Comment by ender7 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ender7 | Hacker News Reader

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Your post is wonderfully self-righteous but not very helpful or insightful, unlike some of the other comments below. This makes me sad. I hope more people vote the latter up some more.

The fact of the matter is that someone is always unhappy when it comes to spam control. If the restraints are too loose then suddenly everyone is screaming about how "spammers are ruining Google" and "Google is doomed because of spam" (this was very true right before the Panda rollout). However, if Google starts to crack down, then you get more false positives and more people upset for different reasons.

Unfortunately, no pattern recognition system runs at 100%. That's not a hard problem(tm), that's an impossibility. Relatedly, I don't really see what's wrong with assiging a "reputation" to a domain name. As the article states, it's possible to climb back up to "good" status, it just takes some extra work. Kind of like in real life.

I worked on Web-Based Reputation Scores for IronPort/Cisco. I know how hard this is, especially at scale. This is not about them having a reputation as a concept.

My point is that Google suggesting you register a different domain because their href-based reputation sucks over time is a cop-out. This specifically falls under the "Things that are Google's fault".

Matt's suggestion here is definitely practical, but it's a fault in how Google looks at domain reputation. When he talks about "having to renovate a domain" he's talking about you the consumer of a domain legally acquired and without spammy content hosted on it, having to play Google's algorithm, because their definition of "spam" is absolutely massive, vaguely defined, and with way too long of a ttl.

And with a massive, undefined, long term concept of spam, you're going to have ridiculous FPs. Which Google has, and is now recommending is somehow your responsibility.

This is entirely their fault, and it has to do with how they are determining reputation, not that they have reputation at all.

Not to mention (well, I just did) that with $50 or less anyone can point millions of spammy links to a $1 Million domain. Buy another $million domain now because Google can't manage that?

He is talking about on page content, not backlinks.

The same, if not worse applies to spammy backlinks.

While Google has certainly been pointing this out to people and telling them to get their backlinks in order, I am not sure that people are actually being penalised currently?

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