With Google’s Penguin update, it appears that the search engine has been paying significantly more attention to link spam as attempts to manipulate links and anchor text to a page. The Penguin Update was launched at Google on April 24th, 2012, and it was accompanied by a blog post on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog titled Another step to reward high-quality sites

The post tells us about efforts that Google is undertaking to decrease Web rankings for sites that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. The post is written by Google’s Head of Web Spam, Matt Cutts, and in it Matt tells us that:

…we can’t divulge specific signals because we don’t want to give people a way to game our search results and worsen the experience for users, our advice for webmasters is to focus on creating high quality sites that create a good user experience and employ white hat SEO methods instead of engaging in aggressive webspam tactics.

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This week, Google was awarded a patent that describes how they might score content on how much Gibberish it might contain, which could then be used to demote pages in search results. That gibberish content refers to content that might be representative of spam content.

The patent defines gibberish content on web pages as pages that might contain a number of high value keywords, but might have been generated through:

• Using low-cost untrained labor (from places like Mechanical Turk)
• Scraping content and modifying and splicing it randomly
• Translating from a different language

Gibberish content also tends to include text sequences that are unlikely to represent natural language text strings that often appear in conversational syntax, or that might not be in text strings that might not be structured in conversational syntax, typically occur in resources such as web documents.

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As long as there have been search engines, there have been people trying to take advantage of them to try to get pages to rank higher in search engines. It’s not unusual to see within many SEO site audits a section on negative practices that a search engine might frown upon, and Google lists a number of those practices in their Webmaster Guidelines. Linked from the Guidelines is a Google page on Hidden Text and Links, where Google tells us to wary about doing things such as:

• Using white text on a white background
• Locating text behind an image
• Using CSS to position text off-screen
• Setting the font size to 0
• Hiding a link by only linking one small character—for example, a hyphen in the middle of a paragraph

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Google’s Webmaster Guidelines highlight a number of practices that the search engine warns against, that someone might engage in if they were to try to boost their rankings in the search engine in ways intended to mislead it. The guidelines start with the following warning:

Even if you choose not to implement any of these suggestions, we strongly encourage you to pay very close attention to the “Quality Guidelines,” which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index or otherwise impacted by an algorithmic or manual spam action. If a site has been affected by a spam action, it may no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google’s partner sites.

A Google patent granted this week describes a few ways in which the search engine might respond when it believes there’s a possibility that such practices might be taking place on a page, where they might lead to the rankings of pages being improved in those search results. The following image from the patent shows how search results might be reordered based upon such rank modifying spam:

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Manipulative repetitive anchor text, blog comments filled with spam, Google bombs, and obscene content could be the targets of a system described in a patent granted to Google today that provides arbiters (human and possibly automated), with ways to disassociate some content found on the Web, such as web pages, with other content, such as links to that content.

In an Official Google Blog post, Another step to reward high-quality sites, Google’s Head of Webspam Matt Cutts wrote about an update to Google’s search results targeted at webspam that they’ve now started calling the Penguin update. The day after, I wrote about some patents and papers that describe the kinds of efforts Google has made in the past to try to curtain web spam in my post Google Praises SEO, Condemns Webspam, and Rolls Out an Algorithm Change.

The patent doesn’t describe in detail an algorithmic approach to identifying practices that might have been used to manipulate the rankings of pages in search results. Instead it tells us about a content management system that people engaged in identifying content impacted by such practices might use to disassociate certain content with webpages and other types of online content.

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