Google Is Cleaning Its Search Results: The End Of Spamdexing ?
Everyone is now aware that Google algorithm is based on popularity of the website being indexed. The popularity is measured by counting the inbound links to the website.
Unfortunately what was a clever way of indexing the web on the first place quickly became the main source of spamdexing for website designer seeking for easy money. The main used technique is referred to as “Link Farm“. The way Technorati ranks the blogs is also based on this technique (see Technorati Authority = Google Pagerank v0.01).
Google recently made a big cleanup of its database. There were a big fall of pagerank for these spam websites. They loosed up to 50 ranking points in the search results for relevant keywords.
Fighting spamdexing is tricky for Google. The search engine robot needs to recognize the relevant and consistent links from the organized reciprocal links. On way of solving this is to detect the patterns like A links B and B links A that happens too much to be true for a given website.
Spammers already changed their techniques by hiding the link exchange. Direct reciprocal link is too easy to detect and these will disappear from now on. Blog posts asking for backlinks have stopped their programs and websites are removing links in the bottom of all their pages.
The future is not so good for Google as it seems quite easy to make more clever use of link sharing that would be a lot more difficult to detect. One way could be to use patterns like A link B link C and C link A. And you can go deeper in the relationships if the organised community is made up with lots of websites.
Google can also use other ways of detecting websites that belong to the same owner because th provide services like analytics, adsense, webmaster tools, etc.
We’re just at the beginning of an endless fight !
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Posted in technorati, search engines, Google



June 11th, 2007 at 8:37 am
I bet a lot of spamdexing is caught simply by the linking pages used. It can’t really be that hard to see what otherwise are decent sites with link directories snuck into them for reciprocal linking.
The other thing I see a lot is reciprocal linking between marginal sites. It’s not a practice that’s common among sites who manage to earn links based on the quality of their content.
July 26th, 2007 at 10:22 am
Being omnipotent ain’t all that easy. Just think of it: lots of companies vitally depend on Google, i.e. they can pretty much cease to exist if Google just stopped showing their websites in relevant search results. Realizing this, I bet guys at Google dev team think twice before changing something… And spammers are just much more flexible, they are not bound by anything in sight. That’s why there will never be a winner in the endless struggle you mentioned, to our good maybe.
November 5th, 2007 at 12:51 am
You were writing some great stuff here. What happened?
November 5th, 2007 at 10:37 am
I’m so busy these days… But this blog is not dead yet, stay tuned !