We reported yesterday that Google penalized Mozilla over user generated content. Today, we learn that it was a really, really small penalty that only impacted a single page out of Mozilla's ~22 million webpages. Google's head of search spam, Matt Cutts, added more to the Google thread explaining that this manual penalty was applied in a very granular way. In fact, it only impacted a single page on Mozilla's domain name, blog.mozilla.org/respindola/about. Matt Cutts wrote: In this particular case, it was the url http://blog.mozilla.org/respindola/about/ that we took action on, and that w [...]

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Bing has responded to the malware study conducted by AV-TEST earlier this week, claiming that Bing search results led to five times more malware than Google. To that Bing said, "the conclusions many have drawn from the study are wrong." Why is the study wrong according to Bing? While Bing may show potentially infected search results, Bing clearly labels results that may be infected and this study did not consider that. Bing said the study's methodology used the Bing Search API, which does not contain a malware label, like the core search results screen does. Bing said, "AV-TEST di [...]

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Yandex has taken exception to a recent study that reported it has more malware in its search results than other major search engines like Google and Bing. The company shared its concerns with Search Engine Land via email, saying that it also sent the same response to AV-TEST, the German IT security firm that published the findings from an 18-month search/malware study. We reported on the study yesterday after PC Mag was first to report on it. The AV-TEST study examined more than 13 million Yandex search results and found malware in about .024 percent -- twice the percentage of malware it [...]

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About three years ago, Google was labeled in one study as the "King of Malware." Things have apparently changed a lot since then. A new study reports that Google is beating its primary search competitors pretty significantly when it comes to keeping malware out of search results. The 18-month study (PDF), done by a German IT security group called AV-TEST, reviewed more than 40 million web pages -- the vast majority (about 38 million) coming from Google, Bing, Yandex and Blekko. The results: About .0025 percent of Google's search results were links to malicious websites. Blekko was [...]

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Matt Cutts, Google's head of search spam, posted a video answer to the question "Can I buy a domain that used to have spam on it and still rank?" Matt explains that there can be two penalties here, one on the manual side and one on the algorithmic side. If this was a manual penalty, you can fix the spam and submit a reconsideration request. Manual spam also has a time out, where the penalty will auto-expire if the spam is cleaned up. If it was an algorithmic penalty, then you need to wait until the algorithm picks up on the changes. Plus, if the spam was very aggressive, it would be much [...]

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A new Google patent was awarded today named Systems and methods for detecting hidden text and hidden links. The patent was filed on August 25, 2009 by Google's Matt Cutts and Fritz Schneider. It was awarded today after being in pending status for over 3 years. The abstract reads: A system detects hidden elements in a document that includes a group of elements. The system may identify each of the elements in the document and create a structural representation of the document. The structural representation may provide an interconnection of the group of elements in the document. The syste [...]

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One of the more interesting aspects of Google's recently released "How Search Works" interactive infographic were the live examples of spam that were recently removed. The features allows users to see live spam that was recently removed (once they clicked through the disclaimer that offensive material may be included.) Just 4 days later our own RustyBrick (the company of our very own Barry Schwartz) has released a Web Spam Archive Replay tool that aggregates and saves the spam examples. Google appears to only provide 48 examples at a time, but this  tool allows users to flip through m [...]

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Interflora got penalized only 2 weeks ago, right after Valentine’s day with a huge coverage in the media and also a some-what indirect statement from Google’s Matt Cutts himself about Advertorials also counting as paid links if they pass Page Rank (i.e. do not have NOFOLLOW tags on them). Now, just this past Sunday, a week before Mother’s day in UK, they are already back for most of their rankings. Many wonder how that recovery was possible so quick and we’ll look at what was changed and what was cleaned up. More Than Advertorials As we could see in the Interflora Deep Dive Analy [...]

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In the latest video from Google's head of search spam, Matt Cutts, he addresses Google's standards for manually removing spam from the Google index. Matt Cutts first said and repeated it a couple times within the video that Google will not penalize or ban a site that is being critical of Google. Matt said: "One thing that we don't do it is just say or someone has been critical of Google, therefore take action. We're big believers in the Voltaire saying of I might not agree with what you say but I'll defend to death your ability to say it. So just because you're critical of Google that's no [...]

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Interflora, the major UK flower delivery service, is showing up again in Google's search results -- just 11 days after it was penalized. According to some tweets and posts on Google+, Chris Gilchrist was first to spot Interflora's resurrection today. As you can see in the screenshot above, Interflora is ranking again on searches for its company name, and its Google+ brand box is appearing again on the right side of the search results. (As Dan Barker pointed out on Google+, that wasn't showing during the penalty.) Based on my Google.co.uk searches here in the US, Interflora is also ra [...]

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In Google's new How Search Works, Google is showing real live examples of spam that was recently removed from their search index. Most of these examples are of pure spam, as Search Engine Land founding editor Danny Sullivan explained in his write up, Google Charts “Manual Actions” Against Spam In Search For First Time. Most of the examples are spam removed from the index within the past hour or so. You can see them live over here, but note some of the examples given can be offensive. Google warns users, "these screenshots are generated automatically and are not manually filtered. Wh [...]

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How often does Google take "manual action" against websites for spam, where a human being reviews a site and decides it deserves some type of penalty? For the first time, Google's released a chart showing this, going back nearly 10 years. The chart is part of Google's new "How Search Works" area, and it stretches back from August 2004 to today (click to enlarge the chart): "Legacy" indicates manual actions that Google took that weren't classified into a more specific category, Google told me. Until around the end of 2007, most everything was either over "unnatural links" or "legacy" -- I.E [...]

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Google's head of search spam, answered some questions in the Power Searching with Google Hangout on Air #2 on October 2nd. In that video, he was asked by fellow Googler, Dan Russell a Search research scientist at Google, will search spam go on forever? This question was asked about 36 minutes into the video, where Matt basically said he's team has done a great job but search spam will go on forever. Here is the video and the transcript (I did my best transcribing): Dan: There is this constant Spy vs Spy kind of thing… Matt: Yes. Dan: And you're the good spies and then there [...]

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Almost two of every three malicious redirects in major search engines are found on Bing, according to a new report from the web security firm Sophos. Looking at data "from the last couple of weeks," Sophos found that 65 percent of malicious search results that its web appliance blocked were from Bing. Google was responsible for 30 percent of the blocked redirects. Image search is particularly vulnerable to this kind of attack. In a separate chart, Sophos says that 92 percent of the malicious redirects that it found were in image search results. Sophos is using its own technol [...]

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The UK's Conservative Party has a new co-chair, The Right Honourable Grant Shapps, Member of Parliament for Welwyn Hatfield. Honorable except with Google, which considers the business he apparently founded to be pushing a tool designed to spam its search engine and fill its listings with rubbish. According to The Guardian, Shapps founded HowToCorp in 2005, a site that, among other products, pitches the TrafficPaymaster software. The software apparently "scrapes" or copies content from all over the web, from RSS feeds to even sets of search results, to automatically generate pages that proba [...]

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The SEO community has been buzzing about a newly discovered Google Patent document named Ranking documents. The patent describes how Google may detect certain "rank modifying" techniques and then adjust the ranking of those documents using those techniques in a manner that will confuse the webmaster into thinking that technique did not work. The purpose is to observe how the webmaster (or spammer) reacts to the change and then make more observations based off the next set of changes the webmaster applies. Here is the specific clause that addresses this in the patent document: When a [...]

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The difference between intent and content is what Google is missing. [caption id="attachment_128943" align="alignright" width="240" caption="My White Hat Feels Dirty"][/caption] Keywords at their most basic level are what we use to communicate, and if you think back to those COM 101 days, you’ll remember that the way it works is our thoughts are encoded in our brains into words, those words are spoken or written, and then decoded by the brains on the other end. This is why when you say something, it may not come out (or be received) the way you meant it to be. If we think of our [...]

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iAcquire, banned by Google in late May after allegations of buying links for clients, has now has been restored to the Google index after two months. The company has blogged about the news and changes to its business model. iAcquire never says itself that it was banned over buying links for clients. Instead, it uses the "financial compensation" euphemism it has used before. From the post: Google’s war on paid links came close to home when we were accused of buying links for clients, which subsequently led to Google’s big hand swinging hard on the back of our head. We admitted that f [...]

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Google’s admitted the possibility of "negative SEO" for years. But in the wake of the Penguin Update, some have claimed it’s now easier than ever. Does a new change by Google in its help pages acknowledge this? Google’s admitted the possibility of negative SEO since at least 2007. On its help page, it previously had said this about "negative SEO," a term used to describe a way a competitor might harm another site: There's almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you're concerned about another site linking to yours, we su [...]

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It's been about two weeks since Google launched its Penguin Update. Google's happy the new spam-fighting algorithm is improving things as intended. But some hurt by it are still wondering how to recover, and there remain concerns about "negative SEO" as a threat. I caught up with Matt Cutts, the head of Google's web spam team, on these and some related questions. Penguin: "A Success" The goal of any algorithm update is to improve search results. So how's Penguin been for Google? "It's been a success from our standpoint," Cutts said. What About Those Weird Results? Of course, soon after [...]

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