Combat Spam With Google’s New Personal Block List

Link farms frequently make the top of the search engine ranking results by using what’s known as “black hat” tactics. While they may have had a little success in the past, Google is seriously cracking down on this kind of spammy activity. A link farm is a site set up specifically to place links on other sites in an effort to boost search engine rankings. When an SEO company tries to establish multiple blogs or sites for the purpose of spamming those links and raising the ranking of other sites, it is used primarily with the aim of improving search engine rankings.

The overall intention is to fool the algorithms used by Google into thinking the site receiving all those one-way links is actually a site of importance. However, Google now seriously police this kind of activity in an effort to uncover these kind of tactics. When they do catch someone using similar blackhat methods, they’re likely to ‘slap’ the guilty party – or penalize their rankings dramatically.

Google Personal Block List

In an effort to combat this kind of activity, Google has released a browser add-on named Google Personal Block List. This add-on is designed to work for the Chrome browser and allows users to block results they don’t want to see. At this time the extension isn’t available to those people using browsers other than Chrome.

For example: if you are searching for a relevant site for something, you might happen to stumble across a link farm filled with spammy links. You can use the Google Personal Block List to block those sites from appearing in your search results in future.

This is a similar tactic to programs you can use to block certain email addresses from sending spam into your email inbox. The same technology has now been designed for search users when browsing through search engine results, if you happen to be using Google Chrome.

Types Of Sites Google Wants To Stop

Webmasters and SEO companies have learnt over time that Google values content-rich sites over all others. In an effort to once again beat the algorithms used to determine ranking results, many webmasters immediately began using computer software to generate barely-legible content that contained the keywords they wanted to target. This content is often so poorly written that it contains no value to the user at all, but helps the webmaster to achieve the rankings they wanted only.

Stumbling onto sites that contain this kind of garbage is frustrating for users seeking real information. Google’s objective with the Personal Block List is to try and reduce the amount of SEO content farms filled with badly-written content and replace them with sites of relevance to users.

Will Google Personal Blocker Work?

So starting with Google Chrome, users will now be able to block sites they find to be spammy in some way. Those Websites that are flagged will be tracked and investigated by the big guys behind Google’s search algorithms thus making it possible for search users to contribute to helping the organisation reshape the way search engine results appear on SERPs and hopefully increase the quality of search results. Furthermore, this move will give the search engine giant a bit of insight into which sites are little more than link farms or SEO content farms and which ones contain useful content.

So, what about the millions of users who surf the net using other browsers? In time, Google will no doubt release further extensions for use in other browsers, such as Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. This should hopefully speed up their efforts to weed out bad websites and increase the relevance of search results.