Archive for September, 2005
Tuesday, September 27th, 2005
Remove Pages You Don’t Like From Google SERPS
Matt Cutts talks about a new user-interface experiment on Google that enables searchers to remove results from the SERPS they view in Personalized Search.
The idea is that you can block spam pages from showing up in your search results.
Under each listing, a new “remove result” link is shown adjacent to the “view similar pages” link. Clicking it removes the listing and presents a link to “more options.”
These give the searcher the ability to choose between removing the particular page for the current search, every search, or blocking the entire site from appearing in any searches performed by the user.
Matt says it’s too early to say whether Google will use the data to improve general search or even if the feature will become permanent.
I don’t claim to be a search engine expert, but to my mind it seems likely that the data would eventually be used to help Google spot spam.
Obviously there would have to be some sort of threshold or “score” in place to prevent purely vindictive attempts by competitors to get Google to drop certain websites, but if 5,000 or 10,000 Personalized Search users all block a page (or whatever a realistic threshold needs to be), that would seem to be a pretty good indicator that something is wrong somewhere. Where there’s smoke there’s usually fire.
No Comments » - Posted in General, SEO / SEM by Azam
Tuesday, September 27th, 2005
Coding Exploit Boosts Google Rankings
From Threadwatch:
Although citation engines are a good starting point for quality search results it is apparent that the citation nature of Google and the search functions/caching of large prominent authority sites can in fact be exploited.
Here is an example:
- A series of pages are created on a domain say www.mylittlewebsite.com and the links point to a search request on one of these sites, example: copy the link url and paste to see what i mean, it’s loooong
- Notice the formatting using HEX code when surrounded by a standard HREF tag this translates the link properly when the request is made to the authority websites POST for search – the result is properly translated into basic html. This is a clever coding exploit, this format ensures the request is properly formatted in basic HTML.
- Obviously the request is a negative search result on the authority website, however particularly site searches will cache all results of local searches, successful or otherwise.
- If these search results are spiderable content, then a robot such as Googlebot will view the cache results and see inbound links from a high profile authority site point to the domain in question.
