Is google’s webspam team preventively checking new sites?
November 10th, 2006 by Remon
A few months ago, I ditched all my blackhat websites. While the money is good, it takes pretty much work to maintain or grow a network of blackhat sites. Maybe I suck at being a blackhat, but whitehat sites with evergreen content are way less work for me.
Anyways, a few months ago I set up another MFA website, had my scripts generate all the content (in dutch) and I got it some PR5 and PR6 backlinks. Good to go! Within a few hours the googlebot visited the site, indexed the mainpage and left.
Within a few hours after googlebots visit, I noticed a “visitor” coming from http://0.squealserver.webspam-team.fp.borg.google.com:32635/strip.
My first thought was SHIT! The link obviously gives a page not found error, because it’s from google’s internal network. I googled for the url, but couldn’t find any info about the webspam team. The borg.google.com was noticed on several blogs though, but never in combination with the webspam team.
They checked a few pages and left. They came back later again, did the same, and were never seen again.
What happened after this? Well googlebot did a deepcrawl on the site, but still the only page found in google is the mainpage, even after a few months. If I google for the domainname, I’m number 1, so there’s no penalty as far as I know? Maybe this is some kind of new penalty for MFA and similiar sites?
The weird thing is, the site is in dutch and, unless you speak dutch, the site looks perfectly legit. Googlebot and visitors are served the same pages/content. Are there dutchies working for google’s webspam team??
I obviously triggered some red flags for a manual review but what was it? My MFA sites always started with about 100 pages, and gradually added more pages so it looks real. Was it the PR5/PR6 backlinks? I think not, I’ve done that many many times and never had a problem with it. Was 100 pages too much? I think not, a 100 page site still is a pretty small website.
It may be the IP address, there were more MFA sites on that IP, maybe that triggered them? Maybe I should do some testing to find out more. Has anyone else seen the webspam team on their sites?
The thing that I like about whitehat sites is that it’s much easier to sleep at night compared to the work of trying to build a group of BH sites.
I wouldn’t worry as much about the referrer. From time to time you’ll see that, but the vast majority of the time you won’t see any indication at all.
You’re right, it’s much easier to sleep at night. I have had multiple BH sites but never saw the referrer before so I found it interesting. Thanks for clearing it up a bit.
I feel flattered that you posted the first comment on this blog