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:
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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… )
