google blocking malware sites’ clicks and google conspiracy theorists
Posted by Steve on Dec 30 2006 | Comment now »
I found today that google has begun blocking access to, and displaying a warning page in place of, the sites that show up in Google’s search results. This is a welcome change. I use to really tick me off when I would search google for keywords that I wanted to get, only to find a spammy site above mine, and then get hit with a spyware or virus / malicious code installed on my system.
I always thought that google and the other engnines ought to be able to detect that the page is using a windows or IE exploit or similar method to install malware. Then I thought that perhaps it would be too much to check a site everytime it’s resluts are clicked and could also slow down results, but really this can be done on the daily or otherwise regular crawl of the spider.
I am glad to see that google is blocking these sites. I wonder what constitues the google block and if there are any benign javascripts or such that will trigger the block. I also wonder if google is attempting to contact these types of sites. Is there a list somehwere that could be added to some kind of link filter / blacklist? Would that list be updated regularly? So many thoughts, so little time.
The google block was brought to my attention from the comments / discussion of an algorhythm change that knocked violet blue, good vibes and a few other semi prominent sex blogs. I should note that weeks prior Sam Sugar of Sugarbank-(NSFW adult porn blogger) went through a similar fall out in the google results and freaked out as much. I too have seen my sites fall 40 - 60 pages in google, and it kind of takes your breathe away. I can relate to the stress in Violet Blues responses, We spend a lot of time trying to make a great site that does right in google’s eyes, work really hard to maintain a great web site and then get knocked down without an explanation. It has been so frustrating for us to sit back and watch other spam techniques get a site higher than the ones that we strive to be organic.
It’s great when your site bounces back to the top of the results, but there are many sites that do not return to front page results, as google has been changning a lot, frequently. It seems that the days of waiting months for a new google to search, the algorhythm changes by the hour, and any given three day period of time could show different front page search results each day.
I think the idea of having more official google people that can answer questions about sites is a good idea. Sure the webmaster tools can help a webmaster troubleshoot a bit, but there are some things like phpbb’s google friendliness and other basic issues that are left inanswered in the google webmaster forums. So I would like to echo the need for more google answerers. As Matt Cutts pointed out he could easily be doing like 20 sites a day if he did individual site reviews. Well why not dedicate a staff of 20, 40 hours a week to answer questions for web site owners?
Google can help make the net better, and provide a wealth of knowledge to want-to-be good webmasters. Especially if answers to site questions could be made public and tagged by the person who asked the question, therefore providing a knowledge base of issues resolved, or questions answered.
Sam Sugar posted 2 bits of wisdom that should be repeated:
- Don’t build your entire marketing campaign around satisfying Google
- If you find yourself knocked out of search results for no reason – blog about it.
- From the sugarbank nsfw adult porn blogger who puts words to some google conspiracy theories.
All in all I think the search engines are getting better, and so are many of the spammers. Of course there is a fine line between what is an adsense spam site and what is a site that is intended to be informative. Even if we went back to hand edited directories for indexed sites and human tagging for search engine imporvements (ala the original yahoo directory) there will still be people that create google conspiracy theories and there will be people that try to fool humans like they do the spider bots. The methods keep changing, yet the game stays the same.
top sponsored in google - not well separated
Posted by Critic on Nov 30 2006 | Comment now »
One thing I have noticed time and time again, is that the top level sponsored ads in google do not separate well from the actual results, especially when I am surfing with my laptop. On my gateway solo laptop searching google it is often difficult to tell what is a “sponsored result” and what is the actual search results. This is something that I think google of all search engines would fix… It looks fine on my desktop, so perhaps this isn’t a hug issue, but something I thought they may want to consider.
Search Engine Critics
Posted by Critic on Nov 27 2006 | Comment now »
Search Engine Critics
This site is for open critisiscm of search engines. Users and webmasters can blow off steam, rant and rave about the problems they have experienced with search engnines. Perhaps the search engnines themselves will be able to learn a thing or two from the discussions here, and it will be very interesting to track the changes and progress of the search engines to see which issues are resolved.
The authors of the search engine crittics’ blog intend to bring to light issues that have come up from our own experiences and will highlight issues that other webmasters and web users have posted about.
We intend for the discussion to point out issues and will not censor the forums or comments like many other webmasters discussion forums.
Welcome to Search Engine Critics. We welcome you to peruse the blog which features some of our highlighted articles and public comments. If you have issues you’d like pointed out about Google, Yahoo, MSN search, or any other search engnines, we invite you post about it in the forums, or send us an email with the info you’d like to make public.