Hmm…Nobody is listening at Google
I see this sort of thing time and time again. “Many hours were spent building this website to comply with Google Webmaster Guidelines, yet we languish below other businesses’ websites in our sector that are still spamming Google with doorway pages, hidden text, and text designed for spiders not users - can you help?”
To be honest - it’s a fair point. Google can’t prescribe what is acceptable web design practice, and then be seen to do nothing about those practices it deems unacceptable - but sometimes this is what would “appear” to be happening.
People are right to feel cheated too - in many cases these are commercial exercises, getting it wrong and not spotting, or worse not acting upon, some spammy optimisation - costs other businesses following the guidelines - in sales, profit - perhaps ultimately jobs, their business and their livelihood.
We can’t help by the way - my company is on the receiving end of this too, since we went clean, and starting writing rather than optimising, our search positions are way down, and are still falling! Businesses still building optimised doorway pages, particularly geographicly styled pages, are beating us hands down.
Given that this is business what can you do? Well, I wouldn’t advise employing your own spammy doorway campaign, I do believe it’ll all get dropped eventually. Spammers take note they are coming for you.
Also, keep your eggs out of one basket - less reliance on Google or any search engine for that matter, would definitely be a good thing too, don’t forget there are offline media channels that have worked well for centuries.
Finally - submit spam reports - Google is not perfect, get yourself a Google Account and send spam reports. Make Google aware of websites that are infringing their guidelines, they might not have spotted them. This is business remember!
December 4th, 2008 at 11:22 am
Hi Oliver, I just wanted to add something to your post regarding the spam reports. The best way to submit spam reports is through your Webmaster Tools account. Reports sent through your Webmaster Tools account are taken much more seriously than anonymous reports. Even if you don’t have a website (which I’m guessing does not apply :-)), you can create a Webmaster Tools account at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ . If you spot sites that are using spammy techniques, please do take the time to report them. These reports are not only used when looking at individual sites, they’re also used to fine-tune our algorithms to automatically recognize similar sites in the future (that is obviously not something that happens from one day to the next though).
Also, keep in mind that there may be any number of other issues involved in ranking :). It might be that there are issues involved which you can fix on your side, such as technical issues that block us from crawling or recognizing your content appropriately. Of course it’s impossible to say in general, because there are so many factors involved in crawling, indexing and ranking, but I would definitely go through some of the technical details when analyzing a site. Webmaster Tools can help you there as well, giving you information about how we were able to crawl your site and if we ran into any issues on the way.
December 4th, 2008 at 4:59 pm
John, thanks for taking the time to input here - much appreciated. I need to change the title of my post now as it patently isn’t the case!