Google Quality of Pages and Serps

just the biggest index "Searching 4,285,199,774 web pages"?

[ukgimp]

I don’t often start Google threads but I thought I would stick my oar in on something that I see more and more of and I thought I would comment.

I am sure you have all seen the “spidered” content that appears in the Google serps, you know the drill, absolutely useless crap that is ripped from mine and your pages. It is not even as if some decent cloaking has been put in place. Just blatant ripping of specific phrases, probably seeded from the sites that are in a typical Google SERP.

So these “search portals” or whatever you want to call them appear on the scene with absolutely no use apart from making the owners some cash :). So what are Google going to do about this and other serious degradations in search results?

I don’t have the answer by the way :)

[Brett_Tabke]

PageJacking is a serious (and growing) problem again. The big change has been that Yahoo's algo is more on the page focused than Googles or Ask Jeeves/Teoma. This has made it profitable for the page jackers to start spidering content again.

Then there are the search engines themselves. By displaying our pages from their site (they call it caching... it is not), they have distorted copyright law for their own advancement without prior permission.

Some plausible courses of action for webmasters:

a) add a no archive tag to all pages that are indexable by search engines.
b) protecting yourself from page jackers by cloaking.
c) running spider monitors to ban any thing that looks like an unacceptable spider on your site.
d) nuke the se's entirely and require cookies to navigate your site.
e) do D above but give the se spiders a cookie free pass.
f) require login and buy traffic from your neighbors site ;-)

The serps getting indexed is nothing new. That's been there since the start of the engines themselves.

[sem4u]

Yes but Yahoo does seem to have its own share of search engines listed in its results. They are different to Google but here is a small sample:

<snip>

etc.

[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 4:39 pm (utc) on April 6, 2004]
[edit reason] lets not go to urls - reread charter and tos please. [/edit]

[willybfriendly]

PageJacking is a serious (and growing) problem again.

Ah, that may help explain why I have had to send out 4 C&D letters in the past two weeks.

Thanks for the info Brett.

WBF

[Tom_Dalton]

So, here's a business model:

Allow people to register their content. A central content database, that people could use to prove the date of creation for their content. So when you write new pages, you just update your listing with them, and then in the future you can use them to verify that you were first to write something.

This could be a resource for you, when you go to the search engines to complain about duped content. Sort of like a subscription model of the Wayback machine.

[BigDave]

Allow people to register their content.

Up until we signed on to that stupid Berne Convention, the USA had a wonderful place where you could (and had to) do that. It is called the Library of Congress Copyright Office.

In fact, you can, should and must still register your copyright there if you want enforcement ability.

So if you want a way to prove it is yours, start registering all your pages.

[allanp73]

I got hit hard by a page jacker. The problem was they hit a new site that didn't have estiblished pr so it was dropped in favor of the page jacker's site. The funny thing was I knew the company that was doing the page jacking they were big long time ago when FFA pages were big. They jacked my site and 14,000 others. I tried contacting them but all their contact information was bogus. After calling the third pay phone, I realized there was a serious problem that had no way of being resolved. Now I am in the process of getting my lawyer to contact the jacker's hosting company. Hoping the nightmare will come to an end. I lost four months of business and thousands in income for myself and others.

[grant]

I've been noting these 'search portals' as well. I'm a bit perplexed by how well they rank for nearly every search term out there. Does anyone have an explanation for these high SERPs?

[ronburk]

Report them. Everytime I do a Google search and get utterly faked/useless results, I take 60 seconds and click the "help us improve" link at the bottom of the page and tell Google how bad it is when the #1 link for my search term actually has no useful information on it.

However, I do not do this when searching for something related to one of my own websites. I don't want there to be any question that I'm reporting a competitor. I report only on "real" searches that I did in civilian life.

[Hobbs]

I suffered this from another end of the spectrum, they never ranked higher than my pages but suddenly a notable percentage of the links pointing to my site became those kind of pages, while I did not enjoy any PR boose becaise of them, later on they started disappearing and and I got a PR -1.
Anyone else experiencing something simmilar?

[grant]

[quote]Report them.[\quote]

Yes, I did fill out a spam report. What is puzzling to me, however, is HOW do these "portals" (there is one in particular I am thinking about, I bet you all know who they are) consistenly rank high with no content for these terms? This portal has a PR of 5. I don't get it.