Google Fighting Back Against Optimized Pages

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the interesting... dept

I’ve been hearing more and more people say that Google’s algorithm is “broken”. People are finding that the search engine optimizer people have figured out ways to game their PageRank system to get their pages to the top of Google’s results, leaving more relevant pages out. Mostly this is true of commercial sites. I found this out last week when I tried to find the phone number for a particular hotel, and, instead, Google gave me listing after listing to help me book hotel rooms. Of course, Google is not going to stand still, and it appears that their latest adjustment is targeted directly at Google optimizers. The article is not particularly clear (though, maybe it makes sense to the search engine optimizers it’s targeted for), but the summary appears to be that Google has added some sort of filter – and if the filter believes the site is too optimized it excludes the page from its results. In other words, it’s trying to guess which sites are trying to hard to move up the Google ranks and punishes them for it. That’s a pretty tight line to walk, and the writer of the article (a search engine optimizer) seems to think that there will be ways to beat it, and Google will have to ditch the plan. It does seem pretty difficult to figure out sites look too good for Google without blocking out plenty of legitimate sites as well.