119 replies to this topic

[Jill]

If they didn't try to put an end to this wouldn't google be favoring spammers.

Unless, of course, they don't consider it spamming. Which may very well be the case.

[incrediblehelp]

Or more easily, just not indexing the hidden text...One would  think they wouldn't be indexing the hidden text already, but it appears that they are.

Sure but maybe they are indexing it, but maybe not weighting it. This is where the debate really is. Is Google counting or considering the hidden text as they rate or judge the page? On the surface it appears they have to be doing so, but Matt seems to be denying this and saying they arent weighting it. Maybe other factors at play here.

Edited by incrediblehelp, 09 January 2006 - 05:20 PM.

[Alan Perkins]

Let's not get ahead of ourselves here.

From my experience, I don't think there's any doubt that Google considers invisible text to be spam, and when it detects invisible text it will penalise it.

Two issues, then:

1) Detection
2) Penalty

Detection is by no means perfect. It's fairly easy to detect a <noscript> tag. It's not so easy to detect that the intent of that <noscript> tag is to spam, rather than to provide genuine alternative content to scriptless browsers. It's fairly easy to detect an invisible div. It's not so easy to detect that the div's visibility will never programatically be reversed. So, when potential spam is detected programmatically, there's a good chance it won't be removed - especially if it's on a site that searchers would expect to find in the index.

So, what penalty can be programmatically applied? A "penalty" can be applied to the suspect area of the page itself, without being applied to the other content on the page. The penalty can simply be a reduction in the weight given to the content on that part of the page. Thus a reduction of 50% to <noscript> content would mean that content in that tag would be less likely to rank. But if that content supported other content or links that were visible, the keywords it contained could still rank well even though it was theoretically "penalised".

Things change when

1. programmatic detection is improved, or
2. a technique is almost always used for spamming (e.g. 99% of the time), or
3. a human reviewer from the search engine takes a look at the site

Then sites may find their efforts were spam after all.

It's true that there are some big sites which can't be excluded from search results for any long period of time. That doesn't mean they can't be penalised, they can't suffer reputational damage, or they can't run into legal problems for the spam they willingly or unwittingly publish.

[incrediblehelp]

It's true that there are some big sites which can't be excluded from search results for any long period of time.  That doesn't mean they can't be penalised, they can't suffer reputational damage, or they can't run into legal problems for the spam they willingly or unwittingly publish.

Good point.

This could simply be the good of the website out weighing the bad.

[Jill]

Those that have hidden this text, either the SEO companies or the brands themselves, seem kind of like they're flaunting this now by leaving it up. Either that or they're simply not aware.

I wonder which it is?

[Jill]

Robert has a new post at his site, which summarizes what has happened so far in regards to this spammy situation.

It's actually pretty funny in parts, especially where he comments on some of the TW comments!

Bjorn Tipling added: I'm no SEO expert, but those 'outings' seem like minor technical violations at best. I was expecting to see massive keyword injection...

Medford: Bjorn is at least half correct—he is not an SEO expert.

[Randy]

An excellent follow up IMO.

Gonna be interesting to see how it all plays out.

I wonder, has Robert or anybody else looked to see if Y! or MSN has taken any action? Seems like a pretty easy way to garner some free publicity for them to me.

[Jill]

Well, I just quickly checked the engines for web meeting applications which isn't used visibly on the webex site. (Web meeting is, but not with applications.)

All but Yahoo show webex's home page. The interesting thing is Yahoo shows the more appropriate page which has that phrase in the title tag.

Certainly, the hidden stuff on the webex site is just weird, because they don't need it at all. It's got it's keyword phrases already visibly on the page. Why hide additional instances of it. I'm really confused by that particular one. Risk a penalty for nothing? Really really weird.

[qwerty]

A lot of people seem to be stuck on the idea that the home page is the most desirable landing page, so even if they've got highly relevant content on an internal page, they want searchers to hit the home page first. Maybe that has something to do with it.

[Jill]

Out of curiousity, and for an update, I just randomly checked one of the sites that were spamming (ShopNBC) and it's still doing it.

Nothing like flaunting it!

Their google crawl page cracks me up: www.shopnbc.com/xml/autopublish/Google/NewGoogleCrawl.htm

[qwerty]

Yikes

Of course, it's just a site map. The fact that it's called /Google/NewGoogleCrawl.htm shouldn't lead anyone to think that it was created just for search engines

[Jill]

Well I believe it's also not visible on the page (the link to that umm site map).

[storyspinner]

why would they (shopnbc.com) even do this? Its not like their site is in frames and can't find those product detail pages.

Jill - how'd you find this link?

[Jill]

Lianna, go back to the beginning of this thread and look at Robert Medford's site.

He points out the link, plus if you just look at Google's text cache you see it. The text cache is a great way to spot hidden spam.

[DianeV]

Also, in addition to disabling Javascript, Opera allows you to view pages with CSS turned off. Can be most illuminating.