Google Spam Rating Guide v2.1 (April 6, 2007)

[beu]

Sorry for the "spam" but I've blogged on this hard to track down and very recently leaked internal Google document at:
http://www.beussery.com/blog/

First mentioned by Aaron Wall & SEOBlackHat.com here:
http://www.seobook.com/spying-google...-read-find-out

[Dan01]

They are probably giving allowances for newspapers who run AP or Reuters stories. For instance, you could have 5,000 sites with the same story on them. Interesting about the song Lyrics.

I did not read the whole first link, but was there anything "super" important that you can share?

I have a question. What is the punishment for spam? Is it site-wide or is it just for those spam pages. The article made it sound site-wide.

[Dan01]

One more thing Beu, I noticed the date of the book was April 2007. Has their project been complete or is it ongoing? It seems like Google is manually looking at sites to determine if they are spam sites.

[beu]

Hey Dan01, there is a lot of good stuff in the document. I'd encourage you to check it out and I've posted a few points in my blog (beussery.com/blog).

As far as the project being over, it doesn't seem to be.
http://www.google.com/support/jobs/b....Search=Search

The program has been in place for years. For more about the history and other docs check out:

http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-03-13-n30.html

[Dan01]

I have a lot of content on my site, and I know that much of it is also posted elsewhere.

My concern Beu, is will the whole site be labeled spam, or just those articles that appear elsewhere?

[beu]

Your issue is really an issue of duplicate content. Are you syndicating via rss or other? In most cases Google can determine the source but including a link back to the original source is always good idea.

It all boils down to "intent" and that is where the "human" review process comes into play. This guide is important to understand because it's what Google quality raters use to determine "intent" during the human review process.

I would also suggest a service like copyscape as well as reading what Google "Officially" has to say about duplicate content: http://www.google.com/support/webmas...y?answer=66359

[Dan01]

Thanks Beu, I read the link and think I am in line with their preferences. There is some duplicate content that might be seen on other sites, but we always prefer Original Content obviously.

We do get lots of submissions - usually more than 30 a day. We review them, and I will be honest, some writers are just plain bad. Some are really bad or they use programs to create alternative versions of the same article (like content wizards that change a couple words).

I have declined to publish articles because they are so poorly written. I feel bad doing that though. We also check to see if the articles are placed on other sites. For the most part, we get the original.

We write our own content / articles too. But lately we have been getting so many submissions we are writing fewer of our own. I have considered hiding our article submission link so that we can get back to writing more.

Question: Do you think Google is considering quality of writing in their human evaluations?

[beu]

If it's really bad, maybe but if you have good to moderate original content you should be ok in my opinion. Good question, maybe someone else has thoughts on this?