Forum Moderators: open
We can't name names, but this is what they do with an example domain--
[getsearchwise.com...]
On the resulting page is search data from a partnered search engine. It includes the top 10 results for "penguin widgets" when you search on the competing engine. These results are well formatted with bolding, links, and high KWD to rank well. They of course have additional "search boxes" and related terms for the user to click on for more information.
Now Google has spidered thousands of these pages which are nothing more than search results from other engines. These results pages rank well for many different keywords doing nothing but putting traffic to totally unrelevant pages and another search engine. If GG wants to see what I'm speaking of with specifics, check the spam report just sent.
You should file out a spam report right now to Google
And yes, I know, S(ites) P(ositioned) A(bove) M(e) as always, but this is more of a possible epidemic than a spam report. If sites like this are allowed to spread, they could have results for any term-- much like the self-replicating no-results pages discussed last week from a major e-commerce site.
DaveN
DaveN
I know the hotel and travel market up down and sideways. Today I was trying to buy some furniture, what do I find ...the very sort of links to other search engines mentioned here.
Roll on the new filters!
No - it isn't strictly spam; but it is a major manipulation of the algorithm and doesn't add to the searchers experience.
DaveN
The surfer is not clear on where they are going-- the meta-result pages pull in other sites descriptions when they are displaying their listings. The meta-tags from other sites are used in the Google listing since it pulls from the text.
I know of three domains doing this successfully in Google, but I'm sure there are many more. They have many thousands of these false-result pages in the index:
example1.com (276,000 pages)
example2.com (44,800 pages)
example3.com (51,500 pages) -- this one used to cloak every one with a redirect
Thanks for the prompt attention GG, I hope this gets sorted as it could get messy.
How is it a manipulation of the algorithm? Google has been aggressively crawling
other search engines [google.com] since it began.
I've also have had the opportunity to look at log data from some sites who have had their search results crawled by Google. And I can tell you, that based on what I saw, the notion that these pages create a poor user experience simply isn't true. The listings that showed up in Google were clearly identified as search results, and the people that clicked through stuck around for multiple page views.
Google is certainly within their rights to decide that they want to reduce the number of these types of pages, but that doesn't mean the people who operate these sites are spammers.
These sites have just as much reason to be in Google as any other.
If a site has a "search?keywords=" in the url it could also mean they are pulling from their own database of content - so you want to penalize them, also?
I think this is just a case of whining.
BSD
Sample search: "buy vases" (not the real search terms)
Top 10 results include 6 results that use templated pages like:
#1)
"Welcome to SiliconJoe's BUY VASES section!" </title>
... Buy Vases Online - All Materials, Great Prices Vasecity offers beautiful decorative
Vases online, great variety in Vases and Urns (glass, acrylic, blown glass ...
siliconjoes.com/buy_vases_us.html - 7k </descrip>
Looks like they sell vases to me, right? Wrong.. click through and it is simply the top 10 results from Gigablast for the same terms. They can take any term, any number of keyword phrases, and generate instant custom pages that are highly optimized because they include everyone else's meta-tags. You're telling me 275,000 of these pages that do nothing but redirect you to a Gigablast search is a good thing?
[edited by: BGumble at 10:09 pm (utc) on May 8, 2003]
The top site is cloaked-- look at the cache. Those are good relevant results? 6 of the 10 do not sell anything when you specifically searched to "buy"
BSD
Plus, GoogleGuy said so.
Fair question!
Ask yourself then, how many search engine duplicates should Google index? How many times should the re-sold listings be ranked in Google? There are companies now specializing in buying search engine results from lesser engines just for the fact of using them to generate these content-less pages for Google Rankings.
Whether they are violating "spam" rules or not, whether I'm whining or not, the results they're returning are not very relevant and anyone can do the same thing they're doing and further clog up the results. Did the example I posted above look like a search engine result? No, it looks like they sell vases.
I could write a script to pull in any search engines listings, reformat them, and generate hundreds of thousands of instant "content" pages just like these people are doing for any keyword phrases I want. I could release the script then many people could do it. What point would indexing these duplicate search engine listings have to help the relevancy of Google results?
And this isn't about autogenerated pages - these are queried results which were spidered by Google.
