All posts tagged Amit Singhal
Searching for Relevancy
Just last week, after more than a year of planning and adjusting, Google introduced a sweeping change to its search algorithm aiming to strike back against so-called “content farms” that have been increasingly spamming search results over the last few years. According to Google fellow Amit Singhal (who seems to be in the news a lot lately), this problem has been on their radar for awhile and the new change will have an impact on an estimated 11.8% of search queries.
It was a necessary step to maintaining search relevancy and is particularly important since people are now increasingly turning to the web, and search engines in particular, to research products and services that they are intending to purchase. According to Pew, 58% of Americans now research online for future purchases, up from 49% in 2004. Medical queries and health related searches are increasing steadily as well, as The Pew Internet Project recently found that in the United States:
- 66% of internet users look online for information about a specific disease or medical problem
- 56% of internet users look online for information about a certain medical treatment or procedure
- 44% of internet users look online for information about doctors or other health professionals
- 36% of internet users look online for information about hospitals or other medical facilities
- 33% of internet users look online for information related to health insurance
- 29% of internet users look online for information about food safety or recalls
- 24% of internet users look online for information about drug safety or recalls
- 22% of internet users look online for information about environmental health hazards
Much of the press regarding Google?s announcement has centered around Demand Media’s suite of websites such as eHow, et al, that are seemingly ubiquitous nowadays when Googling any question-based search phrase. According to Demand Media’s CEO Richard Rosenblatt, the quality of their eHow articles are screened and have to meet some set standard. But when utilizing a network of over 13,000 free-lance writers to pen these pages, this could be disputable. One of my friends, who works as a writer and copy-editor in the journalistic field, worked freelance for Demand Media while between jobs last year. The main lesson from his experience? Getting paid per article did not translate to creating the best quality, most trustworthy work.
New content on a site is an important facet of maintaining a high search ranking, and that’s perfectly exemplified by the over 300 Demand Media sites and their ilk that put out massive amounts of new content on a daily basis and regularly maintain a Page One presence. Because of this, almost half of their revenue was directly tied to their high Google ranking and the ads that they sold based upon that. Probably the bigger culprits, at least in Google’s eyes, are spammy content farms that repeatedly copy the same material over and over again on different sites and link them together, thus creating “new” content and a higher PageRank at the same time. As Singhal and Google spam buster Matt Cutts said on a blog post announcing the change, “Google depends on the high-quality content created by wonderful websites around the world, and we do have a responsibility to encourage a healthy web ecosystem. Therefore, it is important for high-quality sites to be rewarded, and that’s exactly what this change does.”
While it’s too early to tell exactly how the new changes at Google will affect any particular business (Demand Media has seen some rankings go up, while others have gone down); it was a necessary step for maintaining relevancy and repairing a reputation that has taken some hits over the last few years and caused upstarts like Bing top actually surpass Google in some user satisfaction polls. Hopefully, as responsible websites keep maintaining new and user-relevant content on their pages, i.e. don’t have visitors “boomerang” immediately back to the search results page, they should start winning their ranking battle against the spam sites.
Google Helps the Good Guys
Search engine marketing happened to make front-page news recently as the New York Times ran an expose detailing the illegal practices of online proprietor Vitaly Borker and his gaming of Google?s search algorithm. If you?re not familiar with the story, Mr Borker claims to have used loopholes in Google?s search engine, as well as MasterCard and Visa?s charge-back system, to garner more business through negative responses from customers. Over the past few weeks, the Web has been aflame with discussions over how this could have happened in the first place, as well as how it can be rectified. To Google?s credit, as explained by Amit Singhal in a recent blog post in the immediate aftermath, the search giant has gone to immediate measures to shore up its vaunted search algorithm to more precisely pinpoint and demote those sites which use large volumes of negative postings to raise their search ranking. There seemed to be plenty of blame to go around (i.e. eBay, consumer complaint sites, etc.), and many saw it as an opportunity for some particular Google shaedenfraude, but the problem goes deeper than the search engine itself.
Borker himself theorized that the vast quantity of negative reviews on a variety of online consumer review sites, many highly respected, was what raised his ranking higher. In the original article, one online response to his bilked customers was almost gleefully brazen in his explanation, ?I never had the amount of traffic I have now since my 1st complaint. I am in heaven.? Though there are loopholes that he obviously navigated with success for several months, Google casts some doubt on his simple explanation by countering that even before their revision to their own algorithm, to prevent just such a thing from happening, consumer complaint sites typically included special coding so that bad and/or fraudulent companies would not get higher rankings. It might be reasonable to assume that many times, unfortunately, people are more passionate and willing to post reviews online (especially for something rather innocuous like glasses) when they are livid over having been taken advantage of. What does not seem to be reported as much as the search engine optimization part of this controversy, is that much of Borker?s success, at least according to searchengineland.com?s Byrne Hobart, came from auto-generated spam pages and the fact that DecorMyEyes was frequently linked to by mainstream media sites. Among them? The New York Times.
Less than 20 years after its conception, web commerce can still seem like the wild west, especially after stories such as these. But when shopping for any service or product online, consumers should continue to proceed with caution. As stated above, Less than 20 years after its conception, web commerce can still seem like the wild west, especially after stories such as these. But when shopping for any service or product online, consumers should continue to proceed with caution. As stated above, Google?s response has been laudable, and their consumer rankings of local businesses based on the particular searchers zip code now needs to be extended to online commerce – just for these reasons. As all search engines are becoming more aware of the less-savory uses of link building and search engine optimization, this will thankfully make respected, transparent SEM companies like RSO Consulting and the like more prominent. But, as Mr Singhal himself said, it probably won?t be long before another dastardly business attempts to skirt ethical boundaries and risk imprisonment and loss-of-reputation for a few extra bucks.
