Parked Domains, and Ad Generators get the axe – Duplicate Content gets bumped further down

Created on Friday, 02 December 2011 14:51

Parked Domains and Ad Sites

Sites like Godaddy’s giant inventory of “parked sites”, and ad generating sites with shady content are targeted in the latest google algorithm change. And isn’t it about time. I’ve wasted countless hours of my life, trying to find specific information on the web and gotten a “blog” which was actually scraped content with a million ads. As for parked domains, a guess the question is why were they ever indexed in the first place?

The following is was released by Google;

“New “parked domain” classifier: This is a new algorithm for automatically detecting parked domains. Parked domains are placeholder sites that are seldom useful and often filled with ads. They typically don’t have valuable content for our users, so in most cases we prefer not to show them.”

Duplicate Content down, Original Up

“Original content: We added new signals to help us make better predictions about which of two similar web pages is the original one” when dealing with two competing sites for search engine rank. This of course has been put in place to detect websites with content taken(stolen) from another site. In college they call that plagiarism. In Search Engine Land, they call it scraping. Either way, it’s not original and what Google started earlier this year with the PANDA updates, they are still attempting to make more accurate. We of course don’t know how long this will take, but Google said it was going after sites that had low-levels of original content in January and delivered a week later.

Facebook Campaign Against Google

Created on Friday, 13 May 2011 15:10

It was released recently that Facebook brought about a “whisper-campaign” against Google, the popular web browser. Apparently the social networking giant hired Burson-Marsteller, a well-known public-relations firm, to offer anti-Google stories to newspapers. They were urged to investigate claims that Google was invading people’s privacy through Google’s social network tool, “Social Circle.” This tool allows people with Gmail accounts to see information not only about their friends but also about the friends of their friends, which Google calls “secondary connections.” Google encourages Gmail users to voluntarily connect any accounts they have on other social media sites like Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter or Yelp to their Google profile. Google then uses those connected accounts for individuals who become secondary connections. Facebook hired the PR company to embellish some of these instances, but the blogger that was offered to write the op-ed pieces refused and then posted the email exchange.

Facebook was forced to confirm they were in fact, guilty. While Facebook’s concerns for privacy may be founded, the campaign could have been motivated by resentment for Goolge utilizing their data for a competitor’s social networking tool. It’s no secret Google is determined to offer a counter to Facebook’s hold on social networking so this tactic could be another reason for the smear campaign. Either way, Facebook has already had trouble with privacy issues and keeping the trust of their users. This revelation may have alienated some people. (as well as embarrass themselves) but it’s most assuredly intensified the rivalry between the two companies.