Monthly Archives: May 2009

Google’s Best Spam Weapon is it’s Indexing Intelligence

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Just a short post on how Google combats spam with it’s indexing, or lack there of. Anyone that’s been around for a while will know that it’s better to target long tail traffic for several reasons:

1) It converts very well
2) It’s easier to get that the competitive phrases

As your skill develops, you start to build these “mega spam sites” that offer little value to the web in general and are just built out of pure greed. You build them in hope of capturing a lot of long tail traffic, stuff that is highly unique, three four and five word phrases. Because, there are so many option and variants, you build hundreds of thousands of pages, as you try to cover every possible angle, as people searching for purpose built pages will almost certainly find yours first and visit your site. It’s a magnet for traffic and business.

And then you run into a problem…Google will only index a very small percentage of your site, and try as you might you just can’t get it to index a meaningful amount of the pages to deliver the traffic you so badly want.

If you are really on top of your game you can get around it without too much expense or time, but it closes the door to many spammers having a go.

Social Media Networks are Highly Effective at getting Rid of “Linkbait”

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There is always a bit of chatter about what Google will do when Social Media Linkbaiting becomes so mainstream everyone will be doing it. Will they De-value the particular page if it has a high ratio of social media links indicating that this pages authority was driven by social media linkbaiting, or will they simply not trust a site that has “social media spam” signals?

Personally, I don’t think they will have to do a thing. The Networks are doing a very good job at stamping out what is deemed to be spam. Digg installed a toolbar to artificially inflate it’s traffic whist making it almost pointless to spam Digg anymore as lazy bloggers will be linking to the short Digg URL instead of the targeted one. Reddit has become heavily moderated and now deletes many stories, while others get too many downvotes to reach the from page. Finally, Stumble Upon’s algo has advanced quickly and not nearly as many stories are getting 5 stars and going popular. Also, Stumble Upons traffic is of a much lower quality that of Reddit or Digg (you didn’t think it could get any lower right!), but it can! Stumble Upon’s users are much less likely to link, that’s because the profile of the users is different to those of the other two main networks in that stories are random and forced and not chosen.

Of course, there are other networks, Plurk, Twitter, etc, but in our experience, these do not work well for “links”. I think “link baiters” are being forced to go and find new ways to get links while staying within Google’s guidelines.