At the recent Web 2.0 expo (which I totally wish I went to), Matt Cutts presented on "what Google knows about spam." I actually watched the 9+ minute video (yay me!) and found it informative. Basically, he summarizes a few...
At the recent Web 2.0 expo (which I totally wish I went to), Matt Cutts presented on "what Google knows about spam." I actually watched the 9+ minute video (yay me!) and found it informative. Basically, he summarizes a few...
search_engine981:http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/017077.htmlAnn Smarty goes through the conflicts of reporting competitors as spamming Google search results. Yes, this is a topic we covered many times here, including: Reporting Spam: Is It EthicalHow Can I Report Spam to Google?Google Spam Reporting WorkingDoes Google...
I'm sure you've seen those URLs -- www.domain.com/4-star-hotel-in-barcelona-spain.php. The question is: is this a tactic that we consider spammy? Not really, according to a High Rankings Forum thread. On the other hand, if it was www.domain.com/4-star-hotel-apartment-penthouse-keyword4-keyword5-keyword6-in-barcelona.php, that may raise some...
According to Aaron Wall, since Mahalo adds no value (if you remove the links which point to other pages on the Internet), it violates Google's spam guidelines. While many people, particularly SEOs (who have been frustrated with Jason's commentary in...
Warning, clicking on the following Google search result may return an image of extreme pornographic nature. The image is of a woman's vagina and is found on a pornographic site, but the image appears to be hosted on Google's Blogger...
Aaron Wall discovered a Google Spam document that he then shared with his readers. Brian Ussery archived the entire spam recognition guide for our perusal (here) and explains that while he had initial doubts about the authenticity of the document,...
Ann Smarty poses an interesting question on Search Engine Journal. As blogs are communities, it's useful to comment and leave your thoughts. But what if you add your link to the comment? Is it spam? There are numerous tools that...
A Google Groups thread has several smart webmasters aiding a webmaster who found links on his site via the Google cache. In short, the links are not visible when viewing the page in the browser, but they are visible when...
A couple of active Google Reader users have reported at a Google Groups thread that someone or something is injecting spam into their daily reading. It is really hard to determine how this is being done at this point (i.e....
Our beloved Google Groups was hit with some forum spam the other day. A Google Groups thread in the Webmaster Help section reported it back on January 30th. Duncan at TechCrunch reported it a day earlier with his Go To...
As you may know, the highly popular Sphinn Internet Marketing Forum is looking for ways to get better. So they're proposing a Desphinn button which will work much like a "Bury" button that you see on other social networks. If...
If you see spam in Google search results, you can report it to Google using the Report a Spam Result link. Google claims that they take these allegations seriously and investigates them to see if the results are spammy. A...
Yesterday we reported that MSNBot failed some reverse DNS tests. In short, if you did a reverse DNS lookup on the IP addresses of their spiders, it would not resolve to search.live.com. The big issue with this is that Webmasters...
I have been corresponding with Microsoft about the weird spam-like referrals Live Search was sending to hundreds, if not thousands, of web site log files throughout the web. On September 6th, a Microsoft representative confirmed that these were actual tests...
Remember back in September we reported about Chinese-like .CN TLDs spamming the heck out of Google's search results? Well, it appears that a study was done by Sunbelt Software that showed "27 different domains, each with up to 1,499 [malicious]...
What SEO doesn't like talking about spam? Now add a newly granted Google patent that talks about spam and an SEO is in heaven! Bill at created a Cre8asite Forums thread about a new granted patent named Methods and systems...
A DigitalPoint Forums thread asks, can multiple hyphens in a domain name raise a red flag with a search engine? For example, if you have a domain name that is something like www.buy-shoes-now-online-for-cheap.com, would that type of domain raise a...
What happens if you discover a folder on your server that has a bunch of spammy content that has no relevance to your site whatsoever? Typically, Google will deindex your site when it discovers this content. Therefore, you need to...
Over at Cre8asite Forums, moderator Barry Welford has spotted an anomaly with the results of Google Blog Search when compared to Google's relevant search results. Barry asks what drives the poor quality of these search results. Perhaps it is the...
A WebmasterWorld thread reports that many of the proxy highjack pages for your domains have been removed from Google. Proxy highjack pages are basically pages that try to outrank yours for the same keyword phrases, and thus replace your pages...
Over at the Google Groups forum, yet another Googler said that bad links to your site cannot hurt you, at least for the most part. Wysz, a Googler, said in response to someone being worried that a spammy site is...
There are several reports across multiple forums about a large update at Google. It appears people are noticing large search results shifts at Google Web Search. Some are obviously happy with the changes, such as one user at Search Engine...
There is a DigitalPoint Forums thread that is taking note that Yahoo Answers questions and answers have a tendency to rank well in Google and other search engines. Yahoo Answers has been ranking well in the search results for a...
Every Google Adsense ad -- including ads on splogs -- can be reported to Google if it is in violation of any particular AdSense guideline. How is this done? Let's walk through an example from a splog. First, you click...
Oops. InfoWorld reports that Google has accidentally mistaken its own Custom Search Blog as spam and gave it to another user. The issue was noticed by Philipp Lenssen who saw a rather strange post on the blog with some grammatical...
Mike Blumenthal has been vigilant about uncovering and reporting abuse of Google Maps's Local business submissions. In fact, in the past week or so, he has reported a couple of cases of Google Local abuse, where companies submitted hundreds or...
In the Seattle Conference on Scalability, Google's Marissa Mayer was asked a question where she revealed that Google has 10,000 human evaluators that manually go through the search results and rate them. You can find coverage of this keynote at...
A Search Engine Watch Forums thread has discussion about a service one member was offered. In short, the service is composed of two offerings: (1) Damage your competitor's search engine rankings (2) Protect your own search engine rankings They use...
Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Land site has been caught hiding text and performing "poor man cloaking" techniques. A WebProWorld thread called attention to the fact that Search Engine Land was hiding text in a CSS file: text-indent: -9000px; But Danny...
There is a unique thread at Search Engine Watch Forums where a person describes a case of an in-house SEO that has gone bad. He said that before he came on to work for a company, they had an in-house...
The Yahoo! Search Blog has announced that Yahoo! Site Explorer is out of beta. Yahoo has also announced that Site Explorer has added functionality for users to submit sitemaps for their mobile device-friendly websites through the control panel. WebmasterWorld has...
On a recurring theme of Internet spam, a study discussed in WebmasterWorld indicates that three out of four blogs -- or 75% -- are spam. According to the study (PDF link): ...14 of the top-15 doorway domains have a spam...
A user on WebmasterWorld mentions that his page rankings have dropped considerably after what appears to be a hack attempt on his server. According to the user, a vulnerability on his web host was exploited, and 50,000 new pages on...
A WebmasterWorld thread links to a December 2006 paper at Yahoo! Research named A Reference Collection for Web Spam. The paper can be downloaded as a PDF file, it is not brand new, but relatively new. Here is the abstract:...
A WebmasterWorld sparked this post from me. At SES Chicago '06, during a session named CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & Search Engines the search engine representatives were asked about how they handle CSS. It is currently easy to hide text...
Matt Cutts of Google is known as a spam fighter, he is part of Google's Search Quality team and has a inner moral spirit to prevent web spam from creeping up in the Google search results. Watching Matt Cutts in...
The tenth edition of the Search Pulse has now been archived. This is the first week in a while where we only had one weeks worth of topics. Makes it much easier to manage, and more relaxing. The topics we...
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...
AussieWebmaster posted a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums with a link to a blog post named How to remove your competitors from MSN Live! In short, the "hack" is to generate enough duplicate content on your competitors site, so...
We all know about PPC fraud and that some of the fraud is caused by bots (robots) that click on the ads and drive up your bill and unwanted traffic. But it gets more serious than that. Bot are also...
A WebmasterWorld thread asks, Can any SEO company be black hat free from google view? Well, we know from a Yahoo! employee's view, what makes for a Luminescent pearly white SEO. Tim Converse from Yahoo! explains; Luminescent pearly white: This...
Reports via WebmasterWorld that Microsoft's Live Web Search is ranking blogspot blogs that have redirects to adult sites for some popular debt keyword phrases. At WebmasterWorld you are not allowed to list examples, so I tried to dig some up....
Well that was fast! After I resubmitted the site October 25th at 7am and I checked again this morning at it is back in the index. This is after Jennifer Convertibles Web Site Hacked & Delisted In Google.com, I decided...
You ever go to Google.com, conduct a search, and think, wow those results are bad. Or maybe there was just one result you didn't like? Or maybe, you feel that your competitor should not be in the top spot, but...
An interesting thread has been started on the SEW Forums regarding a paragraph in the Wikipedia External Linking Guide. It discusses the possibility of sharing link spam data with Google (and presumably other interested parties) in order to monitor and...
In a WebmasterWorld thread, Adam Lasnik of Google can be quoted on what types of outbound links can and cannot hurt you. Let me first quote Adam; It's unlikely that your outbound linking is causing your pages to be listed...
Last week, Ben spotted, and I reported on a Google OneBox Q&A Adult Spam. Matt Cutts confirmed the issue and said it has been fixed, which it appears to have been done. Matt said: I checked into this, and it...
The third edition of the Search Pulse has now been archived. In this show we covered the Live.com launch, AdWords tests, Yahoo!'s marketing blitz, Google & Intuit's partnership, Google's supplemental command, the Belgian court ruling, OneBox spam, Adam Lasnik on...
Ben Pfeiffer spotted possibly the first OneBox Q&A adult spam in the Google results, that I have personally seen. Ben posted the details in a Search Engine Watch Forums thread, describing the result set one gets for a search on...
A WebmasterWorld thread points out an issue at MSN Search, where subdomains that are excessively linking between each other, tend to rank well in MSN Search. Well, MSN is aware of it, according to MSNdude; It bothers us too, and...
Brian White, part of Matt Cutts webspam team, has joined Search Engine Watch Forums to continue the outstanding Google to Webmaster communication we have seen recently. Brian adds some more detail to our post yesterday on Web Hosts Found Cloaking...
Web hosts are typically in a very powerful position. One such example is discussed at a Search Engine Watch Forums thread showing how one Webmaster was finding "strange results" in the Google search results pages. The results contained pornographic terms...
A thread at WebmasterWorld has MSNdude, MSN's official search rep, trashing on some Webmaster's sites. Check out this quote: I'm not sure why so many people seem to think the "spam look" is in this year (maybe it's a fashion...