Google December 2002 Update!

[ihadtoregister]

STARTED!

[steveb]

Careful, once you think you got a clue.... POW.

[GoogleGuy]

diggle, jady, if you want to fill in a fresh spam report, that might be the best way to tackle someone who is spamming. Sorry psoares, no dollar bills for each spam report. ;) Glad that most folks are enjoying the update and this thread. It's always fun to see what other topics come up. I'm learning a lot about art and other holidays today.

[jjdesigns4u]

I would like to thank Google for another great update that has brought even more of my listings to the top!

It is refreshing when all your hard, honest work starts to pay off.

Thanks Again to everyone in Webmaster World for all their insight and direction.

Here is to a great New Year!

:)

Jon

[nell]

>if you want to fill in a fresh spam report, that might be the best way to tackle someone who is spamming<

Congradulations!

First joke of the New Year goes to GoogleGuy!

.

[colemanator]

How do you file a spam report. I am not one to rat someone out, but another month has gone by and I am still being beat out by a few sites that have little to offer but candy for the spiders.

[nell]

Don't waste your time. Seriously. Google does NOTHING about them. At least several dozen times over the last 4 months I've reported the most blatant spammers and they still dominate Google search results whenever and wherever they please. I've included references to WebmasterWorld and GoogleGuy in all reports. The result of all efforts have done nothing more than make me feel like a damn fool for wasting my time.

[Anon27]

I asked this question earlier, & it went un-anwsered... :(

I see some sites of mine (new) appearing well for there keywords on DC1 & DC2.

Are they likly to settle there when the update is over, or are more factors going to change their current postion?

[daamsie]

I'm wondering what's going on with the DMOZ update.. The search tool on DMOZ says last update was in September. My site was listed in early December and although I still haven't seen it show in the search results, I HAVE noticed new links to my site appearing, clearly using DMOZ results!

Does this mean there has been a dump available to them after early December and if so, why hasn't Google picked up on that dump yet... or will they?

I can't wait to see what a Google Directory listing will do for my ranking!

[Zapatista]

In contradiction to Nell and her strong language, I have had luck in my spam reports. I was persistent and detailed. And I want to thank GG for encouraging others to take the time to fill it out. If the company rep is telling you to do it, then it's a sign they pay attention to some and want to improve search results.

Zapatista!

[Visit Thailand]

I hope Google will consider two major holidays which are coming up namely.

Chinese New Year (end of Jan) and

Thai New Year (April)

[przero2]

why the hell a red tape country like china's new year be considered by google ... wasn't google blocked by chinese rulers or whatever sometime ago;)

[Visit Thailand]

They do just happen to be one of the largest populations in the world, never mind richest and largest markets both domestically and overseas.

Why should Google not recognise one of the most important days for such a large number of people.

It is about the people not the Government.

[daamsie]

I think they should consider my birthday end of Jan.. forget the chinese new year ;)

[GoogleGuy]

nell, we've done better lately not just on using spam reports to improve our algorithms, but also to respond to reported problems. One other explanation might be that we've got different ideas of how bad something might be. I would estimate that 4-5% of spam reports are things that we don't think are spam. Also, changes and penalties can take a while to go into effect.

One thing to bear in mind is that as we improve our automation for things like cloak-checking and hidden text, the spam reports are the first place we look for testing. Sorry you've had a bad experience so far, but I wouldn't give up on them yet.

[Beachboy]

<<I would estimate that 4-5% of spam reports are things that we don't think are spam.>>

Actually I'm a bit surprised that figure is so low, given all the disagreement here at WW about what is or is not spam. I take that to mean that 95% of the time, when almost anyone hereabouts accuses someone of spamming, that Google will agree. Interesting.

[NovaW]

I've filed a few spam reports on really blatant spam - Each time I put a mention of webmaster world & google guy in the report (as was suggested by googleguy) - each time within 2 or 3 days the spam was gone completely.

[GoogleGuy]

Glad it's been responsive for you, NovaW. I'd be curious to see what it looks like if each person reported the biggest spammer that they've seen. Ones with a lot of domains, or that come up way more often then they should. That would be pretty interesting data.

I wonder who the biggest spammers are these days. Don't mention names here, but if you have a strong opinion--feel free to fill out a spam report. :)

[Bio4ce]

This is my first real crack at getting a good listing on google. The site has been up for a couple of months with new content added at the end of Nov. The site was designed to target specific search terms

I just checked www,www2,and www3 for one of my search terms. www shows nothing. www2 and www3 shows a listing way down in the cellar at 217. Not what I was hoping for. Is this where I can expect to dwell for the next month? Or will things continue to change and therefore, all hope not lost? I've also noticed that my PR has fluctuated between 4 and 5.

Thanks.

[nell]

I may as well delete the whole post. It's meaningless now.

[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 4:27 am (utc) on Jan. 2, 2003]

[edited by: nell at 4:31 am (utc) on Jan. 2, 2003]

[Beachboy]

Yeah that's pretty spammy, all right. Virtually identical content over a lot of different domains. But no redirects.

But you could have this guy for lunch. Get a few quality inbound links with the right anchor text in place and you will be sitting on top of him. None of his sites are all that strong. :)

[daamsie]

That webmaster gets a big thumbs down from me!

Ban them all ..

[swizz]

Answer for daamsie -> thread #188.

The ODP dump is as far as I know still failing to build, so I think there will be no Google-Directory listing for new pages on the ODP for a while, Since the ODP is a non-profit section for Netscape they are only provided with one engineer, and she has other stuff to do, so I think we will just have to wait until next update... :) maybe ...

If you want to check the RDF dump status got to [dmoz.org...] or just check it at [dmoz.org...] you will see that the RDF dump structure is still 22. September :(

Happy new year! :)
Steven

[Zapatista]

Nell, plse sticky me with that spam report. darnbarn might be interested in it as well.

Thanks

[dauction]

Bio, Unfortunately yes..

you need LOTS and LOTS of links to rank on a first page UNLESS you target a keyword that has little competition..

Check out the number of "results" for your "keyword" search.. anything over 500k is going to take a lot of work and LINKS LINKS LINKS to get you on the front page..2nd page (the only pages that matter)

Now if the results for your keyword search is say 20 thousand pages .. you can rank fairly easy ..but then again you're not going to generate much traffic.

It sounds like you have only have one site you are working on?

If thats the case ..just forget about Google and concentrate on getting in as many of the other SE's as possible as you build my pages and gather links..

If you are trying to rank high on a popular term it's damn near impossible..best to spread out and pick up as much traffic as you can from a diverse collection of keywords spread ocross your entire web site( with appropriate content)..

[qball0213]

Okay, I'm seeing something weird, according to <snip - no tools URLs per TOS> only one data center has been updated, on that data center, some new pages that just got in for me are nowhere to be found on their specific search terms, on the ones with the old index such as www-va.google.com I'm ranking well for the same search terms, but the new pages shouldn't even be in the old index. Is this normal? Does it have something to do with page rank, etc?

[edited by: Marcia at 8:18 am (utc) on Jan. 2, 2003]
[edit reason] snipped tool URL [/edit]

[dauction]

nell, You can PM me also the spam link.. I have a "collection" of spammers/cheaters I keep updating

[Beachboy]

The keywords Nell referenced return 102K on www3.google.com, and the first page of results is filled with one guy's sites, top one is a Geocities subpage, PR difficult to determine for reasons discussed elsewhere, but the rest are all PR3. It would not be tough to beat this guy.

[qball0213]

Dauction,
I get some good traffic from some searches that have results of less than 20,000 pages, that just means not too many people have figured some of them out yet.

[Zapatista]

102k results, pr 3? Most folks here could whack that guy in their sleep.

Fuhhgedabboudit

[skylighter]

I put up a page on December 12. I submitted to DMOZ and my link was added there within days. I am not in the Google Directory as of yet. I also have about 50 sites that are linking to me none of which are spam sites or link farms. My logs report that GoogleBot visited at 8:30 AM Dec. 31. As of today, my PR reads "not currently ranked". After I change my HOSTS file, it reads PR 0. I doubt that I have been banned because I have not done anything that is remotely cheating. I was wondering when I should expect Google to actually give me a real Page Rank.

skylighter