spamming. It's all hype isnt? Nothing to worry about

rival site has real dodgy links but is not banned in google

[Frank_Rizzo]

counting the links to a rival site of mine:

fast 4,511
google 236
altavista 157

I was intrigued as to why fast were showing 4,511. On exmaining those links I see the site is using some kind of package which 'weavers' its way to 'position'

they have hundreds of pages stuffed with keywords thus:

www.rivalsite.com/wayin/widgets1.html

we are the best for widgets,we are the best for widgets,free widgets,we are the best for widgets

x 100

there are hundreds of these pages, all stuffed with keywords, all linking back to www.rivalsite.com

Ok, so maybe fast is not too bothered about this. But shouldnt google be? Doesnt google detect this kind of shenanigans and flag it as spam?

The rival site has good positions and homepage is a pr5.

What is the point in us worrying about a litle bit of crosslinking and the odd doorway page when all this blatant spamming is going on?

[Beachboy]

Good point! No, Google apparently doesn't penalize for this kind of abuse unless it's pointed out to them, but I expect it won't be long before they do.

Given that FAST counts those doorway links and Google only shows 236 inbounds, I assume that Google did detect the doorways and discounted their importance.

AltaVista went on a rampage against machine generated doorway pages some years ago, it appears that they also rejected them in this case.

PR5 is good but not exceptional. It seems to me they could be knocked out of first place with a little effort.

It's unfortunate that we need to watch for crosslinking problems, but we do. Such is life.

[Frank_Rizzo]

makes ya wonder if the good guys finish last eh?

Ok, I have (a friend eh heh) who has done something not as bad as keyword stuffing page spamming.

What he has done is to use his database on lets say (rock bands) and generated lots of pages thus:

main site is www.rockwidgets.com, doorway site is www.widgets.freeycrappywebhost.com

he has run a program which generated pages relevant to his database entries.

www.widgets.freecrappywebhost.com/zedlepplin.html

which contains simple text similar to

"zedlepplin are a rock band who had 20 top 10 hits. Their first album was released in 1963. Too see more information on zedlepplin please visit www.rockwidgets.com"

next will be a page called meatwoodflac.html

"meatwoodflac are a rock band who had 5 top 10 hits. Their first ....."

Get the point?

I would can it pseudo spam. It doesnt generate pages of mindless guff. It does generate pages of useful, simple information which then entices the viewer to go to the main site. The information is relevant - says how many top ten hits the band had, and when they first released an album.

What do you reckon? Is my (uh huh), friend doing anything bad? I dont think he is because the generated content is offering some useful information which then says goto main site for full information.

[ciml]

Frank, the context of your post may indicate an intent to do wrong (from a search engine point of view), but there's no particular reason why you can't split content onto ten pages where one would do.

However, in Google you're only giving as much PageRank and link-text authority to your core site as the parallel site gets in the first place. If there's a reason why people might prefer to link to the parallel site instead of your main site (or if they might link to both) then you may benefit. Otherwise, I don't see any advantage.

[Frank_Rizzo]

ciml, I'm thinking more of boosting ranking on the other sites. Mentioned here in google section because it seems google is not penalising sites that are blatantly spamming.

My method is offering some value content and is just there to pick up spare traffic from other engines.

I have spotted another competitor who is down right damn cheeky. He's got about a dozen sites on different businesses. I counted something like 27,000 auto generated pages which were indexed in fast. These contained a clever technique of linking cities to pop bands.

e.g. there is a page called britneyspears in it is a table listing "buy tickets for britney at Orlando", "buy tickets for britney at Atlanta" etc. Each page then has links back to all the other businesses.

I'm not saying this is a good idea. I think it is downright despicable.

But my idea makes sense I think.

[Marcia]

Frank, you'll always find things like that. It's been going on since the beginnings of search engines, when people first figured out that they could do *things* to manipulate rankings. It's almost like a game of cat_and_mouse that's gone on. And it'll always be that way; there are always new tricks to come up with.

Here's the danger I see in emulating what we find. It's totally unprovable, but I've got a theory that Google (and maybe others, too) knows exactly what's in there, just as much as any of us can. It's my theory that Google deliberately leaves a certain amount of what's considered spam in there, and keeps watch. If webmasters come up with tricky things, if they're left in the engineers can watch for the next brilliant maneuvers they come up with. Where else can they, or anyone else, learn? Nobody has yet publicized their triumphant techniques for spamming.

I believe (again - totally unproven) that if a certain class of "spam" is penalized and/or removed, it's not impossible that some might be left in specifically and deliberately. If that were the case, anyone who copied what they saw could end up being very sorry and not know what hit them.

Rather than emulating or getting aggravated, just looking on the positive side and using it as a research tool to better understand how the search engines work would probably be the most productive thing to do.

[fathom]

Frank

fast 4,511
google 236
altavista 157

It seems like there are dramatically different number here between SE's. To a certain extent google is penalizing them since the bulk of the backlinks are garbage.

Getting 240 quality links in google seems like a better choice.

In addition, if you compare google-eyes to fast-eyes, google is hands-down the winner.

Spam is spam, and just because we here, are designers, developers, coders, planning and SEO'ers doesn't mean the rest of the world is blind to SPAM. They know what it is as well.

Quality content, quality code wins with quality performance in quality search engines everytime especially when algo's change to combat that spam.

If your on that side of the fence when it happens... it will hurt, deeply!