Matt Cutts from Google wants webmasters to report link spam | Hacker News Reader

Matt Cutts from Google wants webmasters to report link spam

mattcutts.com

16 pointskeltex22 comments

I don't see what the point is. Mahalo is still indexed, and we pretty much all flagged that site en masse.

We've deleted or noindex almost every short content page (stub).

People can't create stubs any more.

The issue is resolved and after our analysis the short pages were 6% of our traffic. we deleted them or expand their content and it looks like we will be even on a traffic basis after doing this.

lesson learned? short pages only hurt you and are a waste of time since google is smart enough to not rank them (at least not well).

Look at our homepage and you'll see our new standard is 300 original words or delete/noindex the page.

Last I checked, Google owned Doubleclick, and they are in the ad business and want to get more page views and clicks on ads. So, it's kind of hypocritical of a Google engineer to say something like this.

And what's wrong with link exchanges, anyway? Let's say I do Model Railroading, and I want some traffic. So, I join a "web ring" of other model railroader websites. Now my page rank goes down? Screw you, Google!

This also seems like a Blackhatter's dream. Got competition with your ad campaigns? Fine, just report your competition to the linkspam link and boost your rankings.

If you're linking to sites as an 'editorial decision' (i.e., you vouch for or approve of the content on that site), then you're fine. Otherwise, and if it's a paid link, you are supposed to nofollow it.

One of my issues with this is that on one of my sites, I have paid links that I vouch for. They're people I know providing services I've actually used and if my Google Account got pulled up by a rogue complainant or competitor, I'd be really pissed off.

The help docs on these sorts of things are pretty ambiguous though. One frustration I have is that they routinely discuss getting 'editorial' backlinks from bloggers, but for small businesses this can be exceptionally hard. If you're a tiler, for example, you might (if you're really proactive) have a four page site with some examples of work, testimonials, contact info and a list of services. None of your customers/testimonials are going to be blogging types. Most of your suppliers aren't going to link to you because they've barely got on top of their own web issues. But you'll get beaten in the rankings by a blogger or general content-producer who knows about SEO. Why isn't paying to advertise on those sites and getting some link juice (without the link being nofollowed) an option?

>Why isn't paying to advertise on those sites and getting some link juice (without the link being nofollowed) an option?

Because that breaks the assumptions of their algorithms - that people link to what is interesting without any conflict of interest. If webmasters were allowed to pay to increase their pagerank, then rankings become about who can pay for the most/best backlinks, rather than what is most interesting to users on a given subject.

The short answer: Google doesn't want their SERPs to be overrun by spam.

But the end result of that tiling example (and I have a lot of smaller clients that are in that sort of position) is that the blog spam and MFA sites dominate, while the small players with a legitimate, physical business struggle to get attention. Who links to tilers because they're interesting?

This could be abused like dmca takedown notices against competitors.

Only if Google acts on it without checking first which is pretty unlikely if you think about it for more than a nanosecond.

True, but it costs nothing to submit your competitor and given the devastating effect getting de-listed from Google can have on some sites the small chance is worth it.

Ironically enough, I expect Google will get spammed with spam reports.

Are you serious? This is the company that gave us Buzz, the security-flawed thing that exposed everyone's private addressbook such that even one's urologist or gynecologist was exposed, or let your bad, discarded clients get to see all your good clients so that they could contact them.

Second, take for instance an ad campaign I had that contained the word "WordPress" inside. Google publicly stated that this was finally okay and I could place ads having the word WordPress inside. So, I did and so did many other people. Google on WordPress and keep hitting the search button and you'll find many USA companies with search engine sidebar ads that have WordPress in them. But not me. No, not me. My creative gets disapproved on AdWords. Google can't even be consistent in their own policies.

Anyone use text-link-ads.com?

Given they don't nofollow links, will this damage them significantly?

I have used them before for customer sites, it works ok but is really a temporary thing until you get that customer to rank better on keywords that they want and increase the pagerank through normal methods. As a temporary shortcut text-link-ads has worked out ok for me. They were at one point penalized but they changed their system around so that won't easily happen again.

Were you using them as a publisher (hosting ads) or as an advertiser (trying to get traffic from them)?

FWIW, I am using them as a publisher.

text-link-ads.com is already penalized in google search.

Thanks for letting me know. I run them on a site (TLA gives me $100/mo) which ranks #1 for a number of key-phrases. If I drop down the rankings a bit, I might need to ditch TLA.

I ran them on a site that was making $3-5k a month from Adsense. Big mistake. I got away with it for about 18 months but eventually Google "got to me." Which was quite impressive considering I'd tweaked the hell out of the TLA code to make them appear as natural as possible (even adding my own descriptions to the links). Now I make $300 a month on Adsense if I'm lucky. Oops.

The amount of money that revolved around TLA used to be gigantic and it's slumped hard since Google started playing hardball. A friend of mine was a top affiliate of theirs making 5 figures a month in commission - no longer though!

Thanks for the info. I might cash in on my recent TLA earnings soon for an iPad and then ditch it (TLA, not the iPad!).

Did anything else happen around the time of that big drop in revenue that could've explained it? I've seen big fluctuations in my payments over a variety of sites that usually come back to becoming complacent about content, competition becoming stronger, leaking PR through outgoing links, etc.

Not really, but it's always a possibility. I did discover, however, using a very short lived trick ( http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2009/01/hyves-subdomain-trick... ) that it was definitely penalized by Google, as was the only other site I ran TLA on (but which has continued to have excellent rankings despite a continuing PageRank hit - 4000 visitors a day from Google to a PR 7 penalized to PR 3 is OK in my book!)

I removed TLA from sites I really cared about around a year ago. I have it on one still but bizarrely all but one advertiser dropped from it last month (after being on it for 2 years!) so I'll probably cancel my TLA account entirely soon.

Google's not worried about nofollow links. They are only worried about followed links because those are the ones that affect organic search results.

What I was saying is that text-links-ads.com don't nofollow their links. They're paid/traded links which are not nofollowed.

Note that your reports are bound to your Webmaster Tools account: http://imgur.com/NQxLT.png

Bookmarklet anyone?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com