Confidential Google Report Disclosed

In early 2006, a Google employee broke a non-disclosure agreement and revealed a report that shouldn't have gotten out to the public. Actually the information wasn't surprising by any means.

In a nutshell, all we learned was that Google is cracking down on spam and sites that offer little content - a.k.a. "thin affiliates".

A thin affiliate is one that offers very little information and the main purpose of their site is to send visitors to the affiliated merchant's site in order to collect a commission.

Often times these sites have more external links than they do actual content. They also may contain several doorway pages (more on those later) that do nothing but link to the merchant's website.

The report even revealed examples of live sites that Google considers "suspect." Trust me...this is NOT a place you'd want to see your site appear. You can bet these sites won't be getting much traffic from Google anytime soon.

This report seemed to indicate that Google has hired humans to evaluate the accuracy of Google's search results. Can you blame them?

Google has always said their main focus is to provide relevant results. The main reason the engine has been so successful is because it gives searchers what they want.

If you've noticed, you don't see lots of ads, banners and other distracting revenue-sucking techniques on their pages. They want their customer, Joe Surfer, to find what he is looking for.

They don't want their index to be turned into a hodge-podge of doorway pages made by those thin affiliates. They want unique quality content that offers valuable information to their customer - the web surfer.

Search engine spiders are not humans. They are programs. They can only do so much when it comes to weeding out the good and bad sites. It only makes sense to me that Google would help protect its reputation by hiring real people to ensure their results are as clean as possible.

Without going into detail over the report (I wouldn't want Google to penalize me!), I've just outlined a few of the topics that were touched upon. You probably won't be shocked by what you read.

In fact, none of this may be new to you. But if you are performing any of these techniques, stop now!