drall - 4:02 pm on Jul 9, 2010 (gmt 0)

Many of our competitors are catching on, dozens of large alexa 1000-5000 range sites are now starting to mashin 5-20 paragraphs worth of gibberish.

here is what we are seeing
- top 5 related widgets
- latest 5 related widgets
- keyword spam clouds
- whole paragraphs of "widget related keywords"
- latest twitter widget snippets
- most popular related widgets
- search related widgets with 1-2 lines of scraped content

All of this is being added to the original page.

Several things come to mind now.

First

Clearly the filters for webwide duplicate content footprint pattern matching has been dramtically ratcheted up. By filling an existing page with cleverly designed quasi useful spam the page is now scoring higher due to a uniqueness factor with almost no footprint.

God can only guess why but any type of social networking aspect onpage and offpage is giving these pages a dramatic boost.

So what I am seeing at least is basically uniqueness and social networking factors being scored extremely high almost regardless of usefulness of page content.

I am also seeing a dramatic downplay now to age, pr and trust as signs of quality across hundreds of sites I monitor.

If this is the direction Google is going I am moving on.

Have fun hiring people to spam twitter and facebook all day. Funny thing is the sites now dominating my area of the web are all based out of China and India. Cheap labor pools of social networking spammers and human scrapers now rule the roost!

Yay, so glad I followed the rules.