Help Google Find ‘Empty Review Sites’
Jan 13, 2009 at 5:32pm ET by Matt McGee
Following up on his call last week for help identifying spam issues Google should address in 2009, Matt Cutts today is asking for specific help identifying what he calls “empty review sites” or “no results pages.” That problem was mentioned most often in the public feedback from last week’s post.
An empty review site, or “no results page,” might be something like this screenshot below, which is one of the top 10 results on a Google search for [sd880is reviews]:
In today’s blog post, Matt says pages like this might run afoul of Google’s webmaster guidelines, and gives specific instructions for reporting this kind of page to Google’s spam team.
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Am I right in thinking that Google is admitting here that they are not able to discern quality content?
They tell us to build quality pages, then go and rank pages based to a great extent on popularity, and now they’re asking us for a hand weeding out low grade pages.
Am I the only one that thinks this is ironic?
They’ve got enough money. If they pay me, I’ll do their hand editing and cover the shortcomings of their algorithm.
Why focus on reviews of consumer junk anyway? I would prefer a move that deranks crappy Wikipedia pages and puts articles of greater merit above them in the SERPs.