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How I had reported, and reported, and written, and called Google for the last 6 months. Pointing out the exact same text between sites, the hidden links (using just a "+" to their link farm pages with garage heater companies exchanging links with them, a site about a tropical island - how themed!). How to spot their cloaks (easily). Etc. Etc.
Well, guess what? They added another 5 or 6 "Proud to be Spam and it shows" (why, they're the same but with different graphics - how unique!) sites to what they had already put out, and now they have even more of a monopoly.
Anyone else seen the same? Or am I the only one!
Since the Google Dance started, some of my key search terms place a new website above me in the top spot. This is always hard to accept, but it's made even harder when the site above you adopts extensive spamming techniques.
This new site has three domain names with largely the same content full of cross-links, optimised to the point of stupidity.
Shows different content within Google's cached page than actual web site, the cached content is 'super optimised' for two keywords.
I optimise my content obviously, but I keep it clean - not only is spamming against se guidelines, it generally adversely affects the ease with which a visitor can read and understand your content.
Come on Google, please enforce the law and please read our Spam reports!
Some of the people here at WebmasterWorld think webmasters should worry about their own sites and ignore the spammers. But for as long as I can remember GG has encouraged members here to be diligent in their spam reports and submit them with his name and your nickname from WebmasterWorld.
Zapatista
The oddest thing is their file names, one is '', another '', another which I won't quote suggests blatantly <snip>. Suffice to say the area I and the other site is in has got no connection at all to <snip>. The domain names are also a bit odd.
On going to the pages in question it's always the same--nothing but a blank page.
I imagine its some form of cloaking, or bait and switch, but I just can't see the point of it.
This is of special interest to me now as my site has just been penalised big time for some amateurish foolishness. I'm a one man show, my competitors are big companies with money to spend on more sophisticated methods and then seemingly get away with it.
[edited by: heini at 6:41 pm (utc) on Mar. 10, 2003]
[edit reason] no urls, or search terms or any specifics to point out sites allowed. Thanks. [/edit]
DavidT... I just lost 3 positions to 3 sites (same company-different domains). Upon closer examination, I notice they have a small invisible image map, with dozens of coord URL's going out. As I followed a few, I noticed they have hundreds of these 'invisible' URL's linked back to the infringing sites.
It seems to be getting out of hand.
I mean the pages are *totally* blank, there is nothing but this:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" http-equiv=Content-Type></HEAD>
<BODY></BODY></HTML>
david
Also thanks again GG for helping me with the spam 2 nights ago.
I see those pages haven't moved an inch after the update (I have checked both www2 and www3). :(
Hopefully, having included my WebmasterWorld nick in the latest reports will get me some attention this time. ;)
I went through the top 100 results for several keywords and compared it to an old index.
(Can I have some ketchup with this?)
I was wrong. The spam isn't any worse, by quantity, but some of the spam pages are ranked higher.
At the same time I can't really say it's better either, but I will admit I was wrong in my observations from right after the dance started. (As things stand now, anyways)
netguy, just the regular Google form with your nick in the comments. Thanks!
We made a big design error when writing the programs for my site, not understanding the way the spider works, and now we have about 10,000 pages indexed in Google that are really just duplicates. When we realised the consequences, we went about rewritting the software and changing the site's structire.
We have done all we can to block googlebot from getting to the duplicate pages again, but I fear that the process may be very long. Is there a way to just dump them all and re-crawl the newly structured site?
Thanks!
MC
I've just filled out a spam report for your attention, it relates to a large network of hidden linked sites. I hope this isn't being too cheeky.
I'm not sure if you will be able to do anything about it because the sites in question are pretty big players in their field and results are relevant but unfair to the small guy.
I will give it a go and hope my sanity / faith is restored. Use the spam report page and the address google@google.com right?
3 Other people here contacted me by sticky mail asking to see these Spam sites, and I have sent them the same thing I will send you.
Thanks for looking.
One of the other guys here I sent this to had a look and said;
Interesting. It wouldn't necessarily count as a link farm though all the sites have the same content after the main page. I most admit very impressive. They even fooled DMOZ multiple times. Sometimes spam is a beautiful thing. The site is annoying, but man did they ever control the serps.
I hope Google feel the same way too, but are suitably less impressed enough to stop them dominating the search returns.
My post within this thread earlier highlighted my disappointment about the strength of a multiple domained spamming site since the google dance.
I made the decision to check other major engines and yep the site in question was appearing top, top, top.
I sent out a few spam reports and wow! - Altavista and AlltheWeb have dropped the site out of the serps against the main search terms.
Still no joy with Google though, but clearly Altavista and AlltheWeb agree with my report, i have to say that i'm impressed with the speed of action from these guys.
Can Google do the same? - we wait:)
Mind you i expect their 15 minutes offline last night kept them busy.
Now I'll just have to wait and see who's the fastest gun in town. ;)
<added>GoogleGuy, please have a look at my spam reports too, will you? ;)</added>
the Google spam detection still does not work perfectly
i was just testing google after the dance and was still able to find some spam pages.
They are using some kind of cloaking.
I searched for "" and found several of these pages, all have the same basic-design, they just differ with the logo.
For google they serve a normal page, but they redirect the visitor directly with an affiliate-link.
I think google should sort out these pages.
hey can easily be found by searching after
""
if you use the "&filter=0" - see all results - you can even find more spamming pages. They look all alike so they are all made by one person.
I found out they are using a simple user-agent cloaking by sending a request with the user agent
"Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)"
and they served me the "Google-pages", hehe.
Sorry for my poor english, but i am from germany
regards
Lutz Warnke
[edited by: heini at 6:38 pm (utc) on Mar. 10, 2003]
[edit reason] pointing out sites is not allowed, please reread TOS. Thanks. [/edit]
GoogleGuy just told me at the phone that it's ok.
Sadly enough, browsing through the SERPS, I seem to understand that a spammer doesn't even have to employ sophisticated server-side cloaking techniques to fool Google: a simple JS redirect (or meta refresh) will do the trick. As we know, robots don't follow JavaScript, so spammers feed Googlebot with tons and tons of spam, while redirecting human visitors to the real site. I've seen hundreds of such pages ranking in the top 10 results. :(
GoogleGuy, are client-side redirects really that hard to spot?
can you stickymail me with the web site that's cloaking, i'ld like to take a look myself:)
thanks
