Google is engaged in a war. It is a war on
spam. With new strategies and filters ready to put into place, the search
engine is adding new firepower to its arsenal almost daily. Webmasters and
SEO Consultants alike are terrified; fearing what the future holds for them.
But for those of us that believe in the cause, the future isn’t scary. In
fact, the future looks very bright.
My ten year old son is fascinated with war. He has a dozen
buckets full of army men, and makes everything a battlefield—the kitchen, my
bedroom, and even the bathroom. He has a new bicycle helmet that’s army
green. For Halloween, when other kids were Spiderman and Batman, he was a
soldier. He constantly plays computer games like Soldiers of WWII and
Battlefield 1942; he even turns brooms and mops into weapons to
combat the invisible enemy. War is all he talks about. He loves movies like
Saving Private Ryan, Pearl Harbor, and Platoon. He
knows more about both World Wars and Vietnam then I’ll ever hope to, or care
to, know. His obsession with war got me thinking about how it applied to
what I do every day. What does SEO and war have in common? More to the
point, how does Google implement strategies that declare war on spam?
SEO is a constant struggle to get our clients' websites to
the top. We combat lousy SEO companies that give us a bad name, flagrant ads
that claim they can do what we do for only $29 by submitting your site to a
thousand search engines, and other little annoyances that pop up every day.
Even still, my small battles are really nothing when you compare it to the
war that Google is waging. Google’s number one goal is to bring the visitor
the most relevant results possible in a search engine. This means filtering
and sorting through all the junk out there, so that you, the visitor,
doesn’t have to.
"It's an arms race," Steve Linford, director of the
London-based SpamHaus Project, said. "The more we lock (spammers) down, the
more techniques they try to get around us." The SpamHaus Project is a
nonprofit organization that posts information about the groups behind the
majority of unsolicited e-mail, and maintains a "black hole" list of domains
from which spammers operate. Spam accounted for at least one in four email
messages a business received in 2002. The U.S. Attorney General’s website
has an entire page on the subject. “Almost 45 percent of all email is now
spam and that number is growing each year. Nearly three trillion spam
messages are sent each year - 13 times the total snail mail delivered by the
U.S. Postal service. The average wired American is hit with nearly 2,200
spam messages annually - this after most ISPs have filtered 80-90 percent of
the junk messages. Some reports indicate that these numbers could increase
by five times in the near future.”
Market research firm, Gartner Inc., estimates that their
company of over 10,000 employees suffers more than $13 million worth of lost
productivity because of internally generated spam. This is just email spam.
Throw in the spam on the internet, and it’s a huge productivity drain. It
causes companies financial losses because they have to purchase more high
tech software like spam blockers and spy-ware removers, and it’s a strain on
system servers and bandwidth.
Google defines Internet Spam as any unwanted information or
propaganda that may have been received through deceptive measures on
the part of the sender. To a search engine, spam is hyperlinked pages that
are intent on misleading the search engine. It is estimated that 80% of
search results for any keyword phrases entered into a search engine are
considered spam.
During World War II, the term propaganda earned the
negative connotation because of intended deceptions used to dispirit those
on the front lines by Nazi Germany. Soldiers and citizens were constantly
bombarded with this new psychological weapon. Most propaganda in Germany was
produced by the Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, or PROMI.
Joseph Goebbels was placed in charge of this ministry shortly after Adolf
Hitler took power in 1933. Hitler was impressed by the power of Allied
propaganda during World War I and believed that it had been a primary cause
of the collapse of morale and revolts in the German home front and Navy in
1918. Nazis had no moral qualms about spreading propaganda which they
themselves knew to the false and indeed spreading deliberately false
information was part of a doctrine known as the “Big Lie”, the theory he
wrote about in his book, Mein Kampf. In Mein Kampf, Hitler
wrote that people came to believe that Germany was defeated in the First
World War in the field due to a propaganda technique used by Jews who were
influential in the German press.
“British and Allied fliers were depicted as cowardly
murderers and Americans in particular as gangsters in the style of Al
Capone. At the same time, German propaganda sought to alienate Americans and
British from each other, and both these Western belligerents from the
Soviets.” --World War 2 Propaganda (www.world-war-2.info) The propaganda was
effective to a degree; however, it was repudiated by the Allied Powers’ own
positive and truthful doctrine.
Now, the term propaganda has come to mean,
“information that is spread for the purpose of promoting some cause, such as
a doctrine in a war.” It's ironic that Google used this word when it defined
Internet Spam.
Google trademarked the term “TrustRank” and is working on a
new spam removing model that they explain in what forum posters are
referring to as the Stanford White Paper. “Web spam pages use various
techniques to achieve higher-than-deserved rankings in a search engine's
results. While human experts can identify spam, it is too expensive to
manually evaluate a large number of pages. Instead, we propose techniques to
semi-automatically separate reputable, good pages from spam. We first select
a small set of seed pages to be evaluated by an expert. Once we manually
identify the reputable seed pages, we use the link structure of the web to
discover other pages that are likely to be good. In this paper we discuss
possible ways to implement the seed selection and the discovery of good
pages. We present results of experiments run on the World Wide Web indexed
by AltaVista and evaluate the performance of our techniques. Our results
show that we can effectively filter out spam from a significant fraction of
the web, based on a good seed set of less than 200 sites.” This comes from a
12 page abstract, called “Combating Spam with TrustRank”, on Stanford
University’s website that outlines the methodology of TrustRank.
In summary, TrustRank is a way to cut down on spam and
filter out content that is not relevant to the searcher in order to bring
them results they really want, by branding good sites with a high trust
rating, and by stamping the spam sites as untrustworthy, including any site
that links to these delineated sites. Google’s abstract says, “Human editors
help search engines combat search engine spam, but reviewing all content is
impractical. TrustRank places a core vote of trust on a seed set of reviewed
sites to help search engines identify pages that would be considered useful
from pages that would be considered spam. This trust is attenuated to other
sites through links from the seed sites.” Google’s famous PageRank seems to
have lost meaning, as sites are easily able to produce back links or
purchase them, which defeats the purpose of PageRank. In my opinion,
TrustRank makes more sense. It makes a webmaster more careful with whom he
or she links to in the first place, making back links harder to get, but
well worth the reward once they are earned.
Another way Google is fighting Internet spam is called the
“Sandbox Effect”. The Sandbox Effect is essentially a delay of a few months
once a site is spidered before it is indexed. Sometimes, a new site may
initially receive a high ranking in the search engines, and then drop into
search engine obscurity. They may receive no page rank, and can be virtually
invisible in the search engines for up to 120 days. While this may seem like
a penalty to new website owners, especially if they are unaware of the new
filters or how they work and why, it is Google’s way of fighting spam. Their
methodology is that in the “sandbox” (named such for the analogy of a bunch
of new kids playing in the sandbox together away from the grownups),
spammers won’t see the results of their efforts in the search engine, and
may possibly be fooled into thinking they’ve either been caught, or their
efforts have been futile. Google hopes the spammers will then simply give up
and go away. In war, we call this technique flanking, hoping to catch the
enemy off guard by coming around behind their line, causing them to panic or
withdraw. The desired result of the Sandbox Effect is that the spammers most
likely will do both: panic and withdraw; or better yet, surrender. Flanking
is one of the most effective plan of attack, and the most difficult to
achieve, as it requires finesse, secrecy, and being able to know your
enemy’s moves before they do.
As in any war, it can be long, bloody, and both sides can
sustain heavy casualties. While spammers are filtered out, some legitimate
websites can be annihilated as well, due to inadequate SEO, mistakes in
their pages (like broken links), or just simple ignorance to the way search
engines work. It is the responsibility of your five-star General to guide
you and develop your strategy. Your SEO consultant can lead you through the
minefield of search engine optimization techniques without triggering any of
the mines, and keeping you safe. If you inadvertently set off a mine, you
lose your hard earned ranking, the traffic that goes with it, and the
resulting sales from that traffic. You will then fall into the multitudes of
spam casualties; possibly earning a Google ban forever. Will the casual
observer see these casualties? No. On the surface, everything feels
peaceful. In fact, the war only helps the average citizens and their
relevant search results, and in the end, brings a better search environment
for all. This is, after all, what Google really wants. Peace.
Jennifer E. Sullivan is an Internet Business Consultant who
specializes in search engine optimization and web marketing. Her emphasis is
on small to medium business marketing. She has written several web marketing
articles, including "Hiring an SEO Consultant: 10 Reasons Why You Should",
"Let's Not Forget About the Little Guy", and "PageRank for Websites: Is
There More To the Web?". You can find more information on her services at
First Class SEO,
http://www.firstclass-seo.com.
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