Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Does Google's short-term revenue mindset, for permitting Black Hatters trick their engine for inclusion who promote Adsense, outweigh their long-term goal of sustaining their dominance in the Search Engine market?
Clearly, the value of Google's index is going down across the board, since they do nothing to permit spam entries. The BH'ers enter spam sites faster than they are "manually" deleted by Google.
So, will Google's short-sighted approach to revenue backfire?
My interpretation is, that without question, they are shooting themselves in the foot. MSN and Yahoo have better control of the situation, and upstarts like ASK.COM, really have the potential to become the next Google.
Why is it that Google has not tackled the inclusion of spam sites into their index problem?
Vote here:
1) They love their short-term AdSense revenue, and don't care
where it comes from;
2) They are not capable technically of handling this problem;
3) OTHER (please specify)
[edited by: tedster at 1:12 am (utc) on Sep. 2, 2006]
It's not at all clear to me that the value of Google's index is going down across the board. Several of the markets that I work in are showing the best SERPs I've ever seen. And talking about the competition...
1. MSN just completely backed out of an update. An honest move, yes, but a sure sign that they are still struggling. MSN is just not a search "destination" for most people -- mostly it's just existing MSN clients, from what I can see.
2. Our Yahoo forum also has a good bit of complaint. Some of the posts over there are almost a carbon copy of the Google complaints in here -- just change the name! The way I see it, people working with problems will tend to post more often than people for whom everything is working out well at the moment. Happy campers have other fish to fry.
3. I agree that Ask.com does a good job, too. But they are also not a big spammer target right now, mostly because the payoff isn't there. A spammer goes where the ROI is, just like any businessman would.
Ask is also far behind Google in infrastructure. And to really be a contender, the hardware learning curve alone will be sizeable (and expensive!) However, I certainly don't discount Barry Diller's team (and his cash.) Just pointing out what I'm sure they know -- it's a long road and a big job.
How can anyone at Google handle a problem when the problem is still unsolved after 8 months of the same old crap.
Crap - spam in 90% of a serp when it returns 20 million results.
Allinanchor - Spam mixed in authority sites, results ommited after 75 results out of 13 million on 1 term I monitor (many other terms also look the same).
Allinanchor is broken, site: is broken = link: is broken.
Malware - Google is now filled with sites containing viruses and those malware sites rank high because of the authority .edu domain.
Conclusion - I'm tired of typing about it, Google is just another greedy irresponsible corporation.
Google should focus more on removing bad webspam and not waste time on giving 4 page penalties to affiliate websites that have been reported by envious competitors and not real searchers. I have some pretty harmless mini sites with ~40 pages and ~30 visits per day and I must say I'm astounded by the amount of attention these sites get from both competitors and Google.
Does Google's short-term revenue mindset, for permitting Black Hatters trick their engine for inclusion who promote Adsense, outweigh their long-term goal of sustaining their dominance in the Search Engine market?2) They are not capable technically of handling this problem;
I'm with number 2. They're not permitting anything, they just don't have the machinery for cleaning out all of the instant spam sites. Of course, many of them were created because of Adsense; that particular commercial enterprise has done more damage to the internet than anything that came before. There are many grubby little people feeding crap into cyberspace, and G is drowning in the resultant pile of dross (which it is the midwife of). But it isn't a conspiracy so much as an example of what can go wrong when most of the participants in a project think primarily in terms of greed.
a) msn - complete waste of time, zero search experience and a team just playing at search. Only hope for them is to scrap it and big pockets bill buy out Yahoo and use their technology - even with ie7 i cant see msn search in its current format increasing its market share - so why bother. All msn have done so far is waste money on search and produce serps that get worse with every update they roll out - you couldnt make it up!.
b) Yahoo - currently not as good as it could be but it has link and site history behind it, more data to pull on than msn have so they COULD offer something special but lets face it, only a few months back they as good as gave up saying they couldnt compete with Google - i dont think they are that bothered, do you?.
c) ASK - a dark horse?, results are not bad imo but again they lack reach with such a low reach they have a long way to go.
As i see it in the UK the reach is as follows:-
Google - 75%+
Yahoo - 12%
MSN - 6%
ASK - 4%
Other 3%
Its a one horse race as i see it.
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