Am I the only one who was really hoping for some specifics about what they're doing and plan to do about content farm rankings? Without that, the article is virtually devoid of content other than "we're really not so bad!"
Edit: By specifics, I don't necessarily mean implementation details, just anything more informative and plan-of-action than acknowledging the problem.
Our policy in search-quality is not to pre-announce things, but we did give some pretty strong hints about planned improvements to search quality in that post (e.g. talking about scraper sites). I'll be happy to talk more about them soon when they launch.
Hey Matt, is there anything y'all can do about the content farm sites where someone buys an old high pr domain and sells 100's of links on it and drops them in between tons of content? Here's a prefect example of that: http://www.dcphpconference.com/.
That is clearly webspam. We only indexed five pages from that site, but there's no reason for that site to show up at all. Thanks for mentioning it. It won't be in our index for much longer.
Hey Matt, thanks for the response. I actually have a huge list of these type of sites that I've submitted through the spam report and 90% of them are still indexed and have pagerank. Is there another way I can send them in?
Matt - I have a posterous site (which uses a subdomain of my main site) that I mostly use to index some of my favorite articles - same purpose as delicious but I can rest assured that the content will always be there. Since most of the site has dupe content, it may lose the PR (which I dont care for) but will that affect my primary site ranking.
I am not sure if Posterous offers the ability to add a robots.txt file with which I can tell search engines to exclude it, but would that prevent my primary site ranking from being affected?
awesome. gosh that page is ranked 5! I still think google is best and trustworthy, but i also felt the problem of content farm in recent years as others. I run my site and find it troublesome that many spammy sites contact me to buy links. They absolutely have no interest in nofollow ads even with banner. They just want normal text links often with a given paragraph they specify mixed into my writing.
though, i do have a question about this ...sometimes i find 1 normal link (do-follow) on a page is approprate for my reader (e.g. the content match, and i approve the site), so in that situation i would like to sell link (and absolutely with a CLEAR "sponsored link" text in plain view but not with “rel="no-follow"”. Afaik google doesnt approve do-follow sold links in anyway. I find this a bit problem because good links from commerial activity could be just as appropriate that benefits my reader.
As much as I like transparency, I think it's appropriate for Google to keep the details of their search-algorithms secret. Maybe they could do something like "de-classify" the algorithms from a few years ago (this would be cool!) but, in the interest of staying ahead of the spammers, I think it's totally appropriate for them to keep quiet.
Since google wants to do everything with algorithms rather than hard coding (some of) the offenders, the minute they give you specifics the "fix" will be circumvented in some way.
Google is probably right to not go down the hard-coding path. Hard coding the offenders doesn't work. You block a domain, they changes names. You block an IP, they switch to AWS so that your choice is to block all of AWS or not block them.
Edit: By specifics, I don't necessarily mean implementation details, just anything more informative and plan-of-action than acknowledging the problem.