Dramatic title. Well, its about time- a lot of sites should be knocked off their rankings pedestals.

What? Google Rates Sites By Hand?

If you hadn't heard, Google is indeed using human editors to increase the quality of its search results and catch more web spam. You must know what web spam is- those Google search results that contain only more (fake) search results, pages with no real content but lots of links and adds? These are black hat spammers trying to fake out Google and make money via affiliate programs and AdSense.

At one point, it wasnt clear Google could beat these spammers- they always had a new programmatic trick to stay a step ahead. Enter human editors. It may seem anathema to Google's style, but it's critical to achieving their stated goal: quality search results.

For more details on these editors, or "raters", including a copy of a help wanted ad for European Google editors, check out these links:

http://www.searchbistro.com/index.php?/archives/19-Google-Secret-Lab,-Prelude.html

and

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/7183.

Which Sites Are Tagged as Offensive?

If you don't want to get blacklisted, the most important thing for you to understand is what you should and shouldn't do when creating websites.

Ideally, it would be just as simple as following Google's Webmaster Guidelines (http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html). You could make the case that it is that simple. But it's easy, when you aren't getting any traffic and want to promote your site, to violate a suggestion you hadn't read all that carefully. Especially since so many sites are violating them. So the first imperative for webmasters is don't just skim Google's Webmaster Guidelines - read them slowly. MEMORIZE them.

Is that enough? Let's look at Google's site editing instructions (their 13 page Spamguide.rtf) and see.

Affiliate Websites Under Human Scrutiny

The first important distinction they make is that sites must have unique value to their visitors. This is discussed in terms of how to uncover "Thin Affiliates". A thin affiliate is a website that merely duplicates all or part of another site and directs traffic to it. The goal of the thin affiliate is to throw up many pages quickly (often with the aid of webpage-generating software), including their affiliate links.

Often these sites, like the fake search results websites, have pulled a large number of keyword search phrases together from Overture or Wordtracker, and, using some form of SEO (perhaps black hat), have wormed their way to high rankings.

Google doesn't mind an affiliate site that provides extra content or value for visitors. But a thin affiliate earning commissions and providing nothing? Offensive!

Navigating the Gray Area

Google tries to help the human editors distinguish if the site is thin or not with both principles and examples. Here are some of major points made:

• On thin affiliate websites, all external links point to one website (however, a site that compares prices between several affiliates does add value and is acceptable).
• A good test for thinness: Would the site stand on its own without the pages that lead to affiliate sites? Or, is there rich, unique content on the site?
• Some other criteria help editors identify program-generated sites: Sites with multiple similarities (or substantial equalities) between pages including formulaic descriptions, content, and template; and repeated text or dictionary-like lists of words in the description. [to check for these, search google for 'site:www.ANYSITE.com' without the quotes].

Obviously inoffensive websites can have one or two of these features, so Google encourages editors to send them a question rather than just mark the site offensive.

Other things that alert Google editors are:

• Images all hosted on another domain,
• External links not placed for humans but to get them indexed by search engines,
• Stock description for affiliate links rather than custom comments, and
• Hidden text (Could you be any dumber? That's so black-hat-2002!).

FYI: Google also asks editors to mark uniquely authoritative sites as either Vital or Useful.

How to Make a Positive Impression on Google Editors

1. Add valuable content, downloads (like a custom application, video, or audio), the option to receive something through real mail, or an ezine.
2. Link to multiple affiliates/revenue streams.
3. Make your website somewhat organic (not formulaic)- don't use keyword spam webpage generating software.
4. Add unique descriptions to webpages and links.
5. Host your own images.
6. List your contact info, phone number, availability, etc.
7. It's ok to have an affiliate program and spawn affiliates.