The war on spam: Google fights back

Website design By BotEap.comGoogle is involved in a war. It is a war against spam. With new strategies and filters ready to go, the search engine adds new firepower to its arsenal almost daily. Both webmasters and SEO consultants are terrified; fearing what the future holds. But for those of us who believe in the cause, the future is not scary. In fact, the future looks very bright.

Website design By BotEap.comMy ten year old son is fascinated with war. It has a dozen buckets full of army men and makes a whole battlefield: the kitchen, my bedroom, and even the bathroom. He has a new bicycle helmet that is military green. By Halloween, when other kids were Spiderman and Batman, he was a soldier. He constantly plays computer games like Soldiers of World War II and Battlefield 1942; It even turns brooms and mops into weapons to combat the invisible enemy. War is all he talks about. He loves movies like Saving Private Ryan, Pearl harbor, and Platoon. He knows more about the World Wars and Vietnam than I would ever hope or care to know. His obsession with war made me think about how it applied to what I do every day. What do SEO and war have in common? More specifically, how does Google implement strategies that declare war on spam?

Website design By BotEap.comSEO is a constant struggle to get our clients’ websites to the top. We fight lousy SEO companies that give us a bad name, blatant ads that claim they can do what we do for just $ 29 by submitting your site to a thousand search engines, and other little annoyances that pop up every day. Still, my little battles are nothing when you compare them to the war Google is waging. Google’s number one goal is to provide the visitor with the most relevant results possible in a search engine. This means filtering and sorting all the garbage out there, so you, the visitor, don’t have to.

Website design By BotEap.com“It’s an arms race,” said Steve Linford, director of the London-based SpamHaus Project. “The more we block (spammers), the more techniques try to get around us.” The SpamHaus Project is a non-profit organization that publishes information about the groups behind most unsolicited emails and maintains a list of “black hole” domains from which spammers operate. Spam accounted for at least one in four email messages a business received in 2002. The United States Attorney General’s website has a full page on the subject. “Nearly 45 percent of all email is now spam, and that number is increasing each year. Nearly three billion spam messages are sent each year, 13 times the total postal mail delivered by the US Postal Service. spam messages annually, this after most ISPs have filtered 80 to 90 percent of spam messages. Some reports indicate that these numbers could be multiplied by five in the near future. “

Website design By BotEap.comThe market research firm, Gartner Inc., estimates that its company of more than 10,000 employees suffers productivity losses of more than $ 13 million due to internally generated spam. This is just spam. Add in spam on the internet and it’s a huge loss of productivity. It causes financial loss for businesses because they have to buy more high-tech software, such as spam blockers and spyware removers, and it puts a strain on system servers and bandwidth.

Website design By BotEap.comGoogle defines Internet spam as any information or propaganda that may have been received through deceptive measures by the sender. For a search engine, spam is hyperlinked pages that try to fool the search engine. An estimated 80% of search results for any keyword phrase entered into a search engine are considered spam.

Website design By BotEap.comDuring World War II, the term propaganda gained the negative connotation due to the willful deceptions used to discourage those on the front lines of Nazi Germany. Soldiers and citizens were constantly bombarded with this new psychological weapon. Most of the propaganda in Germany was produced by the Ministry of Enlightenment and Public Propaganda, or PROMI. Joseph Goebbels was put in charge of this ministry shortly after Adolf Hitler assumed power in 1933. Hitler was impressed by the power of Allied propaganda during World War I and believed that it had been the main cause of the collapse of morale and the riots in Germany. Home Front and Navy in 1918. The Nazis had no moral qualms about spreading propaganda that they themselves knew to be false and, in fact, deliberately spreading false information was part of a doctrine known as the “Big Lie”, the theory on which wrote in his book. My struggle. On My struggleHitler wrote that people came to believe that Germany was defeated in World War I on the ground due to a propaganda technique used by Jews who were influential in the German press.

Website design By BotEap.com“British and Allied airmen were portrayed as cowardly assassins and Americans in particular as Al Capone-style gangsters. At the same time, German propaganda sought to alienate Americans and British from each other, and both western belligerents from the Soviets.” World War II Propaganda (www.world-war-2.info) Propaganda was effective up to a point; however, it was repudiated by the positive and truthful doctrine of the allied powers.

Website design By BotEap.comNow the term propaganda it has come to mean “information that is disseminated for the purpose of promoting some cause, like a doctrine in a war.” It is ironic that Google used this word when defining Internet Spam.

Website design By BotEap.comGoogle registered the term “TrustRank” and is working on a new spam elimination model that explains what forum posters like the Stanford White Paper refer to. “Spam web pages use various techniques to rank higher than they deserve in search engine results. While human experts can identify spam, it is too costly to manually evaluate a large number of pages. Instead , we propose techniques for separating good and reputable pages from spam. First, we select a small set of initial pages for expert evaluation. Once we manually identify reliable initial pages, we use the web’s link structure to discover other pages that are likely to be In this article we discuss possible ways to implement seed selection and discovery of good pages. We present the results of experiments conducted on the World Wide Web indexed by AltaVista and evaluate the performance of our techniques. Our Results show that we can filter spam from a significant fraction of on the web, based on a good set of seeds from less than 200 sites. ” This comes from a 12-page summary, called “Combating Spam with TrustRank,” on the Stanford University website that describes the TrustRank methodology.

Website design By BotEap.comIn short, TrustRank is a way to reduce spam and filter content that is not relevant to the search engine in order to give them the results they really want, by marking good sites with a high trust rating and marking spam sites as not. trustworthy, including any site that links to these delineated sites. Google’s summary reads: “Human editors help search engines fight search engine spam, but reviewing all content is impractical. TrustRank gives a fundamental vote of confidence to an initial set of reviewed sites. To help search engines identify pages that would be considered useful from pages that would be considered spam. This trust is mitigated on other sites through links from the seed sites. ” Google’s famous PageRank seems to have lost its meaning, as sites are able to easily produce or buy back links, thus defeating the purpose of PageRank. TrustRank makes more sense in my opinion. This makes a webmaster more careful who they link to in the first place, which makes backlinks harder to get, but is worth the payoff once they are earned.

Website design By BotEap.comAnother way that Google is fighting spam on the Internet is called the “Sandbox Effect.” The Sandbox effect is essentially a delay of a few months once a site is scratched before it is indexed. Sometimes a new site can initially receive a high ranking in search engines and then fall into search engine obscurity. They may not receive page rank and can be virtually invisible in search engines for up to 120 days. While this may seem like a penalty to new website owners, especially if they are unaware of the new filters or how they work and why, it is Google’s way of fighting spam. His methodology is that in the “sandbox” (named after the analogy of a group of new children playing in the sandbox together away from the adults), spammers will not see the results of their efforts in the engine. search and possibly delude themselves into thinking that they have been caught or that their efforts have been futile. Google hopes that spammers will just give up and walk away. In warfare, we call this technique flanking, hoping to catch the enemy off guard by going behind their line, causing them to panic or retreat. The desired result of the Sandbox effect is that spammers will likely do both: panic and withdraw; or better yet, give up. Flanking is one of the most effective plans of attack and the most difficult to achieve, since it requires delicacy, secrecy and being able to know the movements of your enemy before they do.

Website design By BotEap.comAs in any war, it can be long, bloody, and both sides can suffer heavy casualties. While spammers are filtered, some legitimate websites can also be killed due to improper SEO, errors on their pages (such as broken links), or simply by ignoring the way search engines work. It is your five-star General’s responsibility to guide you and develop your strategy. Your SEO consultant can guide you through the minefield of search engine optimization techniques without activating any of the mines and keeping you safe. If you inadvertently activate a mine, you lose your hard-earned ranking, the accompanying traffic, and the resulting sales from that traffic. Then you will fall into the crowd of spam victims; possibly earning a ban from Google forever. Will the casual observer see these casualties? No. On the surface, everything feels peaceful. In fact, war only helps average citizens and their relevant search results, and ultimately provides a better search environment for everyone. After all, this is what Google really wants. Peace.