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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.
Comments:
SearcH EngineS WeB
11/28/2006 01:09 pm
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
BabyFace
11/28/2006 03:02 pm
Hey Barry, if you want examples of junk that's been showing up in the last few days check out this query for "casino bonus", http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=casino+bonus&btnG=Search Notice the Google spam exploit :)
Matt Cutts
11/28/2006 03:59 pm
BabyFace, that example happened as spammers were trying to get links from google.com/pda%7E and we stopped allowing links like that. But all those pushbutton programs are still linking to those urls. The Google urls aren't crawled, but since they're forbidden by robots.txt, they show up as uncrawled urls (thus the missing cache link). I'll ask someone to look into this case, but it's definitely a corner case that we were already watching, not a general problem. I agree with Barry that I prefer to see concrete reports, not discussion without specifics. But I'll certainly ask someone to check out the sites that crobb305 mentioned.
Gabs
11/28/2006 04:19 pm
casino bonus hehhehe :D Not seeing any differences in my watch list ??
Gabs
11/28/2006 04:20 pm
FOUND ONE http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=viagra&spell=1 #3 AND #4 ..
Gabs
11/28/2006 04:22 pm
Those .ac message board are using refferal spam.. always in my logs and its working for these guys..
Gabs
11/28/2006 04:48 pm
My comment before got blocked sorry .. I'd searched for v i--a -- g r a on google.co.uk Reffering spamming seem to be winning with .ac comments FFA's