From lambasting Sony, to praising Google. What’s up with that?
Well, I am hearing rumors from the webmaster and Internet marketing circles that Google is taking aggressive steps to remove web pollution sites from their index. These sites are also known as spam sites and other less-than-flattering names.
I’ve railed against these garbage sites in the past, and it is quite refreshing to see some of these sites getting thrown out with the trash where they belong. There are reports of website operators that were once making tens of thousands of advertising dollars per month dropping down to hundreds of dollars per month practically overnight.
How is this possible? Once Google wises up to a particular web pollution site and throws it out of their index, the thousands (or perhaps even millions) of people who had been searching on Google for topics that these web pollutions sites are designed around are no longer finding links to the web pollution sites. No links in the Google search results means a lot fewer visitors and as a result, a lot less money being generated!
Apparently, some of the webmaster-related forums are buzzing with complaints from webmasters that their spammy, no-content web sites are no longer showing up in the Google search results.
Google is also catching on to sneaky redirect sites. A sneaky redirect site is when someone registers a domain name and then just uses that name to set up a site that has absolutely no content and just redirects visitors to another site. Let’s use a real life example to demonstrate.
Someone registered a domain called www.crochet-pattern-free.com. Now, you might reasonably suspect that this particular site would provide some information having to do with free crochet patterns, and would be of interest to people who enjoy crocheting. Well, in this case you would be mistaken.
As of this writing, attempting to visit www.crochet-pattern-free.com will actually land you on a site called www.loan-money-usa.info.
That happens because the owner of that site has placed a bit of code on the www.crochet-pattern-free.com site or used some other trick that simply transfers you to the www.loan-money-usa.info as soon as you arrive there.
The idea, of course, is to get as many visitors as possible to the loan-related site so the web site owner can make some money from all the advertising on the site.
I don’t know about you, but if I was searching the net for crochet patterns and visited a site called www.crochet-pattern-free.com only to be redirected to a site about loans, I surely wouldn’t stick around long even if I did happened to be looking for a loan!
It’s good news that the search engines are starting to develop techniques to detect and eliminate these sites from their search results. Hopefully, it will go a long way towards cleaning up these web pollution sites that have become so numerous lately.
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