Interesting! Google is apparently cracking down on spambot activity

[TMF Jeff]

In the last couple of weeks I've gotten two emails from websites asking me if I would help them "deal with the recent google update" by removing links on the TMF that lead to their websites. In both cases, the links were coming from the profiles of banned spambots.

I ignored the first one, but this second time, I replied to see if my read on the situation was accurate. I'm leaving out the website info, but this was the exchange I had with the webmaster.

Subject: Link removal request for http://www.---.com

Dear www.ticklingforum.com Webmaster,

We are looking for your help in our efforts to recover from the recent Google updates.
Our sites http://www.---.com and http://www.---.com have been affected, and in order to recover it is essential that we remove many of our links to clean our profile as much as possible. In doing so we discovered that some of our links are on your website, and are located on the following pages:
---
---
---

It would be much appreciated if you could remove our links and content from your site. Please contact us at [email protected] if you can help us or for more information.
Thank you,


On Thu, Aug 30, 2012 at 4:26 PM, <[email protected]> wrote:

This is the second such request I've gotten this month. In both cases the link was contained in the profile of a spambot. I'm not particularly inclined to help you undo damage that you did to your website while spamming mine.

If I've somehow got this wrong, feel free to explain how.

Thanks,
Jeff

Hi Jeff,


No, you don't have it wrong at all! I don't blame you for ignoring requests like these. We no longer use those kinds of SEO services ourselves.


I apologize for the inconvenience.


Sincerely,
---

So apparently google recently figured out how to identify websites using these practices and cracked down on them, and in some way it's connected to their being linked from sites like ours, since at least two of them have actively tried to undo it.

I thought the community at large would find that interesting 🙂

If anyone knows anything about this google update, I'd really love to hear more info.

 

[His Divine Shadow]

They announced this back in the spring. There have been a few changes in how Google indexes pages, and this is one. Another, more recent change concerns sites that are the target of frequent copyright infringement reports. Google is going to reduce the rankings of such pages. So, if a site that is popular and linked by many but is so positioned because it uses copyright infringement as a business model, that site will drop in the rankings.

All these changes actually present a potential problem for Google. The standard claim from a web site or service, be it Google or us, is that a best-effort is made to police content but that all content cannot be policed; it is just not possible. This is the "Safe Harbour" under US law, where sites that make an effort to respond to complaints from rights holders (or law enforcement, in the case of things like child pornography) are held free of liability for any infringement or illegality. If Google demonstrates that it can lower the rank of spammers or copyright infringers, it will face increasing pressure to deindex them entire and to filter its results so illegal things like child pornography do not show up. The old argument was that the algorithm is what it is and it is automated in its methods. That's less arguable now.

 

[TMF Jeff]

Oh ya, I remember reading about that because they were excluding youtube from this new copyright claim-based formula.