Continuing with our coverage of the Google Q&A via WebPromo that we covered over the past day, with Andrey Lipattsev... He explained why some non-English language based Google search results appear easier to spam, even though the spam algorithms are global.
Truth is, we know Panda works differently for English than other languages. Panda did roll out to other regions but Panda is about quality content and it works best in English. Penguin is about links and that is global. But Andrey said most are global in the video.
Rand Fishkin pegged the question at about 44 minutes in to the video and Andrey goes on for a while answering it. In short, Rand said that when he travels around the world to speak, the audience says that he talks about quality content but spam still works in those regions. I hear the same thing all the time, spam works much better in non-English based language countries.
Andrey gives on reason being that for example in Arabic, there is simply not much content on the web written in that language. So Google serves up the content it can find and some of it may be spammy. As more quality content is written in that language, the spammy content will fall. I've heard this explanation for years and years from Google. I guess there is still limited content in certain regions?
Jennifer Slegg wrote up the transcript for most of that segment. Here is a snippet of it:
I don’t have up to date data, I know a couple of years ago we looked at Arabic for example, and that disparity was enormous. If I’m not mistaken, the Arabic speaking population in the world is something like five or six percent, maybe more, correct me if I’m wrong. But very definitely, the amount of Arabic content in our index is several orders below that.So that means, we just don’t have enough Arabic content to give our users, even if we wanted to. And in some areas, you can exploit that amazingly easily. If you create a bit of content in Arabic, whatever it looks like, we’re going to go well we don’t have anything else, so we’ll serve this, and it ends up being horrible.
Here is the video embed at the start time, so you can watch it yourself, it is interesting:
Forum discussion at Google+ & Cre8asite Forums.
