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Also see: Doorway pages all over the place, unimportant subpages hanging around while important homepages on several key sites gone, lots of those .gov-y sites back...
Really I think even worse that Florida. Strange indeed. More so if these go live every so often.
As that spammer was one of the ones that I reported to Google using the brandyupdate keyword, it looks to me that GG has been given the ok to deal with at least some of the spammers that we have been reporting to him.
I searched 66.102.7.98 for miserable failure and I still get the White House site. Gone is the lady Senator's site.
I won't be surprised if pretty soon Google's home page will show up as #1! ;)
Anyway, I am doing great but unpredictable movements in the serps are becoming quite frequent. Consistency seems to be missing even in the non-competitive keywords.
They finally got it back together and now its all going haywire again.
So here's a nightmare scenario for you:
Y! reverts back to G for the time being. G goes live with 66.
66 becomes the primary set of SERP's on: G + Y! + A0L
Where's my wine opener. Have a nice weekend everybody. :-)
Plus, reports are surfacing of G *reappearing* in Y!'s SERP's.
I think they said in the press release tha they are 'phasing out google results' - gave me the impression that it's not like throwing a switch...
However something quite different just happened.
First some background:
I have a friend who began to receive a growing amount of spam by email about a year ago. Being one of the contact points for a UK national organisation, many other websites had printed his email address, and it was being spidered and harvested there. The website of the organisation itself had protected the email address by using document.write statements to stop it being spidered. I was aware of some of the sites that had published the email address in plain text or as a clickable link, and we contacted them to get the address removed. We used Google to look for more, but aware of various log spam scams, and fake sites, I always used just name@subdomain in the search box, rather than the full name@subdomain.domain.com email address, to find sites that had included the email address in their content. We found loads of genuine sites and contacted all of them to get the address removed from their pages.
However, at the end of the SERPs was a set of odd results: a group of pages where the URL was just the IP number and a filename 123.456.789.123/filename.txt, and the Google description just a short list of email addresses, including the email address we were trying to get removed. We did not click this link. This looked like some sort of scam. We copied the URL from the Google results, and pasted it into a new window (didn't want to send any sort of referrer information to the site). This site just listed thousands of email addresses as plain text. Most wierd. Is that the results file of an email harvester or what? We got most of the other (genuine) sites to remove the email address from their content, a long time ago, but still have no idea what to do about the last email list site. They have no other content than these long lists of email addresses and the server root does not allow access. How do we get them to drop the email address off their site?
A month or two ago, I accidentally clicked the link to this email list site (thereby sending a referrer of www.google.com/search?num=100&q=name@subdomain to the site. Just a few days later some new results appeared in the SERPs for the name@subdomain search. One of them is www.name@subdomain.spamsite.com, which has a Google description which includes my partial email address name@subdomain (not the full name@subdomain.domain.com email address), as well as a load of random words. Clicking this link opens at least 10 windows and tries to set 7 or 8 cookies. It is a porn site (of course). Unchecked, it crashes Mozilla after about 30 seconds. So now there is a site with a URL that includes my extremely rare name@subdomain search, a search that I suspect has not been carried out by any other person on the planet except me.
The other new results also look like spammy URLs, and these also offer the partial name@subdomain email address in the Google description along with many other random words. Clicking any of those results either gives a 500 Server Error or goes to the same porn site with multiple popup windows.
In the SERPs the original sites with just the very long lists of email addresses as content were the very last sites in the results. The new spam porn sites are listed near the end of the results, but are placed just before the original email list sites in the results. All of these scam sites are listed after the normal looking results.
Over the next few weeks more and more of these pages appeared in that SERP. There have been several dozen like it, with some minor variations of which ones were included, and in which order, from day to day.
A few hours ago, they were all still there.
I looked again a few minutes ago, and every single one had gone. All of them. Not one left.
I've never seen this before.
sorry 19th Feb fresh date
[edited by: needinfo at 12:22 am (utc) on Feb. 21, 2004]
.
>> I can see a couple of sites on the top page showing fresh dates of 17th Feb <<
I am seeing 19th Feb fresh dates on some listings on www.
On 66.102.7.98 I have seen some 18th Feb fresh tags.
For all the supposed intellect Google has, there are fumbling so bad....it's really getting pathetic.
Why not take some time off until something significant starts to happen ... like at least a few hours of settled results. Right now, nobody can make sense of it so why keep rehashing the obvious?
I'm going to read some other threads about Yahoo and see if I can make sense of them! :)
So, unless someone can indicate otherwise, I am assuming that GoogleGuy's statement about getting the ok to go ahead with the removal of spam in the Brandy serps that has been reported to him, has not yet borne fruit. Patience is called for I guess.
Your expecting Google to actually do something like acting on spam reports? You have about as much chance as winning the lotto, which by the way I didn't win tonight.
Not trying to make it personal, just trying to offer some good advice and help you adjust your expectations.
I respect your right to express your view about Google not acting on spam reports. However, to tell me what to expect or not was, with respect, unnecessary. Like most people here, I am not naive about Google's strengths and weaknesses.
This is my take on this issue -
GoogleGuy has repeatedly stated in posts in this thread, and the original Brandy thread, that he wanted spam reports and other feedback from people here. He also went so far, a day or two ago, to say that he was seeking the ok to deal with the spammers.
If Google acts on the spam reports that GoogleGuy requested, then Google, surfers and bona fide site operators gain, so well and good. If Google doesn't act on the spam reports nothing is lost, so well and good again. So why not just expect nothing, while asking for something, and hope for the best.
Yeah, like that's gonna happen.
Here, you can have mine, I'm not using it.
"If I ever get a life"
Ain't it the truth!
