The Google Long Tail Fail Whale
About a year ago, the power and speed of a caffeinated Google was supposed to help improve long tail search query results. [click to continue…]
{1 comment}Hijacking Google Rankings Through Content Scraping and Cloaking in 2011
The Panda update has produced some good, some bad, and some downright ugly – this is a story of ugly, in the form of 1990′s era style content scraping/remashing, and old-school poor-man’s cloaking, which together have produced Google SERPs that look like they’re from a ’99 Altavista query. Let us start by saying we do not condone this activity. We discovered this when one of our clients, freshtrends.com was the victim of a ruthless attack by an Affiliate and we have taken action to report all of the infringing websites to Google. The reason we are writing this is to inform webmasters to be wary; Google has not yet been able to eradicate duplicate content issues (essentially Googlewashing) and server side or Javascript cloaking is seemingly back on the rise.
The Discovery
Following an overnight traffic drop due to the “Panda update” we began investigating the potential issues of why the site was targeted. The main observations we found on WebmasterWorld from colleagues was that low quality, commonly duplicated content would be affected. At first we dismissed this as a potential cause because Freshtrends had been manually creating unique product descriptions for all products for years. Aside from Google Analytics, we looked for more clues of where our rankings had been lost and started grabbing chunks of text to use as queries – This is when we noticed that thousands of long tail phrases (resembling product title pages) such as:
“3mm Blue Zircon 14kt Yellow Gold Prong Set Labret”
Would bring pages upon pages of spammy search results instead of the actual original Freshtrends page containing that information. We were literally seeing the majority of the first 100 results comprised of nothing other than spammy domains within the .tk and .co.cc extentions. Here are a few examples and screenshots or SERPs:
Screenshots of first 2 pages of SERPsattached here and here.
The perpetrator was actually a member of the Freshtrends affiliate program via Commission Junction. Clicking through from the SERP links would get you a nice elegant Javascript redirect to the actual product page on Freshtrends.com (complete with Affiliate cookie). Sneaky right? This affiliate essentially hijacked the previous ranking for Freshtrends, sent the traffic anyways, and made a cut on the sales.
How did this affiliate fool Google?
1. Using .tk and co.cc domains he was able to mass-generate free and unique domain names. This meant that he could practically add a domain name per product offered on the site and create domain names that closely resembled all the words within a product title (including sizing and product variations).
2. The Affiliate then scraped all unique content from the original domain and added fake comments using a random twitter feed. Sometimes random Youtube videos were used. This fooled Google bots into thinking that it is an active page with comments and unique content. See Google Cache for one of the SERPs.
3. The Affiliate then used Javascript redirection (Cloaking) to send users to the site with the original content.
We contacted Commission Junction about this user, and they promptly had him removed. Since then all the domains we look at are returning 403 errors and are being purged from the SERPs… But as of this writing there are still copies in Google’s cache complete with the JS scripts that are used to cloak.
We also contacted Google about this. It seemed impossible to us that the first 100 search results for a product title could actually be spammy URLs with a .tk extention. I mean we’re talking about Google here… in 2011 – these look like prototypical spam sites from years ago and they’re dominating the SERPs.
Throughout the course of this Bing hasn’t shown any problems. In fact Freshtrends.com is on the top result for the query and no other .tk domains are on the 1st page. Perhaps Google’s caffeinated indexing has gotten so fast it can’t keep up with itself, and hasn’t got the time to account for quality… even after an update proclaimed to deal with just that.
Everything in this blog post was printed with the permission of Freshtrends.com, as they would like to see as much light shed on these shady practices as us. Has anyone else seen any recent egregious examples they’d like to share?
{8 comments}Are The Best Minds of Our Generation Being Wasted On Optimizing Ad Revenue?
Following 2 years at Facebook, Jeff Hammerbacher left saying “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads, that sucks.”
I think Mr Hammerbacher is being oversimplistic. This was probably taken out of context to “explain” the reason he is leaving Facebook, which is likely to be more complex than just this comment. I doubt he only sees platforms such as Facebook as only concentrating on Ad revenue ; these platforms have allowed whole countries to have peaceful revolutions. Facebook, Twitter and even Google, aside from being profitable marketing machines, have created tools which inform and allow people to organize themselves through grassroot movements.
It is the same as saying that because Fox news misinforms the population and advertises, journalists in general are only interested in ratings. I think a blanket statement like this is untrue. Many gray areas exist. Think about the implications of what internet tools have made possible in the last 10 years: Democratization of political thought, open source programming and advancement and the sharing of scientific knowledge regardless of distance.
Furthermore, and to be “Facebook specific” they did not begin advertising until the platform was already functioning as a powerful communication tool. Yes they are monetizing through ads, but they are less intrusive than what we are normally used to through TV, print and any other form of media. The trick is to keep a balance between advertising and the usefulness of a platform. I think we can all agree that Facebook ads are not particularly aggressive in nature and are clearly distinguishable from the content you go to Facebook for.
The fact that Web Analysts like me use “user behavior” to analyze improvements in a system is not necessarily bad. It isn’t solely done to increase “ad clicks” as much as to make improvements on the user experience: Google for example constantly improves its search algorithm, Facebook constantly uses data to improve user interaction and experience, and twitter as well.
These improvements help us shape the future of technology and communication tools by defining how users interact with them. The fact that it is currently motivated by an advertising platform does not necessarily mean it is bad as long as that delicate balance of Ads/usefulness of the application is maintained. If advertising is abused, users will abandon a platform (ie. Myspace & Digg). On the other hand too little advertising and a platform can quickly become too expensive to maintain. What happens then? Platforms who abuse advertising die off… those who find and maintain that delicate balance are the ones who survive.
What do you think?
{4 comments}Google Analytics: Do You Have a Segmentation Problem?
My last post raised a debate about Omniture, its complex installation, and the fact that most companies that use it are being left behind.
But this blog is not about hating Omniture and praising any other tool. This blog is about Adapting. The real world of Web Marketing does not accept excuses. Either you get your skills working in your company or you Die. Its that simple. Here is Part 2 of “The Good The Bad and The Useless.”
GA rocks, but there is a particular report that really bugs me…
{0 comments}Web Analytics Tools: The Good, the bad and the Useless. Part 1 (The Omniture Effect)
Ok, I’ve had it. Too many Multi-National companies that I have consulted for use Omniture. That “extremely expensive enterprise edition” of Web Analytics that only Fortune 500 companies can afford to pay for… and ironically, also afford to be held back by.
Omniture… my old friend, your old argument that I don’t quite understand your capabilities will not work. As a professional web analyst, and having consulted on some of the biggest North American websites, Oggy is calling you out on your bullshit.
{40 comments}Diggbar Modified due to “Valuable Feedback” From Publishers and the SEO Community
Digg.com announced today that the Diggbar was going to have some changes here. Should this appease publishers and Webmasters?
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The Digg Toolbar Exposed; What’s in the code?
A lot of attention on the web this week surrounded the digg.com toolbar and what it represents. Concerns about publisher rights and content stealing through “iframes” have been raised. Digg even wrote a blog post (http://blog.digg.com/?p=636) to defend itself on the issue.
Finally, someone has the balls to analyze the code in detail. Why Has Digg added this feature? Why does it benefit Digg? Does it pose a threat to Associated Press and other News publishers?
Welcome to the world of Adapt or Die Marketing, only here, will you will find the unmasking of the code behind the Digg toolbar.
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