

Google’s Matt Cutts: Don’t Be The Sucker That Buys The Spammy Domain - spacestronaut
http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-dont-be-the-sucker-that-buys-the-spammy-domain-155200

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onemorepassword
All sounds well and good, until you realize that a "bad domain" in the Google-
verse isn't limited to spammers, but also for instance domains from which
something was published that the copyright-mafia didn't take kindly to. Or
whatever other obscure reasons and methods Google may have to blacklist
domains.

"Spammy" domains is a a smokescreen. The issue is lack of transparency and
accountability of Google when it comes to penalizing domains. We should simple
be able to check this, just like with any RBL.

It's highly inappropriate to call those who fall victim to this "suckers", but
it illustrates once again how Google feels about the little people.

~~~
DominikR
I agree that there is a lack of transparency regarding penalties for spammy
pages, but the copyright stuff (and censorship requests by the government) is
clearly forced upon them. At least they release a transparency report about
the nature and amount of censorship/copyright removals. (it also shows which
party requested the removal, and what exactly was removed) I am not aware of
any other search engine that releases this information.

<http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/>

Edit: Here's a list of all removal requests:
[http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/...](http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/requests/)

~~~
onemorepassword
Just an example: removing certain sites from their autocomplete feature was
not forced upon them. They are not required to do this, and they are not
transparent about it.

Their transparency is also limited to what is forced upon them, not what they
do themselves, quietly and secretly. Also note that other properties, like the
massively censored YouTube, are completely omitted from their transparency
report (unless it ironically enough involves removing links to YouTube...).

The little bit Google is transparent about when it comes to what they omit
from " _organizing the world's information and make it universally accessible_
" (Google's mission statement) is only what suits them.

It's a marketing tool to sell the message "it's not our fault". Transparency
and openness are not part of Google's DNA, that bit is just marketing.

It's not the flaws in the system that bother me, this is stuff is hard. It's
the marketing-driven pretense of caring and at the same time arrogantly
telling us "suckers" to go f __* ourselves.

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codemac
Sounds like Google's problem.

"Remember folks! Don't use SEO! You're subverting das Googlebot!"

But play by all their algorithmic rules, or you may be randomly penalized.

This is called a False Positive. It's Google's fault, not the legitimate
domain owner's. This is a hard problem(tm) for sure, but not an excuse.

~~~
thefreeman
How is it a false positive if there are thousands of spam links still pointing
to the domain?

~~~
nostromo
Because Google wants to get searchers to the best content for the query, not
to the content with the fewest spammy links.

Usually they are correlated, not always though.

~~~
aaronwall
What's correlated?

Are you saying that pages with great content typically have few spammy links?
If so, the jury is out on that thesis, as many of the most popular sites have
hundreds to thousands of spam sites that scrape just about everything the do &
many of those scraper spam sites do link to the original source. And just by
ranking for valuable keywords, over time you will likely get some spammy
inbound links from sites that are scraping the Google search results.

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jacquesm
How does one accurately identify a 'spammy' domain without insight into
google's data?

Obviously you can check the RBLs for email related spam issues but Google does
not expose any interface that would allow you to accurately determine a domain
was used for spam in the past.

The best way to build a company on the web is to build one that does not
overly rely on single traffic sources to begin with, and that imo includes
google. Lest the next update of their algo puts you out of business.

~~~
aaronwall
The hard part about building a sustainable publishing business model online
that avoids the largest single channel is that margins matter & if you have 5%
margins or such, a competitor that clones your model AND is in Google's good
graces can use their search-driven profits to noise up other channels and
drive your margins into negative territory. (In social media competitors can
target ads at just your followers, competitors can buy your branded keywords
in Google, etc. ... most of the big platforms sell access across that way.)

It is not uncommon to see market participants take profits from one line of
business or one channel & use it to undermine competitors who were succeeding
in other channels.

So lets say you avoid search entirely...how do you sustainably compete against
a competitor who has a similar footprint to you AND is leveraging search-
driven profits to come after you?

~~~
jacquesm
Good point, you need to do everything right. But I think my point about over-
reliance on a single source of traffic (and thus, indirectly of income)
stands.

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sudont
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentrification>

Internet slums?

I wonder if this would bother highly-viral pop-up sites at all. Muxtape would
have probably set a spammy domain positive in like a day. But, such is the
nature of a transitional neighborhood—no corporations, just tons of art
boutiques.

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a5seo
One possible solution for a bad backlink profile: drop the registration on the
domain then re-register with new info.

Google claims that they will "wipe" a backlink profile if they see a domain
drop and later re-registration by a new owner.

That wasn't always the case. I think as recently as 3-4 years ago buying
dropped domains for backlinks was a big tactic.

~~~
pgrote
How do you prevent someone else from picking it up when dropped?

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underdown
it would be nice if google gave us a decent tool to check domains before we
bought them. Currently they hide most (>90%) of back links.

~~~
a5seo
That would be an incredible gift to spammers. Just keep spamming until you see
your domain health go from green to yellow. Then you can calibrate just how
much you can get away with.

It's a nice idea, but will just make the spam problem worse.

~~~
underdown
it's usually pretty obvious to spammers when they get penalized. their traffic
drops and if they use webmaster tools (admittedly ill-advised and unlikely)
they get an explicit message telling them they've been caught.

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mixedbit
Spam or any other phony domain is dangerous to purchase. Such domain could
have been serving root document with cache expiration date long in a future
that iframes index.html (so the site looks normal) and includes a malicious js
controlled by the previous domain owner.

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austenallred
It's worth noting that the converse is also true. If you want to rank easily,
buy a domain that wasn't renewed that used to have good SEO - I can fairly
regularly pick up sites with a few thousand white-hat links and and a 4 or 5
PageRank, restore them to the old cache, and start from there, for a couple
hundred dollars. Those links would cost tens of thousands to create.

There are probably a lot of people that would be pissed at me for displaying
that information publicly, but oh well.

~~~
kybernetyk
Does this still work? I know this was the rage back in ~2005. But then google
started to check for registration continuity and drop juice from old links if
there was a large gap in the whois records.

~~~
leephillips
It still works. I wrote this[0] near the beginning of 2012; when I wrote it,
it was a mystery, but I've since heard from a Google engineer that this
happened because the Yellow Pages people purchased a domain that ranked highly
for the relevant keywords. In other words, you can buy pagerank.

[0]<http://lee-phillips.org/hitchYellowPages/>

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djt
I had a SEO person quote us $2K to get our ranking up and declined but know
another person in our vertical that used them and is in the top 10 now on
organic search.

One of the problems of creating good content is that we are still competing
with SEO spammers even if its short term.

~~~
aaronwall
So the competitor who paid the SEO is a spammer, the person who paid Google
AdWords is an angel & the person who has no exposure has no traffic nor
revenues, but is virtuous with great content (that almost nobody cares about
other than the owner)?

~~~
djt
?

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thejosh
Similar to buying a dedicated host, and the previous host was spamming emails
and the IP is blacklisted.

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gesman
Always collect emails of customers and invite visitors to opt-in to your
mailing list. This way if Google will change it's mind the 1,000,001-st time
about ranking you - you will still have direct communications channel opened
with your prospects and customers without Google blessing.

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OGinparadise
Google wants every site to buy ads, so they engage in everything possible from
adding dozens of ads on pages, to demoting entire niches, to FUD to force you
to advertise. When Google has ads for a certain keyword, they don't care much
about "organic" results, they care that ads are better. In fact, several
threads at Webmaster World have shown a lot of obvious examples where Google
makes results worst to have a better adclick ratio. Everything Google does is
to make money via ads, from Chrome to Android to Search updates, especially
during Larry Page's rein. That is the bottom line, the rest is fluff.

Google Shopping is already 100% ads, the rest of the commercial results is 99%
ads and advertiser sites (usually huge brands that spend billions on Adwords).
Disclosure and ethics however aren't Google's strongest points, lobbying
governments is.

