November 28, 2006
Google Spam Filters Not Working As Planned?
I often hate reporting on threads that do not have any direct link to examples but sometimes you have to trust certain members. A thread at WebmasterWorld has senior member crobb305 claiming that for many searches he is finding "loads of junk and subdomains moving back in" the top results at Google. This is something we have seen with MSN search in the past.
crobb305 continues by explaining;
I sent about 8 "spam" reports in through the Webmaster Tools console. I rarely report stuff, but these urls are junk redirects. One was a blank page!
The thread does have some examples of searches and more discussion backing crobb305's feelings.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
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rustybrick in Google Optimization at November 28, 2006 7:45 AM
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The spam filters may in fact be working - but unlike manual human filtering - when ALGOS are used to filter there are FALSE POSITIVES.
So one possibility, is that there were enough complaints to Google to make them aware of the innocent sites that were also being victimized by the previous spam filtering Algos. So, perhaps they had to relax their standards to find a fair balance. There will always be sites that sneak-through...just as there are good sites that are victims. So a balance has to be established, and based on public complaints they may manually ban or demote spam sites and further tweak their algos.
Programming has to do the work that would otherwise require the efforts of millions of Human Beings working continuously
Posted by SearcH EngineS WeB at November 28, 2006 08:09