I cringe every time I hear "violating Google's terms of service." What service? The one where they index your site at your cost so they have something to serve their users?
This is starting to sound more like the RIAA complaining about a new business model undercutting its revenue. Google is not keeping up with people or technology in this case. People have figured out how to exploit (to a great enough degree) Google's ability to tell a spam site from an authority, and their response is to declare that people are in violation.
Their service is sending lots of traffic to your site.
Their TOS is more of a spec than an agreement. It says that if you sell links, they may flag you as a spam site. I don't think that's unreasonable at all.
It is unreasonable inasmuch as it is bullying site owners in to compliance, forcing them to disclose information. I think that this is the case. The central effect of flagging a site as spam is not a quality assurance issue. It is influencing these sites' behaviour. The use the fear of Google taking away their traffic as a way of forcing compliance. That is what I have a problem with.
As an internal policy or part of their algorithm, do whatever you want. But that is not what they are doing. The point of the policy, the point of this publicly declared part of their secret sauce is not to recognise and flag spam sites, it is to intimidate sites into stopping a practice which hurts Google. It is the effects of the intimidation not the effects of the flagging which are substantial. I think it is also safe to say that they are the purpose of the policy.
> Sure it is, spam makes search less useful for users, keeping it out is most definitely a quality assurance issue.
Not exactly. Site X with text links on it is not (necessarily) less useful then a site with declared ads on it. The quality assurance issue is the effect these have on Google's ability to analyse the web. Google's way of preventing site X from doing this is by intimidating. They are not removing the site because it is so spamy that they don't want it on their search results (a case that is equivalent to HN deciding to ban a site). They are doing it because they want these sites to comply with some sort of practice. It is the publicity and threat of these penalties which are their 'raison d'etre.'
I have no problem at all with Google using whatever policies they want to make up the search results. Including kicking sites off. I do have a problem with Google threatening to do so in order to achieve some other goal.
> Which hurts Google's users as well, spam hurts us all, spam sucks. Google is correct here in removing sites which partake in such practices.
Perhaps. But it is doing so by exercising its power to shut down the internet (for that site) to enforce a standard. Google decided at some point that all paid links need to be marked in a special way. This is the standard for disclosure. They then use their power to enforce it.
I'm not sure if I have been downmoded because I have been misunderstood, so I will try again.
I think that the policy of enforcing Google's nofollow guideline by removing sites from their index is not directly about keeping their index free of spammers. It is about enforcing a standard for disclosure specifically designed for their purposes. It's not about disclosure to users, it is about disclosure to search engines.
I don't want anyone purposely deceiving the search engines. I have a problem with the way Google is enforcing this. I think this hints at the issues with having such a powerful Google.
> Google's way of preventing site X from doing this is by intimidating.
Again, so what. I don't care how they do it, but I'm glad they do. The idea that Google is doing something wrong by using their size to try and make a site comply is simply absurd to me; of course they are, that's what they should do.
* The point of the policy, the point of this publicly declared part of their secret sauce is not to recognise and flag spam sites, it is to intimidate sites into stopping a practice which hurts Google.*
The practice hurts Google because it hurts Google's users, so of course they want to stop it. As a frequent Google search user I want them to stop it as well. Buying your way to the top of Google results should be made as difficult as possible.
Sure. I agree with everything you say. They have good reason to want their page rank measurement to be accurate. But they are not allowed to do whatever they want to achieve this.
Sure. I agree with everything you say. They have good reason to want their page rank measurement to be accurate. But they are not allowed to do whatever they want to achieve this.
I think Google is allowed to remove sites from their index. Is that what you mean by 'whatever they want'?
I'm going to parody. Can they threaten to remove sites from their index if you don't write "I love Google" on the top of every webpage? Can they threaten to remove your site if you do not ban the bingbot? I think we would agree that would be abuse of power.
If they want to remove sites from their index because those sites are no good for their index, etc. ..Fine. But, if they remove sites for reasons other than 'We don't want these sites in the index or in the SERPS,' that is a problem. In this case, I am arguing that they don't want to remove those sites from their index. They want those sites to comply with their nofollow policies. I don't even have much a problem with these policies. I have a problem with Google being able to set policies and enforce them directly with the threat of removal from the index. It is almost equivalent to the threat of removal from the web entirely due to the way people use the internet and Google's role in that. Many sites get more traffic from searchers Googling the name of a site then direct traffic.
If they don't survive, it will not be because of damage to their quality, but because of an outcry. There would be in outcry in that case because it is bad and obviously.
There is not a perfect marriage between what is good for Google and what is good for the world.
Yes, they do send people traffic. Many sites rely on Google for most of their traffic. However, paid links does not a spam site make.
If they are flagging sites with a legitimate purpose and with original content, simply on the basis that their evermore dated method for determining authority is not working so well anymore, Google (as an authority themselves) should not be flagging them with such a label. I think it is unreasonable, not for denying them traffic, but for labeling them as spam. It's not impossible to find out who's in the supplemental index all of a sudden.
While I mostly agree with you, Google could easily say: "Fine, then we won't include you in our index". Such an action would easily cripple thousands upon thousands of businesses. It also shows how important it is for Google to have a legit search competitor.
Danny Sullivan's comments below the Business Insider article are spot on.
Agree about Danny's comments. He sums it up quite succinctly, in stating that nothing in this article is new. Its clear the author has little knowledge of the subject matter.
In his words, "Plenty of people get this stuff already. It's been out there again, for years."
To be fair, the post misquotes Matt Cuts. He didn't say terms of service. He said:"paid links that pass PageRank are absolutely a violation of Google's quality guidelines"
Spam: thin site, lacks original content, few pages indexed, crawled infrequently, ranks for a small selection of keywords, weak backlink profile
Authority: many pages indexed, thick site, loads of original content, crawled frequently, ranks for a variety of keywords, diversified backlink profile
Page Rank used to be a strong indicator of this, but currently a better indicator is how often your site is crawled. That's why one authority link can do worlds more for you than hundreds (or thousands) of spammy/low quality links.
I guess it's all about how you define "thin," "few", "small," and "weak." A page on how to eradicate your home of carpenter ants would possibly look like all of these, yet may be the most "authoritative" site on the web on the small, niche subject.
Perhaps, but not necessarily that much. How many people would put a link to how to build a dog house on their web page? Anybody who would probably has links to other dog house things (buy a book on Amazon, keep it smelling fresh with this goo from WalMart) etc., diminishing your algorithmically determined authority.
Not everybody blogs about everything going on in his/her life.
A definition that errs on the side of marking spam sites as authorities is defining a spam site as one that exists solely for the purpose of selling links to other sites.
I would expect that these true spam sites exist as a link network somewhat seperate from the rest of the web. You could start manually defining filters based on what sites are actively selling links on the digital point forums.
We may have actually had this conversation in the real world, come to think of it.
thats easily a million dollar question; figure out how Google could flick a switch and clean their index with out noticeable false positives - I think they would hand you a check :)
* i would assume that the problem parallels with spam emails. i think webpages offer more clues to what the page is about than emails though.
I would argue that it is orders of magnitudes more complex.
Spam passess a single toll gate on the way to each user. You have an address book with contacts and previous conversations and a whole pile of data about previous 'known good' emails in the inbox.
Spam filtering has gotten pretty good. A lot better than google at filtering out 'bad' search results.
The terms you agree to when you use Google properties. I don't like it as much as the next guy; but in the environment they are in (capitalism, public company etc..) they have to do what they can to protect their ranking method.
Were they supposed to foresee people buying links back in 2003/2004?
You have to have new policy or terms for new use cases.
*the article feels like a bit of a 'hit job' on conductor / I would like to offer up that things might be at least a little different than they seem from one side/point of view.
When you have things of value that can be sold or exchanged you will allways have a market. If some authority tries to ban the exchange then it will be a 'black' market. The harder Google tries to enforce their policies the more it will drive the selling or exchange of links underground. Maybe this would be a good thing but there is certainly no way they can stamp it out.
I personally think that the problem lies in the rules of Google's system. A more robust system should be able to account for and adjust for the market realities created by it's own rules. Maybe it is technically impossible but I doubt it. I'm sure the clever people at google have thought of this as well but perhaps they are starting to face 'legacy' system issues themselves.
Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems, so we attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. The spam reports we receive are used to create scalable algorithms that recognize and block future spam attempts.
I'll bet they do but they can only detect the most obvious cases. It would be possible for website to sell links that even a human couldn't identify as sold, so there are limits to what their algorithms could achieve.
I'm often wary of those complaining about Google's policies because they're based on the idea that being listed on Google is a right and not a privilege. This, to me, is faulty logic. Unless they're deliberately taking part in anticompetitive behaviour by blocking competition, I think it's perfectly within their rights to delist or demote you for pretty much any reason they can think of.
I think Google have made it pretty clear that as far as they're concerned they don't want people selling links to other sites in a way designed to manipulate search-engine rankings, and if you do so you may be delisted or have a lowered ranking on their site in the future. I think that's specific enough, personally, and think that anyone wanting a more specific policy either wants to work around them to violate the intended spirit and complain if and when Google punishes them for doing so.
I used to be a bigger Google fan than I am now, and it's all because of this pagerank/link business.
It's fine to have an algorithm to prioritize sites. And it's fine for sites to manipulate that algorithm to their own ends. Both of these things are completely natural.
Trying to keep this list of who's cool or not -- secretly updated by god knows who -- and forcing the rest of the world to do as you say or suffer economic punishment by de-listing from your engine? Not fine, although Google is certainly in their rights to do so.
A better strategy is for Google to adapt, not dictate. As it is, they've created this entire system where everybody games the system but nobody talks about it, and that's counterproductive for the net as a whole.
Google has no problem with link selling--Google has a problem with PageRank selling. Sell all the links you want, just use nofollow.
If someone wants to buy a link but isn't interested in only receiving the traffic it brings (and not any pagerank), they are probably up to no good anyway.
I just checked the paid links on Google's search page. They do not use nofollow. This fact, combined with your arguments, is consistent with gojomo's hypothesis about Google wanting to monopolize paid links.
Google's search results page blocks all crawlers (including Google) using robots.txt, so it's a moot point. Nofollow's only relevant when a page might appear in a search engine.
And isn't that convenient? Google's main kind of link-selling is unaffected by their rules, but other kinds of link-selling is disadvantaged. ("Use a standard we invented to make our job easier, or risk being frozen out of 70%+ of all search traffic.")
And similarly: "We crawl your stuff; but our search results are off-limits." Of course, anyone can block Google, but given the asymmetry in business models and market power that's not much of an equalizing factor.
I like Google and think they mean well. Individually each of these policies has a reasonable basis. But Google is now so dominant -- and the positive financial rewards they get from self-serving policies so large -- that their actions deserve close scrutiny.
(The Freud-inspired quote I led with was originally about the state; Google's influence on the net is so large that they are a lot like the net's government.)
This issue has been resolved years ago. Google even has a report paid links form in the Webmasters Tools. High profile sites get their PageRank and authority diminished whenever paid links get discovered.
Most reputable SEO firms refrain from paid links nowadays and rather focus on "killer content" creation to get links naturally.
This is starting to sound more like the RIAA complaining about a new business model undercutting its revenue. Google is not keeping up with people or technology in this case. People have figured out how to exploit (to a great enough degree) Google's ability to tell a spam site from an authority, and their response is to declare that people are in violation.