Official Google Guidelines Updated - Maybe

[bsand715]

Picked this up on the net:

Have confirmed with two Google employees that these new guidelines were put up by mistake and were not meant to go public yet. I just happened to notice them and I naturally wrote about them.

I have removed this post because I was writing about something that was not supposed to go live yet. I guess all I can tell you for sure is that there will be new guidelines at some point.

[feedthebot.com...]

Can anyone confirm we are getting new guidelines from Google?

[edited by: tedster at 1:57 pm (utc) on Sep 20, 2012]
[edit reason] added a ink [/edit]

[scooterdude]

Well, I think the trend off Governmental thinking now is that "Their property" is now so vast that it may now require 3rd party monitoring to ensure that dominant property position is not deliberately or inadvertently deployed in an anti competitive manner

I appreciate that a lot of folk have had such great experience of G's exercise of if dominant position, but to me, for some time its being evident that all interpret our dominant players intentions, thru the prism of their personal experience of that dominant player.

As an example, back in the days when netscape and others where taking their last stand against another behemoth, I didn't get what the fuss was about, I enjoyed using win95, vb was ace, all was well as far as I was concerned, I am sure others weren't so happy.

The ruling came too late for most of the complainants, but today, I can use firefox to install wordpress, in php5 on a IIS windows server, that mean any thing to anyone?

[Tonearm]

Avoid automatically generated content.

Any other comments on this? I have a fair amount of single-sentence content on various pages which is automatically generated, but not keyword-stuffed.

[tedster]

One common kind of automatically generated content starts from a base of either out-of-copyright content or scraped content. Then it get put through a spin cycle that generates semantic variation.

The end result is apparently a lot of content, but it is almost inscrutable to a human reader, or certainly very "shallow", no matter how long.

[blend27]

Any other comments on this? I have a fair amount of single-sentence content on various pages which is automatically generated, but not keyword-stuffed.

I have Ecom site that has over 900 pages that display larger images of products with Auto Generated 2 sentences that mention the widget it self with the link-back and a category it is in, link back to category, dominating Google Image search for the past 5 years. That is the only text on the page, overage 60 words, except "Buy Now" button.

[Rosalind]

To me the automatically generated content is the most interesting aspect, because almost all sites do it to an extent. How many generate rss feeds, category and tag pages, and other ways of presenting the same snippets in different contexts. A little is essential, but a lot of that creates duplication issues and thin pages. Think of an article tagged "strange widgets" and "bizarre widgets", when it's the only one with such a tag. It's an issue of poor usability (and waste of the crawl budget) when your website creates thousands of similar-looking stub pages.

So I wonder if that's the sort of thing they're getting at? Automatically generated could mean other things instead.

[Deltron Zero]

Do customer reviews count as automatically generated content?

[timwilliams]

Do customer reviews count as automatically generated content?

IMO, I think that falls in the User Generated Content bucket, which needs to be monitored for spam.

Auto-generated content is more like: "The best {insert color} Widgets in {insert city name}."

[jmccormac]

Just looking at the leaked guidelines mentioned above suggests that Google has completely lost control of its search engine and "algorithm". This is the kind of stuff that even a newbie search engine developer knows is important and should be able to handle. Google's mess is Google's mess but it seems to want the web to fix it.

Regards...jmcc

[Robert Charlton]

This is the kind of stuff that even a newbie search engine developer knows is important and should be able to handle. Google's mess is Google's mess but it seems to want the web to fix it.

I'm thinking that, going forward, Google might be looking at ways of targeting specific classes of transgressions, the way it did with the above-the-fold algo, to allow Google to maintain incremental granular control of its AI feeback mechanisms... and perhaps in some cases also to allow webmasters inclined to clean up their acts to do so.

Creating seed sets of sites that fit certain profiles is one way of doing this. As I read some of the new reviewer guidelines, that struck me as an approach Google might be taking.

[jmccormac]

Some types of problem website are simple to identify and a general solution can be put together easily. As for the spam in the comments section (that's typically user generated spam), that's even simpler to deal with from a search engine developer POV. Most of the sites that carry this spam in a fanged manner are abandoned or haven't been updated in ages. And if the comments are open then the junk comments are going to outnumber any real comments. Blogs have a very high rate of abandonment because most people don't bother updating them once they find out how hard it is to maintain a writing discipline. And of course Facebook has captured a lot of the people who would have been bloggers.

As for Google's AI, it all sounds very buzzwordy and attractive for clueless "technology" journalists but the reality of Search is that simple solutions work well by not allowing rubbish into the index. Once it is in the index, it is a far bigger problem and this is exactly what Google's Blind Crawling approach to search has created. Much of Google's approach seems to be that of people who really don't understand what they are dealing with (in terms of the web's diversity and half-finished nature) and hope that their algorithm can sort out the mess that results from spidering everything. While some level of human intervention in search quality is necessary, it would be better for Google if it came up with strategies to stop the junk getting into the index.

Regards...jmcc

[LostOne]

I'd rather see a mix of one e-commerce site plus 9 informational sites than that kind of duplication.

I'm sure everyone would want to see that, but is it reality today? I'm inclined to think not particularly since Google became a public company. It’s almost as if the algo is being fine tuned to think big business or almost becoming a shareholder voice. “We want profits.” There’s far too much emphasis on big brands, but I do see the reason behind the intent; Schmidt: “clean up the cesspool.”

I could bring up another point about big brands. If you look close enough, a good number of these sites (ecommerce as well) have similar characteristics with thin or spun content. Of course this can only be seen if you look back from the forest. Additionally, I found many of these sites conflict with two of Amit Singhal’s 23 signals that help determine a high quality site pointed out in May 2011.

[googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...]

I’ve added the word “big brand” to emphasize.

Does this big brand article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?

Not often because they’re general in nature.

Does the big brand article describe both sides of a story?

Rarely. It goes back to a point I’ve mentioned several times about how anyone that sells a product or service will never offer both sides because it places doubt in the front of consumers. Doubt that turns away sales.

Looking closer at the 23 signals that count as a quality site you could probably throw in more. Read into it. It’s obvious to me. I’m not saying all big brands have low quality, thin or spun content. It’s just that a number of interior fluff pages are showing up more and more. It’s almost as if all they have to do is create a title, slap a little content on it and bingo, it sticks to the top of the SERPS. The SERP landscape is also becoming eerily similar to the affiliate days with some searches providing nothing but sites that sell a product. Sites that also have pictures, price tags and very little content.

Is it done purposely? Are these sites farming and taking advantage of the algo? Maybe, maybe not. One thing is clear however, it ain’t good content.