To kick off the new year, the Google Operating System blog spoke about the downside of their ability to index pages faster: artifically boosting the rankings of newly created pages. New pages obviously can’t rank normally because they have no backlinks, so instead, Google will artifically inflate the rankings based on historical data and any of the few backlinks they can detect.
An example of how this might work is a hot-off-the-presses news story. As websites begin to cover this new story, new pages are created. But because these are new, they would not normally rank high in the SERPs. Google, on the otherhand, notices that there are suddenly a lot of searches for a certain query that wasn’t all that popular before and assumes something has happened. Then, Google shows more recent results, which would include some of these newly created pages.
While this feature has been designed to deliver the optimal relevent information to users, like anything else, it has the potential to be gamed, and is. An example of this being taken advantage of was described at the Google OS blog:
If you go to Google’s homepage and click on the special logo that celebrates 25 years of TCP/IP and the New Year, you’ll be sent to the search results for [January 1 TCP/IP] and you should normally see a Wikipedia page as the top result. But the first page of Google’s results has changed dramatically in the past hours and all the results are new: most of them are from spam sites, pages that discuss Google’s logo and quote from Wikipedia. Most notably, the top result is a Digg page that links to a newly-created blog with a meaningful address: january-1-tcp-ip.blogspot.com and a highly-optimized title: “January 1 tcp/ip”. Obviously, that blog hoped to take advantage of Google’s new logo and succeeded: the two top results are Digg pages that link to that site and they’re followed by that blog’s homepage and a post from the same blog.
Google also discusses how this can also occur when there is an earthquake somewhere in the world, and then people start searching for it. But really, the same is true for any hot new searches. Have you ever utilized Google’s “Hot Trends” feature? Many, many sites take advantage of knowing the hot searches of the hour/day and create all kinds of worthless, spammy posts that litter the web, yet rank high.
While I love that I can search for something timely at Google.com, and not have to neccessarily conduct a “News” search, it would be nice if they could figure out some sort of way to weed out the spam from the actual legitimate stories and sites.
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Comments
13 responses so far ↓
Mark Laymon on Jan 3, 2008 at 6:36 pm
I have had sites that exploited news events with all kinds of worthless, spammy posts, yes they did rank very high and were very easy to make! But they never last long…
Hobo on Jan 3, 2008 at 9:09 pm
I thought all you did was buy links? :)
Jason Murphy on Jan 3, 2008 at 9:54 pm
I agree with mark an example of such a site is www.enjoyafreenight.com which I had at the top for about a day or so…it can become a full time job marketing this way…this is supposed to be a lazy mans game!
Christopher Kata on Jan 3, 2008 at 10:10 pm
Thanks for sharing this tid bit of incredible information! Now to take advantage of this with spamming!
Jaan Kanellis on Jan 4, 2008 at 12:43 am
I really can’t believe how blown out of proportion this “new” web page stuff has gotten over the last few days in the SEO blogsphere. This “boost” has been around for over a year now. Hasn’t anybody else seen this for a while now?
Alphane Moon on Jan 4, 2008 at 6:12 am
I have seen this before, I don’t think that it is new or an “algorithm change”. New pages normally enjoy a good ranking for some weeks, it has been called the “honeymoon phase” or “newbie boost”. These pages tend to crash at the end of this time (whenever that may be) if they can’t attract enough links.
Jaan Kanellis on Jan 4, 2008 at 7:10 am
Now one thing they are doing is indexing and crawling new pages much, much faster than before
Christopher Kata on Jan 4, 2008 at 8:20 am
In case anyone was wondering, I was just kidding about the spamming comment!
Although this effect has been around for awhile I think it’s important that people continue discussing it!
Waleed Eissa on Jan 4, 2008 at 9:43 am
This is very interesting, this is why I think this PageRank thing really sucks and should be replaced all together…
Jason Murphy on Jan 4, 2008 at 10:16 am
This has been going on for awhile. The key is to have a niche site that combines heavy content filled with good keywords. I know this is why we’ve also seen such an increase in SPLOGS in the last 12-18 months. Rob Benwell wrote Blogging2theBank which also contributed to this marketing strategy. I have a site that is using an awesome service that helps ethical marketers leverage this “gliche” in Google. The service creates Wordpress like blog sites with anywhere between 1 and 10,000 articles instantly. The articles are created automatically and are dynamic so they change on the homepage every day. An example of a site is www.escapecollege.com which has over 3,000 articles on it. I also have the ability to write new pages or fresh content that will also appear on the homepage.
If you want to check out the company I use here is a link http://www.whypark.com/?hop=iay2007 it really is the best thing I’ve seen in awhile as far as ease of use and affordability. You can host 100 sites for $99…not bad.
Denver Home Refinance on Jan 4, 2008 at 2:53 pm
There is a guy who has taken this concept to the nth degree with his website http://www.conversationdomination.com/
He charges $1,500 to learn how to manipulate the Google search results in this manner. I heard him hawking his product on a podcast. Basically, you do a blog post and then post to the social bookmarking and news sites referencing back to the blog post, pinging each social site along the way. The result is that you can get to the first page of Google, but the problem is that the results don’t stick. They last for a short time, and then the post falls out of the search engine rankings altogether. It’s just a flash in the pan technique. Google has an algorithmic juggling act that none of us could perform any better. I think that they will figure out how to weed out postings boosted by these type of techniques, but for the mean time, at least the posts don’t stick for long.
Michael Martinez on Jan 4, 2008 at 4:30 pm
This effect has been around for years. It’s a total non-issue.
Vectorpedia(Rick) on Jan 7, 2008 at 11:05 am
I found this to be a very interesting concept…..may be well overblown
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