What's behind these phoney Google results? (Not spyware)

[Colophon]

No, it's not spyware, before you say anything!

I was just searching on Google for info on the Glensanda Quarry in Scotland. The fifth Google result was this: http://www.mapsym.co.uk/quarry.htm

The page seemed to be filled with gibberish, but obviously put together in such a way that it is very efficient at containing legitimate queries, e.g. "quarry tile" and the names of real quarries:

Dorothea quarry when the bank quarry once again essex gravel in quarry sale never again house quarry and bouldering lancashire quarry. House leeds quarry as if derbyshire quarry as if needingworth quarry meets every glensanda quarry. Quarry scottish only in reality laying quarry tile many times had in quarry scotland. Mill quarry therefore quarry slate uk when in fact it is quarry whatley when the cleaning quarry tile.

This piqued my curiosity, so I tried replacing "quarry" in the URL with different words: "frank", "bob", "intel", "keyword", "toaster", "shopping" and so on. All came up with similar pages stuffed full of the sort of phrases people might be searching for: "Frank Sinatra", "Bob the Builder", etc etc. The "shopping" page opens with the profound statement: "Shopping online therefore shopping center therefore shopping cart." There's some logic there somewhere.

Searching Google just for pages from the domain mapsym.co.uk comes up with over 24,000 (http://tinyurl.com/ype9g) pages o' gibberish.

What's going on? What do they gain? Are they trying to hawk ads to people based on their prominence on Google?

[Derleth]

Yes, that is odd. Google is supposed to be resistant to such blatant keyword spamming, but there it is. It's also chock-full of links to its own pages, but that shouldn't matter so much, either.

Google PageRank for an explanation of why this shouldn't happen, but I'm ignorant of why it is happening.

Maybe the algorithm is due for a small tweaking.

[paperbackwriter]

Yes, that is odd. Google is supposed to be resistant to such blatant keyword spamming, but there it is. It's also chock-full of links to its own pages, but that shouldn't matter so much, either.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that exactly how this domain does that? GoogleRank depends on the links to a page to determine order. If you created hundreds of links to your pages, even if they came from your other pages, that would seem to game the system.

As to what "mapsym" gains from this, I can only assume higher view rates for the advertising they carry.

[RumMunkey]

I think I broke it (http://www.mapsym.co.uk/straightdope.htm).


Sorry. :(


(Oh, it still works (http://www.mapsym.co.uk/cecil.htm))

[Derleth]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that exactly how this domain does that? GoogleRank depends on the links to a page to determine order. If you created hundreds of links to your pages, even if they came from your other pages, that would seem to game the system. But links are supposed to be weighted by who's originating them. If Dell links to your page in relation to laptops, it's supposed to boost you higher than if an Anonymous Coward on Slashdot does. By that theory, these incestuous circle-jerks should be pointless.

Obviously, Google needs to revise the algorithm. But they're used to that; it's the price of success.

[tanstaafl]

But links are supposed to be weighted by who's originating them. If Dell links to your page in relation to laptops, it's supposed to boost you higher than if an Anonymous Coward on Slashdot does. By that theory, these incestuous circle-jerks should be pointless.
But the reason you get a higher boost from Dell is that Dell itself has a higher rank. The more pages that link to you the higher your rank. The higher your rank is the greater effect you have on the sites you link to.

Google says they try to filter out such "link farms" but, as was said, these people managed to slip theirs through

And, get enough blogs to link to the same thing and you can boost any page's page rank to number 1. Check out googlebombing someday.

[Derleth]

Heh. I know about Googlebombing, but I apparently forgot how influential blogs have been in Google rankings.

Still, how would any one of those sites have gotten enough of a ranking to boost any other site Google indexes? Maybe Google should think about assigning demerits to pages linked to from known link farms.

(And the 'evil' section of Derleth's brain kicks over... )

[Podkayne]

This article (http://www.discover.com/issues/jul-04/departments/emerging-technology/) (which I coincidentally just read last night in Discover Magazine) claims that Google's Pagerank takes circle-jerks into account.

Google’s director of search quality, Peter Norvig, sez:

So there we have to check because people do things like register a hundred different sites and have them all link to each other. If you’re charitable, you call it ‘search engine optimization’; if you’re less charitable, you call it ‘search engine spam.’ We try to recognize when that happens. What we’ll do is say, ‘Ah, here are a bunch of sites that are all interconnected,’ and we’ll count that as one link, not a hundred.