER BADLY WRITTEN HTML.
Really now. Writing optimised HTML code is not hard at all.
I am just pointing my finger at resellers and those who abuse their customers websites by not letting them edit their site.
I used to think the evil wasn't the Google's fault, but then I read that Google has become a major customer of Washington lobbyist firms.
Since this is a British website, you might not understand how the American system works, so let me try to explain briefly. Most businesspeople just play the game of business by the rules. The LEAST ethical businessmen hire lobbyists. The lobbyists bribe the CHEAPEST politicians, mostly through campaign donations (now mostly disguised within SuperPACs). The corrupt politicians then write laws to favor the business models favored by the least ethical businessmen. The final result is American companies must become more and more cancerous and EVIL just to survive.
It can be restated as a philosophical version. Many people think that businesses are in business to make money. I disagree, since I think businesses should be in business to stay in business (and of course a business that loses too much money will die). However, the rules of the game as encoded into American laws require American businesses to grow like cancers (just to avoid being crushed or swallowed).
The greedy out-of-wedlock children who are driving this process imagine that their wealth is then insured by being too big to fail. In reality, cancers always kill their hosts--and then die. So have a nice day. Google has simply joined the cancer club--and is therefore paying lots of money to lobbyists and is therefore increasingly at fault.
Government should act as an impartial referee encouraging fair competition that provides FREEDOM in the form of meaningful and unconstrained choice. The referees should get a cut of the gate (in the form of taxes) in a system that also encourages them to make the pie (the total gate) bigger. However, what America has now is like a soccer game where the referees are paid by a few of the strongest teams.
Helps if you have a unique name though :-) Was surprised that 192.com thought there were 4 of me until i checked with them and they were all me. I suppose if I keep moving house I could have even more of me! Coincidentally I did find some new stuff of mine online whcih was a pleasant surprise, but whether thats because of their changes or just my international fame is another matter.
think I'll have a beer to celebrate.
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