Google has come under plenty of fire lately, and we’ve been reporting on (yes, maybe contributing to) a lot of it. The reason is Google’s omnipresent spam. While the idea of a search engine based on back-links was incredibly innovative and effective back in 1998, manipulators of the search engine rankings have done the same thing they did to Yahoo: broken the system. For Yahoo, this happened through duplicate pages and spammed text (especially in lumps at the bottom of the page) to repeat the keywords. Today, it happens through buying links to your site, your preferred anchor text, and otherwise manipulating the SERPs.
Because of the efforts of these spammers, many of the results you’ll find for any given keyword — especially those related to purchases — will be a spam result of some kind, either pitching its own services or some affiliate site. Industry analysts and experts, as well as competitors like Blekko, have pointed to this as the reason why we need a change — whether from Google or someone else.
Well, according to Venture Beat, Google knows that there’s an issue and they’re working on it. The PageRank algorithm, the foundation of the original concept behind Google, is shifting — even being abandoned in large part as Google dodges the dishonest spammers. The Venture Beat report is quick to remind us that this isn’t cause for alarm. Google is created by PageRank, but by expandable computing, the ability to conquer the data of the Web, and (I’ll add) adaptability. The addition of features like specific widgets related to information (like local, stocks, weather, etc.) and the Google Instant feature, both of which have SEO specialists in an uproar, may well be designed specifically to combat spam. Of course, it’s not enough yet, but there’s no need to rule out Google simply because there’s a hole to be mended.
