Removal from the index is a bit of a sledge-hammer. There are more subtle ways of correcting for illicit behavior than "No Search for you!" |
I think they mean, for example, things like the "minus 30" penalty where a spammy site will be dropped 30 spots in ranking, rather than not show up entirely.
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This was a result of the year long aggressive controversial complaints by Search Engines Web on a very high profile blog that is read by all of the Google Engineers.
There have been several other changes also.
Ironically, during the heydays of AltaVista and AllTheWeb and Yahoo – before the blog hype began – they too could have been saved ....
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Rather than tell the site owner you've been caught by removing the site they penalize it to page 95 to keep them guessing...eliminate the feedback from experiments in pushing the SEO envelope. |
I think they're just talking about removing power to give other pages a PageRank boost via external links. However, since for Google paid links are almost taboo, it'd be interesting to see their explanation about why they even consider that to be a penalty. :-] |
These are just the normal penalties they have been using and handing out for a long time now being reflected in the guidelines. Nothing really new, but it might be a start of better communication with the webmaster. Instead of saying "take a good look at your site" they are starting to say "you have a penalty for doing junk like this and that". If they don't police their webmaster guidelines (and imho they are for the good of the user) then they might as well remove them. |
(I'm just speaking for myself personally here.)
I wouldn't characterize this as a policy change. Some folks (including me) have been taking a fresh look at our web documentation to see if anything can be misunderstood. We'd like to minimize the chance for misinterpretation of any help documentation. I wouldn't be surprised to see similar small changes throughout our documentation to clarify various points. |
Interesting you mention that. Nick Altmann http://wiseup.org just alerted me that Google also revised:
How can I create a Google-friendly site?
Make sure that other sites link to yours
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=40349
Before:
<<Links help our crawlers find your site and can give your site greater visibility in our search results. When returning results for a search, Google combines PageRank (our measure of a page's importance) with sophisticated text-matching techniques to display pages that are both important and relevant to each search. Google counts the number of votes a page receives to determine its PageRank, interpreting a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." Please note that ranking of sites in our search results is completely automated, and we don't manually assign keywords to sites.>>
After:
<<Links help our crawlers find your site and can give your site greater visibility in our search results. When returning results for a search, Google combines PageRank (our view of a page's importance) with sophisticated text-matching techniques to display pages that are both important and relevant to each search. Google counts the number of votes a page receives as part of its PageRank assessment, interpreting a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important.">> |
They removed this: <<Please note that ranking of sites in our search results is completely automated, and we don't manually assign keywords to sites.>> because it was redundant. |
> because it was redundant.
... or because it's not true. Google rankings are *not* completely automated. They're based on human-made algorithms (e.g. Larry Page/ Sergey Brin's PageRank), human evaluation (e.g. the Quality Evaluation Team with numerous participants, according to Henk van Ess's revelations), and human supervision (e.g. the Google web spam team headed by Matt Cutts). |
