Is it true that Google is planning to exclude user generated content sites from search results?
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M$4 Answers
Google already has a duplicate content algorithm that pretty much does in sites like Bukisa that allow posting of reprints. It's also hurt Examiner, who allows it as well.
Google is trying, I believe, to only give the best information to its users, which is admirable, but a tall order. The algorithm that does not even index articles under 250 words came into existence to exclude diary blogs, or scraper blogs. Unfortunately for some of us, it also excludes our promotional posts on our own blogs which point to our articles. Suite101 only allows you to post 50 words of an article in a blurb, so you have to either include that blurb somewhere in a longer article, or put several blurbs on one post.
Over the years, Google has done a lot to clean up its search results. They changed their algorithm in 2008 to exclude all those really annoying keyword stuffed affiliate pages. That time, they did the "update" algorithm, that if a site was not updated regularly and significantly, it would not be crawled. Eventually, all those pages disappeared from search results.
I've spent a lot of time learning as much as I can about how Google works, but it changes so regularly that it's impossible to keep up. If some of this information is now faulty, please correct me.
Personal experience and study
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M$
I guess it's plausible that they could decide to give a lower weighting to some kinds of sites, or particular UGC sites that they don't consider high-quality. But that's not a lot different than now, where an incoming link from the New York Times counts for a lot more than a link from some guy's blog.
Since so much of the useful, specialised, "long tail" info on the web only exists in places like forums, blogs, article sites etc, it is hard to imagine that they'd ever screen out a result when that was one of the few best matches they managed to find.
In fact the only discussion I found about Google screening content was actually about whether they should review videos before they get published on YouTube, to make sure they're not offensive, illegal etc. That obviously has nothing at all to do with what they return in search results.
http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/07/31/uk-web-giants-should-screen-user-generated-content
PS The blog you mention is an interesting read, even though I've got no idea where they got the Google snippet from, unless maybe it was a misunderstanding of what was meant by screen UGC content.
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M$
From my point of view, as a writer, I love it when an article or blog post gets picked up by google and suddenly I get thousands of hits, it is really good for my ego, however I find it incredibly irritating when I find 'my' content elsewhere with minor changes (usually typos and maybe tense) in a google search and there is no track back or source attribution.
I am not in the business of creating content for money, but more because I love to write.
First content indexing is great, but finding the source without trackbacks is incredibly tough I suppose.
personal experience.
You can leave an optional "tip" with Mahalo's virtual currency, Mahalo Dollars. If you are asking a difficult question that might require some research, or if you'd like a wide variety of feedback, a higher tip often leads to more answers to your question.
M$
You can leave an optional "tip" with Mahalo's virtual currency, Mahalo Dollars. If you are asking a difficult question that might require some research, or if you'd like a wide variety of feedback, a higher tip often leads to more answers to your question.
M$
I agree about the stub pages. It really isn't helpful to users to go to pages with no real information.
thanks for the additional thoughts on this, dsaldrigde and philipy.
i became concerned on this issue a couple weeks ago when someone posted a link to this page in a mahalo question:
http://www.seobook.com/matt-cutts-eats-mahalo-spam
obviously, the example posted there is NOT a typical mahalo page...but i've often questioned whether creating inlinks to keywords that actually don't have a page is a good idea. i do it when i create pages because that's what we're asked to do, but i've always questioned the wisdom of it...
Great comment. The closest match to the information I am sometimes looking for often comes from a blog or some sort of user-generated content. I also often get annoyed at how many incomprehensible academic papers (and similar stuff) Google sometimes gives me. Sure, it would be ideal, reputable information for some people; but for others it's just not useful.
I think we can bet that Google will always keep trying to find ways of weeding out garbage from its results, and will always be looking for ways to prevent gaming of its algorithms.
What will never make sense for them is to exclude reasonable quality content that is a the best available match to what the user appeared to be looking for. Given the enormous variety of things people search for, a lot of the time the nearest match will often come from a blog, a forum, a UGC site or similar.
Sure it makes sense for them to give priority to an MIT page over an answer on Stack Overflow or Mahalo. But what if the only place the question was ever addressed in any depth at all was on Stack Overflow? Are they going to tell the person that wants to know the answer "Sorry, no matches" just because the only reasonable match is from a UGC site? That'll never make business sense.
What could make business sense though is to squelch all the "promotion" efforts that people make to boost the rankings of their pages. If you could create an algorithm that told you page X has 10 incoming links, but they're all friends of the author, while page Y has 10 incoming links from visitors who found it useful, it would probably makes sense to favor page Y, and maybe ignore page X altogether.
Btw a 250 word boundary seems pretty useless as there are plenty of questions I have that can easily get a very useful answer in far fewer words. That esp goes for niche questions that are exactly when you most need a search engine to help you.
Thanks for choosing mine best answer!
@balinesecat
> i've often questioned whether creating inlinks to keywords that actually don't have a page is a good idea
Me too. In fact I haven't only questioned it, I've said it's a dumb idea. :)
When I click on any site's internal links and don't find anything but a stub page there I assume it's a half-assed unprofessional site.
For the same reason Mahalo's practice of creating a stub page anytime people search for something that doesn't have a page is also not a great idea.
@derosajohanna
You are right that experts often given rotten explanations which you can't even find if you don't know what the correct technical terms are to Google for.
There's a great example of that in the video on this page, about 15 min in...
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-for-bloggers/
The university site had pages titled things like "Recommendations for use of anti-retroviral drugs...."
All the average person knows to Google for is things like "Have I got AIDS?"