Web Marketing Strategy Update

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.

Initially Google might have these “threshold breakers” inspected by its human spam watchers, to see how reliable such user input is before any further action is taken against a page or website. But if they find that 99% of the sites are indeed spam, Google could easily move to automatic filtering and reduce its own human input to monitoring accuracy with random samples.

Since it is also likely that some users will remove pages that are not necessarily spam, but simply not relevant to their search, Google may also use the data to improve its understanding of what searchers are actually looking for when they enter a particular search string.

I would imagine pages removed for this reason to be far less in number and relatively easy for Google to spot because they will be tied to specific kinds of searches instead of popping up all over the place, and form a pattern of removals in common with similar themed sites, probably having few entire site removals. And whilst different searchers may be using the same words but looking for different things, objections to spam run across the board.

Matt mentions that the final format may change, so we could even see an option to select either “spam” or “not relevant” as the reason for removing a page. Alternatively Google may see the mass removal of entire sites as a good indicator of spam.

Of course, this is all conjecture on my part, and I could be entirely wrong.