“Google will take action against domains that try to rank more highly by just showing scraped or other auto-generated pages that don’t add any value to users.”
So says Google’s webmaster guidelines anyway. Charles Arthur from The Guardian’s technology blog though had this to say about scraper sites on January 4:
“The only value those scrapers add, in fact, is to Google, because they display tons of AdSense ads. (Well, you can make a fair bet that they aren’t Bing’s equivalent.)
Wait – the scrapers that dominate the first search page, the place from which 89% of clicks come (for only 11% of clicks come from the last 990 results out of the first thousand, or at least did in 2006, a number that has probably only shifted down since then) all benefit Google financially, even while it sees market share improvements? That’s not quite the disincentive one might have hoped for that would make Google act.â€
Mr. Arthur’s report, which you can read here, is talking about spam in Google’s results, and how searchers are becoming somewhat dissatisfied with results that take them to useless web pages of little value. Google’s response?
“Google works hard to preserve the quality of our index and we’re continuing to make improvements to this. Sites that abuse our quality guidelines or prove to be spam are removed from our index as fast as possible.”
Google’s intent is there, but has it simply got too big to maintain and police itself? And will we see more and more people jumping ship in 2011 to competitors such as Bing and others?
It may very well happen if people get fed up with how Google works. All searchers want from the likes of Google is a quick, accessible answer to queries without any hassle. If a search is taking longer than expected because Google are struggling with spam, then it could lose a lot of friends quicker than it expects. From our point of view, Google spends a lot of its time and resources penalising legitimate Google techniques, when their scrutiny would probably be better served on its algorithm to get rid of the real spam that users so passionately hate.
This to us highlights why it’s important to beat spammers with search engine optimisation, good link building and why you should optimise for a broad range of search engines – not just Google. Though Google does indeed have an unprecedented slice of the market, nothing lasts forever. Optimising as far and as wide as possible will not only help you climb above spam sites in search engine rankings, it will benefit the health of your site for a long time to come, and attract new traffic through a variety of different sources.
