WebProNews

Tag: web spam

  • Google Accused Of ‘Double Standard’ Over Rap Genius Penalty Lift

    Google is being accused of employing a double standard for its handling of web spam and enabling one penalized site to recover speedily from a manual action. While the search giant has certainly been accused of double standards by angry webmasters many times over the years, the recent case of Rap Genius is generating a lot of discussion, and a bit of fury in the SEO community.

    Rap Genius was able to get out of the Google penalty box after just ten days after being caught in a very public and very obvious link scheme (which Google has been cracking down on vigorously throughout the past year or two). Some think Google has given the site unfair treatment in lifting the penalty so quickly.

    What do you think? Should Rap Genius be back in Google’s rankings so quickly? Share your thoughts in the comments.

    Rap Genius, if you’re unfamiliar with the site, is basically a lyrics site, but adds interpretation from users. It fancies itself a “hip-hop Wikipedia”. Users can listen to songs, read lyrics and click on pop-up annotations on lines of interest.

    Around Christmastime, Google took notice of a practice the site had been engaging in, after John Marbach blogged about it. Rap Genius took to its Facebook page (which has over 530,000 likes, by the way) to give its followers the following message:

    Do you have a blog? Do you wanna be a RAP Genius BLOG AFFILIATE? Help us help you! If you have a blog and are down, email me…

    When Marbach responded out of curiosity, asking for more details, he was greeted with this (image credit: John Marbach):

    Rap Genius email

    So yeah, a pretty blatant link scheme. Something Google isn’t shy about slapping sites over. Except in Rap Genius’ case, it only took ten days to get back into the rankings. This is pretty much unheard of. It’s left many in the industry dumbstruck.

    “Would any other webmaster with such a penalty be able to get back so soon? Doubtful,” says Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Land.

    SEOBook’s Aaron wall wrote a scathing post about the situation, noting that the tactic employed by Rap Genius was basically so spammy that most spammers won’t even attempt it:

    Remember reading dozens (hundreds?) of blog posts last year about how guest posts are spam & Google should kill them? Well these posts from RapGenius were like a guest post on steroids. The post “buyer” didn’t have to pay a single cent for the content, didn’t care at all about relevancy, AND a sitemap full of keyword rich deep linking spam was included in EACH AND EVERY post.

    Most “spammers” would never attempt such a campaign because they would view it as being far too spammy. They would have a zero percent chance of recovery as Google effectively deletes their site from the web.

    And while RG is quick to distance itself from scraper sites, for almost the entirety of their history virtually none of the lyrics posted on their site were even licensed.

    Rap Genius was recently targeted by the National Music Publishers Association for the unlicensed publication of lyrics.

    Robert Ramirez, a senior SEO analyst at big name firm Bruce Clay, Inc., wrote on Google+, “I work with small to mid-sized businesses that suffer from manual penalties all the time, and I have NEVER seen such a fast recovery. What made Rap Genius special? The $15 million in VC funding they recently raised? Their high profile?”

    He added, “Other businesses who find themselves penalized are DEVASTATED by these actions, they very often had no idea what they were doing to themselves when they paid an ‘SEO’ to build them links, but the loss of revenue, loss of jobs, loss of livelihood is VERY REAL, no less real or urgent than Rap Genius’ situation.”

    “I am working with two clients right now that are under manual penalties,” he wrote. “Their reconsideration requests were submitted through Google Webmaster Tools in mid-December, and to date there is no answer. I’ve seen reconsideration requests take longer than a month to be responded to. These are real businesses with quality websites that serve a real purpose and offer visitors a quality experience, their only mistake, they paid someone to build them links in the past because they were lead to believe that’s how ‘SEO’ was done.”

    Dan Rippon commented, “Obviously Google wanted to make a spectacle of the issue to highlight their anti-spam cause, but considering the plight of ‘Mom & Pop’ businesses faced with similar problems the level of double standards is pretty impressive.”

    A few more comments from the Twitterverse:

    Richard Hearne at Red Cardinal writes what many are probably thinking: “What’s especially disturbing about this is that sites which used directory and article links are still punished by Penguin 2 years later, but these guys who used the spammiest of tactics get off after 10 days.”

    Even music tech blog Hypebot is critical of the whole thing, saying, “This game really is fixed.”

    Some think that perhaps Google just made this move because Rap Genius actually has better content, and it wants to serve the best search results. Josh Constine at TechCrunch, for example, says Google is “favoring smart results over holding a grudge,” and that “Google apparently cares more about giving the best search results than punishing spammers.”

    Rap Genius put out a blog post detailing the steps it took to get back into Google’s good graces, which included contacting webmasters about link removals, and writing a scraper to gather URLs to have disavowed. They also used the post to promote an upcoming iOS app, which brings up another interesting point.

    As Wall noted in his post, Rap Genius has managed to get all kinds of promotion out of this whole ordeal in addition to getting its Google rankings back. In additionto all the mentions of its name, it’s getting a lot of high value links simply from being covered in the media. In other words, it’s entirely possible that Rap Genius will come out of this whole thing in better shape than ever.

    One thing Rap Genius does have going for it is verified accounts from many of the biggest names in rap (not to mention people like Sheryl Sandberg). That means trust and authority, and these are things that Google cares about a lot.

    Google itself hasn’t had a whole lot to say about the story.

    What do you think? Is Google unfairly helping Rap Genius or does the site deserve the rankings its getting? Let us know in the comments.

    Image: Rap Genius

  • Rap Genius Climbs Out Of Google Penalty Box

    As you may have heard, lyrics site Rap Genius was hit with a big Google penalty around Christmas time for unnatural linking practices.

    The site was telling people they could be a “blog affiliate” and get “MASSIVE traffic” when they posted Rap Genius links to Justin Bieber lyrics on their sites in exchange for tweets to the posts.

    Obviously, you can’t do that. Not for PageRank passing links anyway, if you want to remain in Google’s good graces.

    Google caught wind, and took action.

    Rap Genius remained out of Google rankings for about ten days, but it’s now back. Apparently Google views the site in a positive enough manner (in terms of quality) that the penalty has been lifted, with Rap Genius having cleaned up its act.

    “First of all, we owe a big thanks to Google for being fair and transparent and allowing us back onto their results pages,” the Rap Genius founders said in a blog post. “We overstepped, and we deserved to get smacked.”

    Rap Genius offers a history of its link-building practices here.

    Image: Rap Genius

  • Google Takes Action On More Link Networks

    Google Takes Action On More Link Networks

    Google has been cracking down on link networks, penalizing the networks and the sites that take advantage of them to artificially inflate their link profiles, all year.

    Google’s Matt Cutts hinted on Twitter that the search engine has taken action on yet another one – Anglo Rank:

    While engaging with the Search Engine Land crew on Twitter, he noted they’ve been “rolling up a few”.

    A giant ad for AngloRank can be seen at BlackHatWorld (h/t: Search Engine Land). It promises “high PR English links from the most exclusive and unique private networks on the web.”

    Back in May, Cutts announced that Google would continue to tackle link networks, and that in fact, they had just taken action on “several thousand linksellers”.

    More recently, Google took out the link network GhostRank 2.0.

    The moral of the story is: stay away from these networks, because Google will figure it out, and make you pay. But you already knew that.

    Image via BlackHatWorld

  • Cutts Talks Web Spam Fighting In International Markets

    In today’s Webmaster Help video from Google, Matt Cutts discusses the search giant’s efforts in web spam fighting around the world. Many of us are very used to hearing about the efforts surrounding web spam in the United States, but efforts in other countries aren’t discussed quite so frequently.

    Cutts responds to a question from an anonymous user, who asks:

    Is the Webspam team taking the same measures to counter spam in international markets like India like they do in the US market? It just seems like there are a lot of junk sites that come up in the first page of results when searching on google.co.in.

    “Remember, the web spam team has both the engineers who work on the algorithmic spam,” says Cutts .”We also have the manual web spam team, and both of those work on spam around the world. So, Google.co.in, you know, India…we want the algorithms, whether they be link spam or keyword stuffing or whatever to work in every language as much as we can. And so we do try to make sure that to the degree it’s possible for us to do it, we internationalize those algorithms.”

    “At the same time, we also have people, including people in like Hyderabad, who are fighting spam not only in English, and on the .com domains, but also in India, you know, .IN as well,” he continues. So we have people who are able to fight spam in forty different languages based around the world. At the same time, I would agree that probably English spam in the United States on a .com definitely gets a lot of attention because not every single engineer can speak French or German or a particular language, but it is the case that we put a lot of work into trying to make sure that we do internationalize those.”

    He adds, “Definitely if you see any results that are sub-optimal or that are generally bad, either do a spam report or show up in the webmaster forum, and drop a notice there. Feel free to send a tweet. That’s the sort of thing that we’re interested in, and we’d like to make sure that we do better on.”

    Cutts notes that they use the feedback they get to try to improve future iterations of their web ranking algorithms.

  • Google Penalizes Mozilla For Web Spam [Updated]

    Update: It turns out that Google only penalized a single page from Mozilla. Matt Cutts weighed in on the “penalty” in that same forum thread (hat tip: Search Engine Land).

    Google has penalized Mozilla.org, the nonprofit site of the organization that provides the Firefox browser. This doesn’t appear to be an accident like what recently happened with Digg. This was a real manual web spam penalty.

    Mozilla Web Production Manager Christopher More posted about it in Google’s Webmaster Help forum (hat tip to Barry Schwartz), where he shared the message he got from Google:

    Google has detected user-generated spam on your site. Typically, this kind of spam is found on forum pages, guestbook pages, or in user profiles. As a result, Google has applied a manual spam action to your site.

    “I am unable to find any spam on http://www.mozilla.org,” said More. “I have tried a site:www.mozilla.org [spam terms] and nothing is showing up on the domain. I did find a spammy page on a old version of the website, but that is 301 redirected to an archive website.”

    Google Webmaster Trends analyst John Mueller responded:

    To some extent, we will manually remove any particularly egregious spam from our search results that we find, so some of those pages may not be directly visible in Google’s web-search anymore. Looking at the whole domain, I see some pages similar to those that Pelagic (thanks!) mentioned: https://www.google.com/search?q=site:mozilla.org+cheap+payday+seo (you’ll usually also find them with pharmaceutical brand-names among other terms).

    In addition to the add-ons, there are a few blogs hosted on mozilla.org that appear to have little or no moderation on the comments, for example http://blog.mozilla.org/respindola/about/ looks particularly bad. For these kinds of sites, it may make sense to allow the community to help with comment moderation (eg. allow them to flag or vote-down spam), and to use the rel=nofollow link microformat to let search engines know that you don’t endorse the links in those unmoderated comments.

    For more tips on handling UGC (and I realize you all probably have a lot of experience in this already) are at http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=81749

    Also keep in mind that we work to be as granular as possible with our manual actions. Personally, I think it’s good to react to a message like that by looking into ways of catching and resolving the cases that get through your existing UGC infrastructure, but in this particular case, this message does not mean that your site on a whole is critically negatively affected in our search results.

    Let this be a lesson to all webmasters and bloggers. Keep your comments cleaned up.

    Mozilla still appears to be showing up in key search results like for “mozilla” and for “web browser”. It’s not as bad as when Google had to penalize its own Chrome browser for paid links.

  • Google: Are You Really Serious About Removing Web Spam?

    Dear Google: First and foremost, my letter to you is not personal. I am a big fan of yours and always have been. You have the best search engine in the World, better than Bing. You have the best web email service. Your Google Docs product is amazing. Don’t even get me started on Google Earth or Google Maps, just unbelievable products. Your analytics product is excellent. Everybody loves Android. All you do is create and create and still give it all away for free. Your Adwords business model is even shared with other businesses so they too can make lots of money.

    Obviously, you are a great company and despite what some believe, you are not evil. You are great for America and an asset to the World, in my opinion.

    However, when you stated the other day that you are taking steps to make sure web pages from content farms don’t show up prominently in your search results it follows that you Google believe that content farmers and web spammers are bad for the Web, or at least your search engine. You said it was feedback from your users that convinced you to go after these bad content makers. So Google, if they are bad (evil?) or simply not good for the Internet then why Google are they still your partners?

    It begs the question, if you are serious about making articles from content farms show up less in your top search results why don’t you just do it already?

    Here’s what I suggest:

    Step 1: Define what a content farm is. By the way, please also define what web spam is. I mean very specifically so that everyone knows what is and isn’t web spam. I think I understand what you are referring to, but I am not sure. I guess examples of sites that fit the various definitions of content farms, web spam and ‘mostly duplicate content’ … would be helpful. I would then suggest that you threaten them … again. That way the bad guys who are scared of you might just leave our Internet for a different one. Or, maybe they will change their behavior and start creating content that is not so bad. Right…. (sarcastic tone intended).

    But at least the sites on the edge of this behavior would know that they are OK by you and that they will continue to show up high in search results. There is nothing worse than not knowing if your business is about to implode.

    Step 2: Identify publically who the content farms are. Who are the companies? What sites do those companies own? Well, one company should be rather easy for you to identify Google because it has been widely referred to as a ‘content farm’ in thousands of news articles and is is about to go public. That of course is Demand Media. As I understand it, this would be the first content farm to go public and if they qualify as a content farm in your book, why not tell them and their potential new investors. They even stated in their IPO related filings that one thing that could hurt their prospects in the future is if Google took steps that would hurt their business such as giving them less prominence in the search engine or removing them as an Adsense partner.

    I am asking you Google for the sake of the potential shareholders of Demand Media to simply tell us if content from eHow and Demand’s other sites is considered by you to be of "poor quality". After all, if Demand Media who has a staff of SEO experts and has scientific algorithms designed to create content that will rank high in search engines and who pays just a handful of dollars per article or video and who shows up in your results for medical results right next to the Mayo Clinic and WebMD … is not considered a content farm, then who is?

    I have to believe that you believe they are the poster child of content farms. Obviously Google, the writers who produce content for article factories such as Demand Media are not doctors and have no expert basis from which to write such articles. Also, I am sure everyone would agree that all content from content farms is not bad. I recently watched a great YouTube video of theirs on how to make a cocktail. I really enjoyed it and learned something too. I don’t think that’s web spam at all. So the real problem is subject area right? If eHow has an article on changing your tire that’s probably OK, but if eHow has an article on brain surgery perhaps it shouldn’t be linked to at the top of your results, right?

    Step 3: Stop partnering with known companies who produce what you define as low quality content or web spam. I assume this would include Demand Media and all major content farms since the term "content farm" was a major part of Matt Cutts anti-spam blog post. Why Google do you allow sites with low quality content as defined by you to be included in your Adsense Partner Program? Or maybe you don’t and I just don’t realize it.

    Again, all of Demand’s content isn’t bad. In fact, my opinion is that most of it is pretty good. The problem is that Demand (and many others) pushed the envelope too hard with accepting expert style articles written by non-experts on subjects that one would expect an expert to write. Demand also SEO’s their articles so well that your Google search engine believes the articles are from experts. And because we users trust you Google we often assume that what we are clicking to from your top results is written by experts. 

    Matt Cutts also mentioned that Google was making a change to its algorithm, "..that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content". Does this include SeekingAlpha.com which derives revenue from Google Adsense and openly hosts duplicate content and appears high in Google search results? I read their stuff and I like it, but Techcrunch articles are on seekingalpha.com and so are lot’s of other blogs. Are you against duplicate content or aren’t you? I really want to know. I personally don’t see the big deal, but it’s only fair that if you Google are going to penalize sites that host duplicate content you should do it for all sites, not just the scrapers. Also, does this include article submission sites that often have copies of articles that appeared on the submitters blogs? Most of these article sites are your Google Adsense partners as well.

    My opinion Google is for you to consider ending your Adsense relationship with all content producers who don’t follow your search engine guidelines whether that means content farms, web spammers or sites that host "mostly duplicate content" even if they have a big web audience, look nice and professional and are a famous Internet brand.

    Step 4: If all else fails I suggest Google that you give web spammers and content farmers a taste of the directory massacre technique you employed a couple of years ago. Remove from your index all links to content from sites you identify as produced by content farms, web spammers or are largely and predominently hosting copies of content from others. Yes, content farms in particular have some good content but possibly a little good content collateral damage is OK in order to get rid of all the bad stuff.

    Removing all this bad content from your massive index Google will make the Internet a much better place for us all, won’t it?

  • Is Bing Growth Being Inflated By Shady Sites?

    Is Bing Growth Being Inflated By Shady Sites?

    Article updated. See below. I have also posted a new piece based on new information that has come to light.

    Facebook took in an estimated $1.86 billion in advertising revenue last year, according to eMarketer, and AdvertisingAge says that the top two advertisers were AT&T and Match.com. Google was number five. 

    It is the third-largest advertiser on Facebook, however, that has raised a few eyebrows, including those of Google’s Matt Cutts. The advertiser is something called make-my-baby.com – not a well-known brand that you’d expect to see in the top three.

    Update:  Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineLand writes: "An Ad Age article suggests that Make-My-Baby is Facebook’s third largest advertiser, based on a comScore report. But comScore tells me this isn’t so."  That certainly changes things, but it is still unclear where the confusion stems from, and it doesn’t really change what is happening, even if the ads aren’t being shown on as large a scale as initially thought (reports stemming from that AdAge piece have make-my-baby.com, which has now been taken down, buying 1.75 billion ad impressions in the third quarter alone). 

    Have you been to any sites lately that urged you to install a browser plug-in changing you default search? Let us know. 

    Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team, said the following in a Google Buzz update early this morning (via Marshall Kirkpatrick, who has an interesting write-up of the situation):

    Visiting make-my-baby.com instantly prompts you to install a browser plugin. The "terms and conditions" link takes you to http://mmb.bingstart.com/terms/ which has phrases like "If Chrome ("CR") is installed on your PC we may change the default setting of your home page on CR to Bingstart.com." 

    I also noticed this phrase in the Zugo toolbar section: "To uninstall the Toolbar, please visit the Toolbar FAQ ( http://www.zugo.com/toolbar/faq/ )." Sadly, that url is a broken link. It looks like a few people have had trouble uninstalling the Bing/Zugo toolbar, according to pages like http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/questions/746034 or http://mymountain.blogspot.com/2010/03/how-to-remove-bingzugo-toolbar-hijack.html

    If make-my-baby.com is Facebook’s 3rd biggest advertiser, I wonder how many people are installing this software without reading the fine print that says "Installing the toolbar includes managing the browser default search settings and setting your homepage to bing.com" ?

    The toolbar comes from a company called Zugo (as Cutts mentioned), which is apparently an affiliate company trying to drive traffic to Bing so it can make some money from Microsoft. After some discussion about the find, Cutts also says, "It’s entirely possible, even likely, that FB and MSFT didn’t realize this was going on. I wouldn’t assume they were aware of what was going on."

    Cutts did point this out to Bing publicly via Twitter, but there has been no response from Bing thus far (at least publicly). 

    @bing was reading http://goo.gl/CQIze and found some interesting stuff: http://goo.gl/1jac9 They bought 1.75M ad impressions on FB in Q3?less than a minute ago via webMatt Cutts
    mattcutts

    At the time of this writing, both Microsoft and Facebook have been silent on the matter (we’ve reached out to both for comment, and will certainly update if we get a response). 

    Update: We’ve now received comment from a Microsoft spokesperson, who tells us:

    "Distribution deals and affiliate programs are an important part of how all search engines introduce their product to customers. That said, we have been made aware of some practices that are in conflict with Bing's principles and are addressing them directly with this affiliate partner."

    Update 2: We’ve now received an updated comment from a Microsoft spokesperson, which now says:

    "Distribution deals and affiliate programs are an important part of how all search engines introduce their product to customers.   That said, we have been made aware of some practices from a specific publisher that are not compliant with the guidelines, best practices and principles put in place by Bing. As a result, the relationship with this publisher will be terminated."

    Update 3: We finally received comment from Facebook, and this one definitely changes things. Facebook’s Brandon McCormick tells us, "Not only is make-my-baby.com not one of our largest advertisers, they are not an advertiser at all.  In fact, their practices are against our ad policies and would be rejected as a result.  This is true whether they tried to run ads with us or an affiliate did."

    It would appear AdAge got some bad info, that set this whole chain of events into motion. I will be posting another piece on this with more clarification. 

    One has to wonder how much of Bing’s growth can be attributed to practices like this. It might not be a substantial amount, but on the other hand…third largest advertiser on Facebook? And this is just one example of a site like this. It didn’t take Cutts long to find several more with a quick search. There’s no telling how many site like this are actually out there. 

    Facebook Ads Reach Over 500 million people

    "It’s pretty remarkable that even at the top of this giant success story of Facebook advertising, and perhaps near the top of the story of Bing’s steady rise as a search engine, is a Web 1.0-style pulling the wool over the eyes of gullible internet users," says Kirkpatrick. 

    Bing’s share of the search market rose from 11.8% to 12.0% from November to December, according to comScore numbers released last week. 

    It’s worth noting, as mentioned by a commenter in the Buzz conversation, that Cutts broke this story using Google Buzz, which goes to show – it doesn’t matter if the site is called Twitter, Quora, or Google Buzz – if there is interesting content there, it’s got to have some value.

    Webspam in a growing problem. Watch our exclusive interview with Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta, who talks about the trend. 

    Update: Sullivan was sent a copy of the comScore report by AdAge. Apparently the confusion stemmed from make-my-baby.com being listed as the third largest adertiser in social networking, based on comScore’s information – a category, which was comprised of Facebook, MySpace, and other social networking sites). So while the site may not have been a big advertiser on Facebook, it would appear that it was still a big social media advertiser – and still a problem. 

    SEE NEW PIECE ON TOPIC WITH UPDATED INFO.

    Do you think sites like make-my-baby.com have contributed to Bing’s growth? Share your thoughts.