trinorthlighting - 9:28 pm on May 10, 2007 (gmt 0)

Certain phrases/combinations can send you into a spam or safe search penalty. That is why. Think about it. Google has filtered adult sites (Safe Search) by phases or words right?

Now, take that over to the search side. Let’s say Google wants to fight "free ring tone" spam this week. What are they going to do in the algo to fight this?

Google would look at anchors, text on pages that contain derivatives of Ring Tones and Ring Tone keywords correct? They would play around with the algo, monitor it for those phrases, test it and see how it does. If they like the results and they seem to have a good answer to get some of the "free ring tone" spam out of the index. They implement it.

Now, since Google does not want spammers gaming them, they do not talk about it and make it a very sneaky and stealthy penalty and downgrading pages that just do not fit the calculations right? Thus -950. Very stealthy bugger so people will not really see it. It’s a slow and long fall to -950 and it does not happen overnight. May be -10 today,-30 next week, etc.. And will not be able to figure it out to game Google because it’s slow. Once you reach that last page, the next step is supplemental. It’s the best and slowest penalty Google has yet to implement. Want proof, pick a keyword and monitor it daily and see what happens. -950 urls go supplemental and new one replaces them due to new pages coming into the index. Look at the -950 results and 80% of them are spam. So it’s obvious it’s a spam fighting penalty.

So back to the ring tones, you have a site that talks about telephone ringers and here comes the spam algo and for some reason it does not like your page. (Collateral Damage). This is due because you do not have enough trust rank for the keyword (Per Miamacs post)because your site is new and has not been around that long.

Google groups keywords together and I am sure there are quite a few algo's going around scoring pages in the background depending on keywords. Different algo's, different results.

Now, why do I keep saying links? Here are the reasons:

1. <I have not yet seen> a site yet that has not shown mass link exchanges, paid links, "recip links" or that has not been hacked. (Hacked is the exception)

2. Trust rank, trust rank flows through anchor text. Again a part of links.

3. Lack of good and relevant links. (Collateral Damage Pages) show a lack of authoritative and trusting links.

All in all, look at the majority of results that are -950. Most have been in link exchanges or involved with paid links. Is there collateral damage? Yet to see it but I am sure there is. How much collateral damage? I have yet to find one so I can say it’s probably around 1%.

Now, the .edu sites we see, either hacked or not real .edu sites. A lot of spammers have look a like .edu spam sites. Do some research and you will see that.

[edited by: tedster at 9:33 pm (utc) on May 10, 2007]