good results vs. fair distribution

hypothetical: how will react google towards ultra-targetted spam?

[rocco]

it's just hypothetical, but still interesting:
what would google do, if they discovered a spammer who is dominating the entire serps with spam, but the spammers spam is so good, that:
- users will love it more than all the rest (which most likely is some sort of spam as well)
- it really improves the serps
- it is not noticed (by the user) to be spam, nor that those site belong to the same person

but the spammer would be be using all the forbidden techniques like cloaking et al

would google try to ban that spammer or would they let him get away (as long as he is not naturally caught by their algo) since they benefit from it?

it is quite a dillema as the sites ARE all about good content...

btw.: no, i do not have such sites ;) and no, i do not know how to build such sites (other than manually)

[matuloo]

I am almost sure they would ban him simply because of the fact that he is using dirty tricks like the cloaking you mentioned.

A different question would be if they would ban a "smaller spammer" that got to the top positions with the use of rather legitimate techniques - like getting a lot of links with good anchor text, crosslinking his own sites (in an acceptable manner) very good internal linking etc...

[4eyes]

I am almost sure they would ban him simply because of the fact that he is using dirty tricks like the cloaking

I wouldn't have thought so. Plenty of big names have been using IP delivery with apparent immunity.

I think their focus is quite rightly on quality of results rather than sticking to the letter of their guidelines.

[europeforvisitors]

I think their focus is quite rightly on quality of results rather than sticking to the letter of their guidelines.

I wish they'd focus a little harder on the quality of results. I was searching for the Web sites of two major London hotels the other day, and I couldn't find anything but boilerplate affiliate pages and a couple of TripAdvisor reviews in the first five pages of search results for each hotel name. For a moment, I thought I'd made a wrong turn into AltaVista. :-)

[dmorison]

I was searching for the Web sites of two major London hotels the other day

Is it actually possible to search on "hotel chain" without the hotel's official page being way down the SERP behind layers and layers of SPAM?

If Google wants to develop algo's to detect SPAM, studying their SERP for hotels would be a great place to start.

Creating a hypothetical town called "Widgetville", there are thousands of URLs like:

http://hotels_in_widgetville.example.com/hotels/widgetville/widgetville_hotels/hotels_in_widgetville/hotels.html

[yankee]

"it is quite a dillema as the sites ARE all about good content..."

You are saying good content is ultra-targetted spam? I don't get it.

[rocco]

"..You are saying good content is ultra-targetted spam? I don't get it.."

no, what i meant the spammer is creating spam that is as good as "real" content would be... while the rest of the serp would look like the regular spam.