Joeychgo
04-27-2006, 07:57 PM
I always tell people they should read and follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35772&topic=8521) and pay attention to them.
Many webmasters either dont take the time to do this, nor flagrantly ignore the guidelines, usually thinking they can get away with it.
Here is a snapshot from one of Matt Cutts' latest blog entries, where he is discussing Google’s Webspam team working with the Sitemaps team to alert some (but not all) site owners of penalties for their site via the sitemaps interface. (Read Blog Entry (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/notifying-webmasters-of-penalties/))
In this blog entry, Matt reveals just a few of the things Google can determine about your site.
In his blog, while referring to a screenshot of a particular webpage, Matt posts these comments:
From this picture alone, you can see that the site is doing
keyword-stuffing
deliberately including misspellings
nonsense or gibberish text, probably auto-generated by a program
you might be able to guess from the left-hand side and all the variants of “tax deferred” that there are many other pages like this. You’d be right: the site has thousands of doorway pages.
What you can’t tell from the snapshot is that
the site owner attempted to gather links by programmatically spamming other sites. Specifically, the site owner found a vulnerable software package on the web that doesn’t yet support the nofollow attribute (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html) for untrusted links, and then spammed several good sites trying to get links.
this site is also cloaking. Search engines get the static page loaded with keywords that you see. Users get a completely different page.
the pages returned to users employ sneaky redirects. Users get a small page with a JavaScript redirect and also a meta refresh; each page just does a redirect to the root page of this domain.
Given all this, would it surprise you to find out that when a user finally arrives at the root page, every single link that they are offered is a link that the spammer makes money from?Needless to say, I’d rather not tip off spammers like this when we find their pages.
I hope these two examples give you some idea of the sites that we’d like to alert (and not alert) to issues with their site. Just to repeat: not every site with a penalty will receive confirmation and the offer of a reinclusion request. But if this program works well, we’ll certainly look for ways to keep improving communication with legitimate site owners while not tipping off spammer sites.
As you can see, Google can see quite a bit, and I am certain that this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Many webmasters either dont take the time to do this, nor flagrantly ignore the guidelines, usually thinking they can get away with it.
Here is a snapshot from one of Matt Cutts' latest blog entries, where he is discussing Google’s Webspam team working with the Sitemaps team to alert some (but not all) site owners of penalties for their site via the sitemaps interface. (Read Blog Entry (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/notifying-webmasters-of-penalties/))
In this blog entry, Matt reveals just a few of the things Google can determine about your site.
In his blog, while referring to a screenshot of a particular webpage, Matt posts these comments:
From this picture alone, you can see that the site is doing
keyword-stuffing
deliberately including misspellings
nonsense or gibberish text, probably auto-generated by a program
you might be able to guess from the left-hand side and all the variants of “tax deferred” that there are many other pages like this. You’d be right: the site has thousands of doorway pages.
What you can’t tell from the snapshot is that
the site owner attempted to gather links by programmatically spamming other sites. Specifically, the site owner found a vulnerable software package on the web that doesn’t yet support the nofollow attribute (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html) for untrusted links, and then spammed several good sites trying to get links.
this site is also cloaking. Search engines get the static page loaded with keywords that you see. Users get a completely different page.
the pages returned to users employ sneaky redirects. Users get a small page with a JavaScript redirect and also a meta refresh; each page just does a redirect to the root page of this domain.
Given all this, would it surprise you to find out that when a user finally arrives at the root page, every single link that they are offered is a link that the spammer makes money from?Needless to say, I’d rather not tip off spammers like this when we find their pages.
I hope these two examples give you some idea of the sites that we’d like to alert (and not alert) to issues with their site. Just to repeat: not every site with a penalty will receive confirmation and the offer of a reinclusion request. But if this program works well, we’ll certainly look for ways to keep improving communication with legitimate site owners while not tipping off spammer sites.
As you can see, Google can see quite a bit, and I am certain that this is just the tip of the iceberg.
