feeding google-results back to google

or: the recursive curse, and how its diluting SERPs

[eraldemukian]

my situation is a little bit different: my site's name is a word that was invented for the site, and did not exist before. Along the lines of 'all your serps are belong to us' it makes tracking backlinks and mentionings pretty easy. Slowly the site crawled up to about 200 mentionings in about 2 years time. I only wish that google would count all those back links.

But that is beside the point. Since a couple of days I find around 300 pages for that term of mine. The usual results are trailed by 100 sub-domained paged from only a few hosts. They do contain almost verbatim what appears to be the google results for certain searches. Somebody is feeding google to itself.

Its surprising to me that these people were able to:

- spider google for as many terms as they apparently did
- were able to put that many pages in the current index

and bypassed all checks and balances.

You never know, one day somebody forgets to block the googlebot from botting google.com and the whole things
falls into one big infinite loop, just to burp out '42' after some time.

Seriously: Those results are not a problem for me, since the
bloated pages are returned after the rest. Its just a waste of space, and potential problem, if those pages get better ranking ...

But maybe its only me, again.

[takagi]

I see them more and more, pages in the SERPs that contain a SERP. It's an easy way to create a page with a nice keyword density, relevant outbound links, put the keywords also in the title and at the top of the page and it ranks not so bad even with a low PR.

For the short term it's bad for the users of SE's (and therefore also bad for the SE's themselves) because these pages have no added value. Besides, some of these pages are cloacked so the SE user doesn't even see the same page as the SE did. If the SE's don't filter it then in the long run it's even worse. Because of the recursive nature of it, new sites will have a hard time to get a nice ranking because existing sites will have bonus inbound linkes from all these fake pages.

[idoc]

I have seen the same thing with a bit of a different twist. The serps that appear to be google serps also contain the company trademarked name along with the snippet found from a google serp. It is a contrived name and being not a common word...a search for the company name now returns a result link in google that redirects to an affiliate tracking page belonging to a direct competitor. It is not of course above the real corporate site for a company name search, but still sometimes on page 1 of the result set.

I tracked the website owner and asked these specific pages be removed or edited and they did comply after first denying it. I had to show them the uncloaked page to get cooperation...problem is every day now I see more of their pages doing the same. Because we had pages in the top ten for alot of keywords in google, I wonder if there will soon be hundreds of these pages. I am about to the point to call in the corporate suits to deal with these guys.

I dont think they are spidering google or anything so sophisticated. They simply are probably querying google for a term, caching the result set and adding it to a page with the query term the page title and inserting the query in H1 text at the top of the page of results.

I wonder if google cares about this...this should be a situation they care about IMO anyway. Wouldn't they consider their serps to be theirs alone? They didn't let Y use their data for free, why should they let these type operators do it?