europeforvisitors - 3:01 pm on Jul 3, 2006 (gmt 0)

most important thing in that article:

Maybe in the GOOG: Google Finance and Business Operations Forum, but not in a forum (and a thread) about Google Search.

The problem is adsense. Bad serps are a symptom of the problem. They have to learn how to control adsense abuse and not search engine spam. If they control adsense, there is no, or less reason anyway, reason to spam.

A couple of years ago, it was affiliate spam. Today it's AdSense spam. In another year or two, it may be something else. So yes, controlling AdSense is a worthy goal, but it won't solve the problem of search-engine spam.

In my opinion, one of the biggest problems right now is machine-generated clutter. In the travel sector, there are a couple of major sites (one owned by a huge Internet travel agency) that spew out millions of computer-generated, keyword-driven "review" pages. Some of those pages have useful information, but many are little more than "post a review" pages that exist solely for the SERPs. The same problem exists in the tech sector, where some big-name, corporate-owned computing sites clutter the SERPs with "review" pages that use licensed duplicate content or--even worse--that have no reviews at all, but are merely placeholders with price-comparison links. If Google wanted to send a message about spam, it could apply a random -20 to -40 penalty to pages from such domains until the owners cleaned up their acts.

Google shouldn't give up on the arms race; if anything, it needs to take off the kid gloves and become more draconian in fighting spam. If collateral damage is a problem, then put review teams in place to quickly handle reinclusion requests based on a simple rule of thumb: "Are users worse off or better off if they can't readily find this site's pages in the search results?"