News Source: http://www.searchenginejournal.com
Published: Aug 11, 2008 - 02:50 pm
Story Found By: annie7 1278 Days ago
Category: SEM
3 Comments
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News Source: http://www.searchenginejournal.com
Published: Aug 11, 2008 - 02:50 pm
Story Found By: annie7 1278 Days ago
Category: SEM
3 Comments
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Comments
You’ve nailed a conceptual problem, in fact, a weakness in Google’s thinking: when they don’t have 10 relevant results, they make it a point of honor to still show 10 results, even if those are crappy, spammy, useless ones.I’ve seen queries that were wrongly formulated, with totally unclear user intent. Not surprisingly, the SERP they brought up consisted of off-topic, irrelevant results.Those clueless searchers would have been better served by a message like this:"Unfortunately, we couldn’t find truly relevant results for your search. You may want to consider a broader or slightly reformulated query. However, we can show results for this specific query, if really that’s what you want... In this case, click here, but don’t be too surprised at the quality of what you’ll find"But no, Google is desperate to demonstrate it can fill a SERP for almost every conceivable query, as if somehow its reputation as Search King was depending on it.
As long as Google places most of its ranking weight on the anchor text of back links to pages we will continue to have a spammy lopsided list of SERPs. I mean they want to have people report paid link buyers for god’s sake. How sad is that.
I agree with the anchor text theory. Google complains about spam, yet they are the party most responsible for creating the reason for being for website spam in the first place. Google needs to make content King and the give their toolbar usage data more weight.