Saturday, October 5, 2002|
Google Degraded? Geeks Aghast. Did Google lower its standards for ranking Web pages on its search engine? Its filtering of spam sites and doorway pages appears to be less than what it used to, observers say. By Paul Boutin. [Wired News] [...] Pilgrim added, "The forums are full of people complaining that spam sites, doorway pages and obvious cloaking attempts, which Google used to be so good at filtering out, are now popping up in top spots with disturbing frequency." Indeed, posters at Webmaster World went so far as to proclaim, "PageRank is DEAD." [...] Pilgrim, who earns his living as a Web accessibility consultant, said in a phone call that his concerns arose as a Google user, not a traffic-monger. "I use Google literally 100 times a day, and I've never seen spam on the first page before," he said. "And 404's in the top 10? Hello? Pages that are completely blank -- how did those get in there?
"I use (Google) to find addresses. I use it instead of bookmarks. I use it to settle arguments. If they're screwing with PageRank, I can't imagine doing what I do now and being as productive," he said. |
Last update: 25/3/03; 11:55:18 PM .
