What's the difference between a spammer & a new site ranking?

[gatormark]

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System: The following 5 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/5037667.htm [webmasterworld.com] by goodroi - 2:50 pm on Jun 13, 2021 (utc -5)

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My question to anyone out there reading…

What is the difference between what you call a spammer and a legitimate website that may be new?

Does the spammer use scraped content? Is there some other criteria that defines a spammer? The reason I ask is that in my niche, there are always new players. Some of those players gain traction and may eventually rank higher than me, but most will not.

[superclown2]

What is the difference between what you call a spammer and a legitimate website that may be new?

A spammer is someone using unethical means to promote a website with contents that are no real use to anyone but just designed to rise up to the top of the SERPs.

Rather like Google themselves, actually.

[christianz]

What is the difference between what you call a spammer and a legitimate website that may be new?

When I write about 90% of my backlinks being from spam sites I mean sites with auto generated gibberish word soup with scraped or hotlinked images.

There are spammy sites written by humans but those would never overwhelm my backlink profile or Google index like the onslaught of auto generated and scraped stuff that has appeared in past 2 years.

legitimate website that may be new

There are almost no legitimate websites that are new. Nobody makes websites anymore, because they don't get any traffic. All the new web stuff is usually made for ads / SEO exploitation or affiliate spam.

This might sound cruel but if Google deindexed all websites created within the last 3 years, it would be net positive for the internet, because 95%+ of it has no real value added. Because the WWW ecosystem is almost dead, thanks to Google.

[gatormark]

@christianz

“There are almost no legitimate websites that are new. Nobody makes websites anymore, because they don't get any traffic.”

I guess it just depends on your niche.

[superclown2]

Because the WWW ecosystem is almost dead, thanks to Google.

That bit at least I can agree with. In my vertical the only serious newcomers have been the megacorps who have hoovered up all the traffic. Other newcomers vanish quickly. I suspect that with the latest update that will at least continue and probably get worse. Right now, apart from said megacorps my only competitors are sites that have been there for years.

Looking at today's mobile search results, I seriously wonder if anyone (again, in my vertical) gets any business without paying for ads The organics are so buried as to be almost out of reach.

There may be some who can make money from the ads. I tried several times but so much click fraud there's no way I could make it pay.

[martinibuster]

Many sites with domain names beginning with the word "best" followed with the name of a product category are generally affiliate spammers with low quality product reviews.

Sites with an inadequate or missing "About Us" page are generally spammers.

Check out the Google Search Quality Raters guide (PDF) [guidelines.raterhub.com], as it provides a standardized way to judge a website. It's what Google created to standardize how their raters rate websites shown in tests.