Matt Cutts Wants You To Help Fight Spam
February 23rd, 2007 by Michael Gray in GoogleIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
If you needed any further evidence that Google is ramming personal search and Google accounts down your throat for their own self interests you need look no further than the latest Google Patent about removing documents.
Here’s the part you want to pay attention to:
41. The method of claim 40, wherein aggregating information regarding documents that have been removed by a group of users includes: identifying a set of legitimate users and a set of illegitimate users; and collecting information regarding documents that have been removed by the set of legitimate users.
So how do you think they’ll identify legitimate users? Maybe people who have verified Google accounts and log in daily or stay logged in. Maybe they’ll also consider the age of the accounts. Maybe they’ll look at the number of searches people who are logged in are doing and rate them by activity. If they can track who and how much I read they certainly know how much I search. Think this might be related to them discontinuing the soap search API? Ajax is much easier to authenticate as a real user they can track the actual mouse movements and clicks, if Crazy egg can figure it out I’m sure the boys at the ‘plex can, that’s why they force you to use the new ajax based API. I predict we’re going to see an AJAX based SERP in less than 12 months time.
Smart folks saw this coming in 2005, the rest of you better start looking at defensible traffic and finding ways to build it the sun is starting to set on the days of link based algorithms.
Sphere It
February 23rd, 2007 at 11:04 am
Well IMO it is every individual’s responsibility to fight against the spammers as it would become extremely difficult if we keep relying on a third person for the same.If we take care of not to spam and spread the awareness among our friends and others, it will reduce spam on a large scale.
February 23rd, 2007 at 11:16 am
Great post and opinion on the new application. This will likely have a major effect on how SEO providers support client accounts. While it’s not the best way to measure successful SEO, clients still demand accurate ranking reports.
Right now most software used for rank checking must use an API to reliably record results. I’ve been using WebCEO for a while now, and like it — but only because I can use an older SOAP API. So far as I understand, you can’t use an AJAX API with software titles.
I could be wrong on that, but if not… If / when Google moves to force AJAX based SERPs, it’d really cause a lot of headaches and alter what SEOs can provide to their clients in terms of reporting.
February 23rd, 2007 at 9:58 pm
Dear Michael,
This is my first time commenting on your blog, but far from my first time visiting:)!
You are one of the fellows whose take on personalized search I have followed most closely, and I wanted to ask for your opinion as to whether something I am seeing in my SERPs is the result of Google’s new personalization strategies.
I have documented my weird findings on my blog at:
http://www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=62
I would greatly value your opinion on this as I am really struggling to figure out just how this is affecting what I am seeing when I use Google.
Thank you for your frank and smart commentary on what is going on with Google personalization. It seems that every time I see this discussed on various blogs, I see you there!
Kind Regards,
Miriam
February 27th, 2007 at 12:06 pm
If you file a spam report in my language there is almost no attention for it from Google.
Perhaps they could look at it if they want to fight spam.
Personalised search and local search for my language : results are of less quality. Oriented on a small area gives you less results and the quality is sometimes very bad.
If i want to use Google.com and i clicked logout then i still get redirected to Google.be or Google.nl.
I have to go to my gmail account and logout there to reach Google.com
They are perhaps improving for the global language results but certainly not in my native language.