Google Anti-Spam Guidelines
A few days ago I mentioned you guys should all be checking out Search Bistro. Search Bistro is a blog by Henk van Ess a Dutch newspaper reporter. Henk happens to be interested in search engines and internet marketing and he has uncovered several interesting things about Google.
Henk wrote an article entitled Google’s Unknown Spam Recognition Guide. I don’t know if this is real or not. However Henk has located a document supposedly by Google for the “raters” whose job it is to manually review sites and determine their relevancy. These raters are given a set of criteria to determine whether a site is relevant to a particular keyword phrase, irelevant, or offensive (spam).
Reading this spam guide is very interesting. There is a detailed set of criteria to be applied to affiliate sites. One thing google is concerned about is sites that are cretaed for the sole purpose of generating affiliate revenue without providing any real content. I’ll quote the spam guide here:
We differentiate between affiliates that produce extra service, value, or content, and those that simply are duplicates of other sites, set up to boost traffic to other sites and earn a commission for it.
The document goes on to describe sites where there are a ton of affiliate links. They then describe which of these sites are relevant. These being the sites that provide genuine information along with the affiliate links. They also provide examples of “offensive” or “spam” sites that provide no real content and are simply a copy of another site, copy of search engine results, etc.
The document might not be real but the avoiding these pitfalls in this document is probably a good idea for any search engine marketer.
Henk also has a article on Google’s method of having reviewers review the results for random queries and evaluate the results. The reviewers are given random queries and are ask to assign the sites returned a value. Each site should be rated as:
Vital
Useful
Relevant
Off Topic
Offensive
Erroneous
Didn’t Load
Foreign Language
Unrated
Once again it can be quite an interesting read to determine how Google might determine one site as an “authority” on a topic and give them a high PR, and how another site might be deemed offensive and have 0 PR.
I’d be interested to hear your comments. Do you think these are real documents?
- Ben Fitts
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Hi Ben,
I hope they’re real documents. I’ve been cruising the web over the last few months thinking about what I can do to start a business on the web. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people around flogging spam on the web and trying to make money from it. I have heard from some of these people that Google will not index their site, whereas Yahoo and MSN have.
I think it would be a good thing if all the search engines made effective attempts at “encouraging” these guys to give up trying to make a quick buck using spam. The internet would be a better place.
Dan