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Google Needs to Catch Up

September 29, 2003 in
Short URL: http://boyink.me/s/2138

Web Design, Web Site Hosting, Ecommerce Development, Graphic Web Designers, Internet Marketing Search Engine Submissions by Bella Web Design
http://www.bellawebdesign.com/webdesigncompanyinformation.htm

As much as I like Google, people are still finding ways to fool it and artificially bump their rankings for certain search terms.

On the page above, the site developer put pages and pages of text aimed squarely at bumping her Google rating, hid them “below the fold”, and turned off the browser scrollbars.  The spam text isn’t colored the same as the page background - that’s an old trick that most search engines now recognize.

This technique got her to page 2 of a Google search on “Holland, MI Web Design” even though her firm is in Georgia.

Here’s another one, this company has a page for each state, with city names and web-development related links underneath them.  This earned them a first-page spot on the above Google search.  They’re located in California.

The sad thing is most small businesses aren’t web-savvy enough to recognize underhanded methods like this at work.  I wonder how much work they get by doing this?  If someone was searching for web design in Holland, would they be OK with working with a company in California or Georgia instead?  Or are these web designers just creating non-value added traffic for their sites and email systems, up to the point prospective clients realize they aren’t local after all?

Regardless, Google needs to catch up with these types of pages, lest their value as a search engine begins to drop.

Comments are closed, but you can read the comments other people left.

  1. Dave J. on September 30, 2003

    A competitor of mine was able to corner nearly every keyword phrase I use with #1 on Google.

    Right now his site is missing on Google.  Last time, Google dropped them for a month.  Hopefully this time it is longer.

    I searched for a certain type of hardware on Google yesterday and the first link ended up being a redirect to Amazon, which must violate both Amazon and Google’s rules.

  2. Michael Boyink (Author) on September 30, 2003

    I reported these 2 sites to Google, and got this response:

    Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We take cases of inappropriate sites very seriously, and we appreciate your help maintaining the quality of our index. Please submit this report at http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html and we will investigate.

    Regards,
    The Google Team”

    Always kills me when the company can’t forward it’s own email internally, but maybe there’s some automation behind that form.

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