How Do We Help Google Fight Webspam?

Posted by Eric Ward on July 1, 2010 to

On his blog this week, Matt Cutts put out the call for contributions for Webspam projects in 2010. Head over and add your ideas. I added the below suggestion.

A Google Chrome or Firefox or IE Web spam report tool extension could work if you did it by invitation only to a select group of invited participants, i.e., school teachers and librarians from everywhere from grade schools up though special and corporate libraries. There are 300,000 mastered degreed librarians in the US alone. If you let anyone install the extenstion, you’ll just get company A reporting competitor B for spam, where there is none. It’d be a free for all. At the same time, it takes more expertise than you might expect to spot a scraper or MFA page. We in the biz spot the spam instantly, but most folks can’t.

Beyond this idea's merit is the larger issue Matt's post refers to: Webspam in general, and Google's ability to identify it. I've been called out a time or two for drinking the Google Kool-Aid, and I'm proud to say yes, I drink it by the gallon. The reason I do so is because I was working online as a web publicist long before Google existed, and as a certified "First Gen" link builder, I do not believe in trying to make a search engine's job harder than it already is. The variety of spam I encounter on a daily basis is absurd. Not just scraped content or blog bot nets, and not just the email offers I get from people claiming to represent "thousands of high pagerank sites with links for sale" (which, btw, I forward to Google, so keep them coming, spammers). The spam problem goes way beyond the above tactics.

People are still hacking .edu servers to drop redirects to sites that would make you cringe. See for yourself. Click a few of the results for this search. It's pretty sad when someone will hack into or pay off someone to get links like this. Same with .govs. People laugh and ask why should we help Google, aren't they who we are trying to beat? Let Google solve the spam problem. Some will even blame Google for the spam problem itself. My favorite is when people say the Pagerank meter on the Google Toolbar is the root of all linking evils on the web.

No. It isn't. Not to me at least. Even though I'm a link builder, I side with Google on the spam issue. I want my search results to be useful, to help me find what will help me. If I'm looking for information about a medical condition my 83 year old mother is dealing with, I'd prefer to know the results aren't filled with pharmaceutical spam selling me pills.

I like the idea of a universal spam flag extension, but fear most people will just use it to call their competitor's site spam over and over. Based on the tactics people are willing to try, nothing would surprise me.

So how do we help Google fight webspam? Google does a pretty remarkable job now, and will continue to get better. I envision that percentage-wise, an ever smaller number of web pages will carry even greater influence with the search engines. The distance between main street and the back alleys will widen. Being able to identify where trust lives, and then recognizing how or why your site can or can't be a part of that trust link graph is going to be the key to long term organic success.

If the web is a bunch of liars, Google is the ultimate lie detector. That's why your link building approach should be to tell the truth from the start.

Eric Ward, Link Evangelist