Declining search quality: Is Google losing the battle?

Has Google lost the battle against the companies that game its system of ranking search results? It certainly seems that way from my anecdotal usage.

John Byrne, the former BusinessWeek editor seems to feel the same. He recently launched a site that looks at business schools: Poets and Quants.

He published a post detailing his frustration at Google’s listing of the site, or rather its failure to list the site. C-Change Media Inc.: Google? Where are you?

“One of the most fascinating aspects of our debut is what Google has been able to discover, or fail to find, about the site.

“…So what do you find when you Google “poetsandquants?” Not a single mention of the actual website.

“…As you go through the first five pages of Google results, there are all kinds of websites that have essentially highjacked Google, rendering its search product less useful and helpful to users. There’s a so-called weblog that is little more than a place to advertise Viagra and Cialis. There’s links to TweetMeme, Interceder, tweetcepts, twapperkeeper, rallyclips, and whotechpunditstweet, among many others. Most of them are search traps that have gamed Google.”

Part of Byrne’s frustration is related to the fact that his site is a young site — Google trusts sites that have been around for a longer time. However, I’ve been noticing a similar fall in the quality of the rankings on general searches.

Often I have to look at second and third pages of listings when I used to be able to find what I needed on the first page.

Also, there are plenty more companies that make a business gaming Google results. For example: Demand Media, which has built a large business based on the fact that it publishes content that is gamed to attract Google rankings and Google AdSense advertising.

Demand Media is so confident in its business model based on continued gaming of Google that it has filed for an IPO. And there are other companies whose entire business model is based on their ability to game Google.

Google changes its algorithm on a regular basis and that serves to shakeout all those sites that have tried to game Google based on the characteristics of the prior algorithm. Has Google ran out of ways of shaking out the spam sites?

I agree with Byrne’s conclusion:

“…This goes to the quality of Google’s primary product: search. If Google can’t find PoetsandQuants or any of the stories published on the site, I wonder how many other legitimate, substantive efforts are also going undiscovered because Google’s algorithms have been so effectively gamed.”

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http://woganmay.com/ Wogan
Give people a ladder, they'll find a way to get to the top.
This is true for absolutely everything, so it's worrying that Google doesn't have any protection against it. Obviously people are going to try and game the single largest source of free traffic in the world – how is any of that a surprise?
I guess this is even more incentive for a regulated internet – when the one company that exists to “index all the world's information” starts drowning in commercial spam, you know it's time to move on.
~ Wogan
paullombard
You don't have to go too far back (before Google's Big Daddy Update) to get an idea of how much G has improved . Until the day the algorithm is completely semantically proficient, you'll get a lot of spam as a by product of a free web – which is essential. It's next to impossible for SEs to determine quality, but popularity is far easier for a robot to calculate. (backlink profiles). Sad truth is, if you want to rank, spamming is one route you can take…
http://twitter.com/aaranged Aaron Bradley
A more superficial “analysis” of Google's search engine performance than that offered by Mr. Byrne can hardly be imagined. That you grant it any credence whatsoever simply demonstrates the network effect of technical ignorance.
It is not in Google's best interest to throttle results for poetsandquants.com. It's not in any spammers best interest to try and hijack results from poetsandquants.com (spammers pay rapt attention to their own ROI as well you know). The increasingly bad quality of results as you go down the pages has only to do with the fact that Google is scraping the bottom of the barrel to come up with any results at all (a query with 51K results is amazingly non-competitive).
The ranking problems of poetsandquants.com are almost certainly due to some bad technical decisions that throttled the site in Google. A cursory analysis hasn't revealed any smoking guns, but the captionless site: citation in Google shows that there was, at least at release, a technical problem. That the site's webmaster has been working on this is evidenced by the cached version in Bing, which reveals the use of 76 meta keywords in the code (which was a search engine spam technique that worked very well in 1995). In short, somebody bungled the release.
Mr. Byrne might do well to learn a thing or two about how search engines work before waxing poetic on the quality of Google's search engine results.
JohnAByrne
A week after my post, I’ve taken another look at whether Google has found the site http://poetsandquants.com. Not yet! But the surprising thing is that Bing and Yahoo Search (now one and the same) have not only discovered the site but have indexed most of the articles on it. My post–”Bing vs. Google? Guess who wins?”–is at C-Change Media.com
paullombard
well, it’s a wonder what a bit of time, good links, and URL re-submissions can do… at time of writing the site ranks for ‘poets and quants’ in both .com and .co.uk TLDs.
http://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1GGGE_en___ZA375&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=poets+and+quants&pws=0
http://www.google.co.uk/search?rlz=1C1GGGE_en___ZA375&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=poets+and+quants&pws=0
So, message out there is have an understanding of SEO and engines and above all CHILL, ranking takes time…
Enjoy your presence in the SERPS P&Qs!
http://twitter.com/mattcutts Matt Cutts
I left this comment on John’s follow-up post, and thought it might be helpful here:
“Hi John, I’m an engineer at Google. I dug into this and can provide you with more information. As of yesterday, when you type [poetsandquants] as a search, we return your website right after your Twitter url, and searching for [poetsandquants.com] returns you at #1.
The issue is that from May until late July, your website had very little visible text on it (basically just the text “www.poetsandquants.com”). The text on the page was so sparse that we thought that Poets and Quants was a parked domain–which in essence it was, for those months.
We later detected that the page had changed away from being a parked domain, but it took a few days for that new information to spread through our index.
I think you’re in fine shape now, but if you launch a domain in the future, I would recommend not showing an empty page (except for the name of the domain) for months. If you intend to launch a domain, I’d recommend instead writing a couple paragraphs–although even a few sentences are better than nothing–about what the domain will eventually be. That helps search engines realize that a domain is not just a parked or empty domain.”
AndrewRens
So Wogan you are saying that because the admittedly very clever engineers at Google i.e. technology can’t fix the problem, and nor is there a competitor doing better than Google i.e. the market can’t fix the problem, then we must ask government, which has proven so massively inept at regulating the telecommunications in both the USA and RSA can fix the problem.
I would rather live with the problem
AndrewRens
So Wogan you are saying that because the admittedly very clever engineers at Google i.e. technology can't fix the problem, and nor is there a competitor doing better than Google i.e. the market can't fix the problem, then we must ask government, which has proven so massively inept at regulating the telecommunications in both the USA and RSA can fix the problem.
I would rather live with the problem
AndrewRens
So Wogan you are saying that because the admittedly very clever engineers at Google i.e. technology can't fix the problem, and nor is there a competitor doing better than Google i.e. the market can't fix the problem, then we must ask government, which has proven so massively inept at regulating the telecommunications in both the USA and RSA can fix the problem.
I would rather live with the problem

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