Why Google cannot fix link spam problems

Google talks about link spam and every so often issues a FUD warning from on high or Twitter. Google is trundling off down the yellow brick road of AI irrelevance and it is driven by people who just don’t seem to understand the issue of link spam. So while the Google index turns to mush, its “Knowledge Graph” is promoted as a shining example of its “innovation”. Scraping Wikipedia and adding a few links is hardly innovation. And therein lies the problem.

The whole Star Trek computer PR guff was probably created by some Google PR flack who never watched Star Trek:TOS. The Enterprise’s computer was a box with flashing lights and the voice was that of an actress. But it is easy to see how this faux nerd credibility would appeal to a PR type. Steve Jobs and Apple saw Star Trek and created the iPhone and the iPad – things so elegant in design that babies can use them without having to be able to read. People in Google claim to have watched Star Trek and created… Well they didn’t, did they? Google isn’t really the Enterprise’s computer with a female voice. Apple has beaten Google there too with Siri.

Google was beaten at Social Media by Facebook. People use Facebook. So Google tried setting up its own cringingly geekish version with Google Plus. Google Plus, or G+, is a great place but few use it. Google doesn’t understand why people continue to use Facebook and not G+. Google doesn’t understand people. And this is the second part of the problem for Google.

People create websites. People have their own social networks and often that social network overlays their websites. Building on this produces a very simple and powerful idea — the idea that a website has a social network. The inbound links to a site often have a context within the website’s social network. The links come from, or at least used to until the Google started trying to kill the web, people who use the website, find the website useful or know the people and businesses involved. The link graphs of many websites tends to have many such strong connections.

Link spam isn’t like that. The links are dropped on websites and blogs that have no real social connection to the promoted websites and are often in geographical areas outside the target market of the website. An extreme example would be a highly local shop’s website with links from some low quality blogs (or splogs) in another country on the other side of the planet. This kind of link stands out because it is so unusual. If you examine many of the other sites linking to the shop’s website, they have a social network where the people and sites linking are connected either geographically, or via Facebook and Twitter. The website, in effect, has its own social network and is part of a larger localised or topic driven social network.

But Google sucks at Social Media and the idea that a website has its own social network of links may be heresy to the purveyors of Artificial “Intelligence” who seem to think that they know what people want. It would be possible to use these social network signals to deemphasise link spam if Google had a clue about the problem. But then it is easier to issue FUD warnings that fanboys and fangirls will lap up and consider to be true. With link spam the solution lies in a social network approach to how websites link to each other. But Google sucks at social networks – that’s Facebook’s territory.