Read a great post this morning from InfoCommerce, a consulting group that focuses on business information content and database publishing. Here’s a snippet, but I think you should head over to their blog for the whole post on Google’s recent spam-prevention search updates.
…let’s think a little more about this new filtering capability offered by Google. What if it were to truly catch on? The basic concept is that you can now easily and permanently take out any domain from your Google search results. Consider what this means: suddenly, nobody is seeing the same search results. What is the implication for search engine optimization programs and providers? What happens to search engine marketing?
—more at the InfoCommerce blog
Of course, the clear message from Google, Bing and other major search engines is that already, no one gets the same search results. [Despite that, some SEO firms are still trying to sell you rankings. Snake oil alert!] But the greater ability to customize your own results on the fly means that not only will you not see what I see, but that we may accidentally be giving ourselves poorer results.
Personally, I’m not sorry to see Google act on the content farm spam problem. I’ve noticed it a lot in my personal searching, as I have tried to teach my 5-year-old and my 11-year-old how you judge a quality website to use in research for school projects. To an untrained researcher, lots of content farm posts look really useful — but they usually just give you half an answer or even the wrong information.
But the implications of fiddling with the mechanism, and of allowing us to fiddle with it, also concern me. Will we start to see campaigns to have people “vote down” certain sites out of malice, hoping to get Google to dump them? I suspect that Google will figure out when humans need to intervene in those kind of cases, but Google’s got a track record in other areas of letting the machines act first and then let the humans correct when necessary — with no regard to the downstream consequences. So I hope that Google is treading very, very carefully here.