07.20.06
Potential Spam Killer
Google introduced the “NoODP†tag a couple of days ago. In this post they mention that they often draw the SERP descriptions from the DMOZ directory. What this tag now enables site owners to do is to choose whether they want their ODP description used (well taken into consideration) or not. If not, all one has to do is include this tag to your meta.
Although they state this, in my experience I’ve often found that when you write your meta descriptions objectively and page relevant, whilst still optimised – more often than not (if you get the formula right) it will display your meta description on the SERP as well.
Has MSN developed a spam killer for search engines? Strider Search Defender claims that it’s capable of doing just that. According to Microsoft, the tool will identify spam URLs that are distributed through different sites and prevent them from being indexed by search sites. (They released a paper on this, but unfortunately the link is not working for some reason today.) In this paper it claims that it starts with a list of confirmed spam web addresses. By using the “link†command, a “spam spider†runs the addresses through search engines to find other pages that link to those sites. Any other potential spam URLs found on those sites during this process are also run through the “spam hunter†program. The spam list is created by a process of filtering out all the false positives and a list of web pages that do redirect to spam sites is compiled.
Once this has been completed the list is fed to the Strider URL tracer to find the domains which are associated with high volume doorway pages. This list then goes through further refinement until they are investigated manually at which time they will either be removed from the search index or assigned a low relevance ranking.
I bet spammers are shaking in their boots about that low relevancy ranking…lol. Most spammers have so many domains and are quite prepared to have them dropped out of the index, at which point they will just turn to the next batch of domains and start all over again.
At least it’s a start – well done Microsoft.
Google 0 – MSN 1
Your move Google ; )
On a Personal Note
I changed over my DNS records as I am testing Google’s Email for Domain. I (well more accurately Joey) saved my site as whilst I was doing all of this I somehow managed to delete the www record – so my site vanished for a couple of hours…but, its back now, and luckily still indexed ; )