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- Sphinn It!
Went Hot: March 18, 2008 - 2:44 am
Posted By: DazzlinDonna 124 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://startupearth.com) my network
Category: Google
39 Comments
Who Sphunn This Topic?
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graywolf
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Wiep
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kichus
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JohnWeb
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Sebastian
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grasshopper
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MattMcGee
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DazzlinDonna
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patrickaltoft
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mvandemar
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oggin
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rjonesx
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bwelford
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Hobo
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Eavesy
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DariaGoetsch
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TannerC
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DianeV
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jeffquipp
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Sorvoja
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mbeharry
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steaprok
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MelissaF
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Rhea
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onreact
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MarkBarrera
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DanThies
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skinner
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Yogini
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planetc1
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NickWilsdon
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Kalena
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jennosborne
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MikeDammann
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theGypsy
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swags2804
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shawnsmith
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nsmseo
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sza
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EstebanPanzera
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LtDraper
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AbleReach
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annie7
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FREEL
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JamesDuthie
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rishilakhani
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thinkingserious
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oliverwood
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Makakman
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davidb
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crashingflwrgrl
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sammy
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crazycat
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tynansanger
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jameskm03
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MrJavodotCom
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alwoodman
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Alfredo
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hjomats
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rafiq
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joeseo
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spyros
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vikramprashant
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sunaren2001
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anglemona
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digits12
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SilentlyScreaming
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isaSuperstar
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mercylivi
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-mj-
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nolimitdomains
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TinPig
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Elvie
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HafizD
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technoguide
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mcollins08
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nukemdomis
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Musa
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JohnT
Who Desphunn This Topic what is desphinn?
MattCutts
03/18/2008 06:42pm
This story is a fake; Google never said anything like the source claims.
Halfdeck
03/18/2008 08:06pm
I'm desphinning this post though at this point a desphinn would be an empty gesture than anything else.
iBrian
03/19/2008 01:26am
False linkbait. More characters for 50 limit.False linkbait. More characters for 50 limit.
clickfire
03/18/2008 08:41pm
Almost fell for this one. It's late at night and I had time to research the quote before sphinning :)
SpostareDuro
03/19/2008 10:31pm
This story has proven to be a fake..and I know this because I have once again bought into what someone else claims as fact. (go figure)
Comments
There goes my little bubble of happiness.
On the plus side, maybe all of the obnoxious "social media experts" will shut the hell up finally.
If something works.... TELL THE WHOLE WORLD! It'll just keep working forever and ever and ever... Google's full of idiots.
Yayyyyyyyyyyy!
What?! They tell us to write good content, we do that and they penalize us? Hope this is not true or I will become a full-time Google hater.
In the article the update now says that it looks like they pulled the original story, and that this probably wasn't something they wanted to be public knowledge.
Of course, if I were making ass-backwards decisions like that, I probably wouldn't want them published either.
so exactly how are they going to figure out who owns what site and marry that with social data
I have some ideas but none of them put big G in a positive light
so exactly how are they going to figure out who owns what site and marry that with social data
Hm, actually my take on it was that they were going to penalize sites that gained unbalanced benefit from Digg, not site owners who also happened to be members of Digg... the opening line was this:
@mvandemar - I read the same as graywolf about them targeting specific users and have a few thoughts on how they'll do it, too. I'm more curious though about the impact one to three iterations deep of social submissions on non-major sites.
easist way would be to use toolbar data. They know what the admin panels URL's are for most blog platforms, they also know when you login to digg and other places, and could easily marry those pieces of data, and only throw out the odd baby with the bathwater here and there.
Also looking at digg URL's that are sent through gmail would be another clue
and then there google anaylitics which recently went more big brother on us
Hm, looking through the summary of their Privacy Policy, I really don't see anything indicating that they say they would be above doing just that... it's all worded very carefully, as to allow just that kind of behavior pretty much any way they feel like it:
http://www.google.com/intl/en/privacy.html
Also it seems like this, similar to the paid links situation, would possibly be one more venue that could be used to harm a competitor's website.
So Google finds a blog selling a link for $25 and that is such a threat to their system they remove its PageRank? People find loopholes like W3 selling links for the donors and Matt rolls in and says those links have been devalued since around 1976? and now we are supposed to believe that its going to take a year for them to figure out how to devalue links from social media? I'd think they could do that with a click of a radio button.
The whole story reads like its from The Onion or something, when would you ever hear someone from Google saying that they thought they made an error? At most it would be a bad data push. The whole concept of Google is based on popularity, they never claimed to offer the most relevant results or else the supplemental index would not have existed, only the most popular. Google doesn't discover data they just report on the already popular, and social media sites like digg are the wet dream of popularity for the digital age.
I also find it quite odd that with 603,000 subscribers no scrapers picked this up before Google pulled it and no other blogger mentioned a word of the quoted story.
Googler Jeff Waltz has also been keeping quite a low profile in the online world until this first blogpost.
Seems quite suspicious in the least.
Nice find Donna ... I think Google's ultimate goal is to create such fear around the whole idea of links, that most are afraid to even think about links.
Did anyone here read the alleged post on the Google blog?
I just don't get this, you are allowed to submit your own stuff to most social bookmarking sites including digg, devaluing links to sites that constantly submit their own stuff would be one thing, but penalizing the websites of site owners that do it sounds extreme. I don't see it as being a major problem; non disclosed paid posts and paid links own the top money phrases on Google UK. Digg etc. doesn't even come into it. Digg are pretty swift in banning most e-commerce sites that get submitted anyway. Non e-commerce site or sites that sell advertising don't really care about Pagerank, they are in it for the traffic.
Which post is this in?
I see only this on a global search of a snippet; http://www.google.ca/search?q=%22Webmasters+who+rely+heavily+on+bookmarking+their+own+sites+to+gain+traffic+will+likely+see+a+drop+in+pagerank+before+the+end+of+2008%22+site:startupearth.com&hl=en&newwindow=1&rlz=1T4GGLJ_enCA238CA238&filter=0
and nada searching the G/Blog; http://www.google.ca/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLJ_enCA238CA238&q=%22We+are+working+on+strategies+to+level+the+playing+field%2c+effectively+bringing+back+natural+search+patterns+enjoyed%22+site:googleresearch%2eblogspot%2ecom
Where is the source? Anyone?
Is this verifyable?
@johnweb agreed looks like we did a lot of the same searches trying to verify the story, it was late so I gave up because I was tired ;-)
I think the question here is why wouldn/couldn't google take steps like this? They are smart enough to know they pushed people into the viral space so it's only natural gaming will take place.
So are you thinking ahead of the algo trying to protect yourself from future fallout?
I built my own Google fallout shelter. It's buried 300 yards deep in Utah.
How Google can do so...I mean if a site has good content and it's owner submits it into Digg or whatever... What Google has to do with it's pagerank...
Instead of that ..it will be better if Google update it's Algorithem.
@johnweb you're right in that page rank is nothing more than a popularity contest at this point, and one where you can buy your friends or make cardboard cutouts of friends and pretend they're real friends and sometimes google will believe you. the problem is that google DOES use this popularity to influence their concept of relevancy and once you weed out the basics of SEO, page rank is all that's left.
popularity != relevancy, pure and simple. google needs to either abandon the link-based page rank algorithm or stop using page rank to inform search results.
isn't kinda obvious it's not working based solely on how much effort google puts into trying to weed out the spammers?
i knew it was comming eventually
Does this mean social media is not a Golden Egg? LOL
@Rhae Awesome!
"On the plus side, maybe all of the obnoxious "social media experts" will shut the hell up finally."
I want to see the original article dammit! Sounds a bit dubious, on what the methods will be to tackle this though. Is this starting to mean that any type of paid links are bad? I have paid links that use the nofollow attribute so I'm guessing they're fine, right!?
Iv'e just had a good think about this and I am going to call BS. Wise up sphinners this is linkbait.
and i thought matt cutts said that linkbaiting was whitehat and totally OK.
sheesh...there's no longer anything you can do. if you market your website a bit, you're just plain old a bad person, according to Google !
He doesn't want self-submissions perhaps. I'd look at that little social profile API thing they had awhile back if you want to see how they're probably going to detect this
>Iv'e just had a good think about this and I am going to call BS. Wise up sphinners this is linkbait.
I agree it's very probable it's BS, but what you really need to think about is would google want to do this to negate the gaming we all know happens. If so how would they do it? How should you start mopping up your dirty footprints so you don't get caught ...
http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help-Indexing/browse_thread/thread/644d43e62840ed88/3526b8e4a69dbf1e?lnk=raot
JohnMu: "I would not worry too much about a blog post that doesn't seem to exist."
He continues: "keep in mind that PageRank is roughly based on the quantity and quality of the links pointing to a page. Traffic from self-created
bookmarks does not really play a role in that, at least not directly"
And it doesn't play a role because with or without nofollow, Google IMO algorithmically nofollows links from social bookmark sites because they're UGL (user-generated links), similar to how nofollow on Wikipedia didn't matter to Google, because those links were already dealt with.
And who the hell is Jeff Waltz? Where does that name come from?
Finally, how do you exactly "punish PageRank"? I thought the spammers are the ones asking to get spanked.
And Graywolf, for a guy who believes webmasters should not live in fear of the big ol' G, you sure have a lot of conspiracy theories under your sleeve :)
"Where is the source? Anyone?
Is this verifyable?"
JohnMu was polite; I call fake story. I subscribe to the Google Research blog and never saw that story appear in my Reader feeds. Plus the Google Research blog talks about research, not webspam. There's not even a Googler named Jeff Waltz as far as I can tell.
I think "Startup Earth" has some 'splaining to do. :)
"some 'splainin to do"...
On this, and I think quite a few more stories Matt. I'm also suspicious of the "Doubleclick" story at: http://sphinn.com/story/35225
Matt, I did some searching, it seems there is a Jeff Waltz at Google (see link) - looks like the story could be true, although I've no idea what his position is.
http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2007/10/google-education-summit.html
"it seems there is a Jeff Waltz"
No, it seems there is a Jeff Walz, not Waltz. Walz' title is director of university relations - what does that have to do with search quality and spam control?
Interesting, if only the url on SUE was to the specific post (assuming there was one), we'd be able to tell if it had been there.
I guess we have to stay tuned. :)
~ Mike
Ahh, my first desphinn and I feel I've done a good deed :)
This might be horribly offtopic, but is Sphinn a lot slower today than usually?
Penalizing the websites of site owners submitted their content in sites like digg, really sounds extreme. It would be better if the startupearth.com come with a better explanation on their post.
This is a pretty controversial post.. But if ever this is true then spammers have to say goodbye to their pageranks..
Jeff Walz could be the Googler. Hope this is his Linkdin Profile Page
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/3/71B/B37
Calm down guys, you are about to throw the baby out with the bath water. Google did not say “penalize bloggers who use Digg” they said “Bloggers who abuse Digg”
What they are saying is “STOP SUBMITTING YOUR OWN BLOG POSTS” and the “STOP SHOUTING YOUR OWN CONTENT” and doing nothing more. If all you do is submit your own blog and then shout it to your friends then you are already screwed. Google has been watching this for a while now and I told you all this months ago but no one wanted to believe me.
You all wanted to just keep submitting you own stuff and then shouting it to your friends. Oh look, I got a 110 Diggs today. Look what that is going to get you now. If you have been doing this you are already screwed. It is in everybody’s history, not just their private history either, their public history. Yeah, every shout you ever sent, all over Digg.
Too late my friends. You people have been doing this for so long just to get a couple measily diggs that you forgot that Google is watching. I blogged this months ago here:
http://www.keywebdata.com/?p=79
Digg banned me for writing that article, I published it and the next morning, KeyWebData.com is banned from Digg. Accused of spam by the Digg mafia.
Dude, nobody is "about" to do anything... you're replying to a story that had it's last comment 98 days ago. This is way old.
Obviously, I can read and this ain't my first day on the internet or on Sphinn.
Despite the original article being over 101 days old now, the topic is still something which affects people today.
I agree with Chris on the "not throwing the baby out with the bathwater" just because people have the urge for making some kneejerk reaction. Years ago I was told by one of my bosses "Learn the rules well, then use these people's own rules against them!". That was sound advice and it works for this as well. If people would take the time to learn about the way things are, then they can find ways to utilize those rules or methods in their favor. Don't get mad, don't get even... Get Ahead! It may take time and a little work, but it is often most gratifying to beat people at their own game.
Now I don't know exactly how many people actually did something other than gripe, nor do I know how many have put off doing anything until later. I won't even make a conjecture on how many new people will see this article and decide to act... my crystal ball quit working months.
I would not be surprised to find out that anywhere from about 50% to 80% of all Digg Users do not have a blog or site to promote. Their whole reason for being on Digg is to post things which really does nothing for them except to get Diggs. My hunch about this mostly stems from the number of people who seem so against a person posting their own content. Almost any Blogger or Site Owner should see Digg as a great tool to be used to get them noticed. Their ought to be a huge fuss raised over the possibility of being penalized for publishing their own content. There isn't, and that tells me that either most people have nothing to promote.. or they are idiots who don't understand what things like Social Bookmarking sites can do for them.
Now don't confuse this with those who preach that you can be penalized, so don't shout your own stuff. Some of these people may really agree that Digg, or other social bookmarking sites, should be used as a useful tool where you should be able to shout your own stuff... but they are realists and know that if you do then you could get penalized by the search engines. In other words they know that, despite how they really feel, you have to play by the rules of the game in order to succeed. So this takes us right back to the idea of "Not throwing the baby out with the bathwater" and Learning the rules to use them against them.