Lies, More Lies, and Google: How the Search Giant Promotes and Profits Off Spam
Try as hard as I might, I can’t seem to bring myself to love Google. Few people who have some SEO experience can. They’ve seen the gross inconsistencies of its search results, the often unfair ranking upheavals where for every five spamming bad guys, at least one good guy also takes a fall, and the complete obliqueness of its customer service process. Forums upon forums are filled with complaints from angry AdWords advertisers who’ve been banned without explanation, it’s silence and heavy-handedness perhaps matched only by the AdSense team.
Sure, I love Gmail and YouTube (which Google didn’t build, by the way), and even Google Docs is somewhat okay, but I simply can’t embrace the company’s main product: Google.com, wholeheartedly.
There was a whole lot of noise about the Google Panda update that was released in February this year. It was popularly called the ‘Farmer Update’ because one of its chief aims was to clean up the number of ‘farmers’ – websites that cull content from other sources without attribution – that tended to dominate search results. There was also a lot of talk about relegating spun, unoriginal content to the back of the SERPs and promoting original, high quality content. Consequently, a lot of websites were affected by Panda (“did you get Panda’d? became a popular catchphrase at SEO forums).
SEOs will tell you though that the penalties that were handed out seldom seemed to follow any fathomable process. I know internet marketers who maintained sites filled with more spam than the collective inboxes of the Erectile Dysfunction Community, who, nevertheless, actually saw their traffic increase. Others, who maintained similar websites got the axe (and deservedly so). Still some who worked hard on their sites, kept them updated with clean, well written, original content were penalized because of a solitary low quality page on the site (yes, Google does that. One bad page can actually tank your site). Nobody has any clue whatsoever how or why certain sites get affected while others are spared. There is seemingly no consistency or logic to the penalties that were handed out, outside of the high-profile hits, of course.
So yesterday, when I tried to find an article on Steve Jobs I’d read before (but couldn’t recall where), I headed over to Google and typed in “Steve Jobs Jerry Lee Lewis”, since I remember that the article mentioned that Steve was a big fan of Lewis. I first searched at the Google India website (Google.co.in). Here are the results:
The original story, which appeared on Hollywood Reporter (and is a great read, by the way) is at no. 7, six spots behind a spam site that’s copied it verbatim.
I remember posting a query on Google Webmaster Forum about one of my sites tanking despite no overt offences against Google’s Webmaster guidelines. I mentioned that a keyword my site used to rank at no.1 for was now occupied by a spam site with barely readable spun content. I was told that “that’s a barely searched for keyword, so naturally, you’ll see spam results”.
So apparently, here, the original story ranks behind the spam site because my query itself wasn’t worthy of excluding spam from.
Disappointed, I headed over to the main Google.com forum to see if and how the results varied. Sure enough, the Hollywood Reporter story was now at no.2, though the first position was occupied by an even bigger offender:
I’m not going to give the site any SEO juice whatsoever by linking to it (and neither should you. In fact, don’t send the spam sites any traffic whatsoever), but here’s a snapshot of the language carnage taking place over there:
It's actually somewhat hilarious when you read it.
This is unreadable bullshit. And Google thinks its better than the Hollywood Reporter story. Better enough to be served ahead of it.
Don’t Mention the Competition
Let’s get some perspective here: Google’s biggest competition, until an year back, was Yahoo.
Yes, that ship sinking faster than a cardboard raft in a Pacific storm was the company Google’s executives had to worry about when they sat down to discuss ‘competition’. I’m sure that must have made for some fairly short meetings (punctuated by epic laughter, of course).
My point is: Google hasn’t really been challenged hard enough. Sure, Microsoft has thrown in its competitor, but Microsoft stopped being on the cutting edge around a decade ago. There are (were) other competitors too – Cuil and Blekko being some famous examples – but they could never gather up the resources to confront a problem of such a massive scale. Building a search engine is about a googol times (ha ha!) more difficult than 1998 when Google started out. The mess of data that makes up the internet today is astounding. Billions of pages are created every day. Even crawling that data requires hundreds of servers and dozens of engineers working round the clock, not to mention the actual process of making sense of all of it. No wonder so few startups are even trying to compete in what is a $30B market.
Of course, the lack of competition has done exactly what lack of competition does: it has made Google a monopoly that is far too distracted with shiny new toys to actually care about its core business. And it doesn’t make a lot of difference because, heck, what are you going to use? Bloody Bing?
Why Google Won’t Cut Down on Spam
Google won’t cut down on spam because spam keeps its business afloat.
See this site? It has pretty decent content – or at least I would like to believe so. As of now, there are no adverts on it. Even if there were any – say, I were to put a small AdSense banner to pay for hosting costs – the CTR (Click Through Rate) on the ads would be abysmally low – less than 1%. That’s because I probably will make the ad a little discreet. I wouldn’t want to scare away my readers, would I?
But that spam site you stumbled upon in the morning today? It doesn’t give a shit about readers. It wants you off the page as quickly as possible – hopefully after clicking on an AdSense ad. On internet marketing forums, the general advice passed around is: you don’t want them hanging around. You want them to click on an ad and move on as quickly as possible.
Most spam websites are monetized by GoogleAdSense or other affiliate programs. Most of these spam sites are also very carefully designed to maximize ad clicks. The more people visit spam sites, the more clicks on Google’s little ads, and the fatter the company’s bottom-line – to the tune of $2.34B in Q1 2011. Getting spam results off the search engines would pop a huge hole in this number for Google.
Even further: many spammy sites make money through affiliate programs. Most affiliate programs advertise themselves through AdWords. It’s in Google’s interest to keep those affiliate sales coming in, so that even more advertising dollars can be channeled into its AdWords program.
It’s hard to realize how important spam is to Google’s fortunes unless you’ve worked in internet marketing for some time. Without spam, Google’s profits would be cut in half (okay, so that might be a bit exaggerated).
Of course, it has to adopt a “customers first!” policy publicly, hence updates like Panda among others. Sure, it cleaned up the SERPs somewhat because far too many people were complaining, but only long enough for the voices to peter out. Google knows it can’t possibly keep on pumping up spam without some backlash from users (those Bing numbers must have also scared the Mountain View giant somewhat), and hence those periodic house cleanups. But make no mistake: spam remains absolutely vital to Google’s business interests.
This article started out as a rant against crappy Google search results but evolved into something else altogether. Needless to say, I feel it doesn’t do enough justice to the title. This is a much deeper issue that covers several industries and even the fabric of the internet itself. I’ll probably do a more in-depth story in the coming weeks.
Btw, if you have a Google horror story to share, send it to puranjay at gmail dot com.
