Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
It strikes me that if Google can't see the problems for themselves, then relying on spam reports is not going to achieve much overall. I thought they tried to identify tactics and adjust algos to weed out spammers on mass. Spamming is not rocket science and by now they should know all the tricks. Why have they started looking at it in such an inefficient way?
Have they run out of better ideas?
What I am wondering is: Looking at a jagger2 search result that contains up to 80 per cent pure spam and/or black hat techniques on the first page, where is the point in reporting spam? This turns out to be endless, and it could take hours to weed out the results - and this is just for one single phrase. And for stuff that HAD BEEN fixed already, i.e. it was machine detectable before.
The relevance of this, is that some people suggest o here that Google wants to increase revenue with the new update, as much as provide an update on the SERP's.
I think that Google has realised that it cannot stop spam through algo's / filters alone. By encouraging spam reports it is allowing human judgement a bigger role. And human judgement is always going to be better than algorithms at weeding out bad sites in the ever changing spam game.
Think about it, if Google had stayed algo-only there would be no end to this algo change > tweak site > mcdar / webceo cycle. Google would never have great serps and would waste massive amounts of time and money spidering and tweaking.
As it is, Google will soon have human verified serps in most sectors and can then, once it has trust in the existing sites in the serps, shift it's energy to policing newcomers.
For me Jagger (so far anyway) represents a huge leap forward in attitude form Google that has set it apart from the other search engines and will keep it ahead for a long time.
All these spam reports that must be flooding in now give them a vast expanse of information to work with.
It's all about Google trying to establish trust in Webmasters.
Perhaps they will see new tactics and adjust the algo but in this frenzie of reporting I think the bigger picture is being lost. Its a great way to appear 'caring' towards webmasters in this forum but ultimately it is a stitch up.
If I wanted to soften the impact of a big mistake I would:
1) Say its rolling out over several weeks.
2) Ask for key players (webmasters) for help and appear to be responding.
3) Blame canonical technical problems that seems to be very complicated and a bit woolly.
returning now wordsmeant to read 'returning no words'
