Vladamir
Power Member
- Jan 4, 2012
- 694
- 488
So I have been a member of blackhat world for over 8 years (I used to have another account for years with many posts until I lost the password/email and couldn't reset. I haven't really put up an article to contribute or anything so I thought I would add a little bit here. Now the only reason I am doing this (because I did have a scary NDA from google) is that I have changed my name since working this job to my fathers surname for personal reasons (nothing shady haha) and I have moved to another country far away with nice palm trees, so google doesn't go all snowden on me there's nothing they can really do haha.
What I will cover here is the following:
1. Thin Affiliate Sites What I Looked For
2. Internal Optimization 1 - Content structure
3. Internal Optimization 2 - Site trust
4. Shady practices I looked for (your not as smart as you think 13 year old black hatter
)
5. Tbd
6. tbd
Lets begin...two years ago was my last day on the job as a Google Manual Reviewer, they have a different name for it with a fancy acronym. But basically my job was to use a software they had developed to compare different sites on the first page then go through each one manually and decide whether they were legitimate sites, thin affiliates, thin content sites, authority sites. etc and rank them as such. After that its only my guess what my rankings would lead google to do perhaps a small rank penalty or perhaps it would be passed to a more high level review, I can only tell you what I did on my level.
What the software I used looked like:
This is the format of sites I was given on the google software. I would see top 10 results and I would see another suggested top 10 results, from these I would have to review and decide which one was the more suited result. Sometimes the top result would be a google asset such as a calendar or a calculator or an automatic answer such as "whats the standard hat size" "25 blah blah this is a google quick answer". The software was very basic and it tracked my hours while I looked at different sites and I would be given a specific time frame to complete each ranking task. I would click through to these sites and on the site itself there was no google tool or plugin. BUT I was encouraged to use inspect element and search for anything shady, Ill cover that more in another section.
#1 - Checking a site for affiliate content.
This was all down to the eye test and some criteria I was told to watch for. Firstly I would check the site for an overload of ad content, if there was ad content higher up "more priority" such as right below the header or on the head that would be fine but I would keep that in mind, then if there was ad content on the right hand side I would mark that down and take down some more points from the site, It was basically the eye test for how much ads to content ratio you had. The thing that surprised me here is the way I was taught if you used google adsense it was okay if you had two ads but once you got to the adsense ALLOWED three I could still mark you down as too much ads if your ads were big enough and obscuring the content ex. If you put all three of your ads as banner ads one on top of the other at the top of the page I wouldn't even think twice before I flagged you and put a comment down (extreme example).
I was told for shopping sites to click through links and add something to the cart and try to check out all the way to make sure it didn't take me to an amazon site.
Some sites were harder to judge since they would have affiliate links but they weren't a "thin" affiliate since they would have more content on them. I can't give an exact measure since this was down to my personal eye test and not an algorithm. But the way they taught me was about 20% or more affiliate content would make it a thin affiliate.
Amazon sites were super suspicious for this tag as soon as we saw anything amazon it was an immediate flag going up in my head it would be guilty until proven innocent hehe.
Recommendation: Keep affiliate content below 15% if your doing a product review try to have only one product link a image or a click here to see the price. Do not make amazon product charts, unless your either a churn and burn site or its located somewhere with tons of content to support it OR there aren't many links inside. If you have cloaked links and those auto amazon sites that you can add to cart and redirect, don't think your immune a manual reviewer will click through your entire buying process to see if it goes to amazon an you're a thin affiliate.
Phew lots of typing for today, hope this is helping someone let me know since its all pretty vague I assume they kept it that way to avoid me making this eventual article any more detailed hehe.
More to come...
Cheers,
Vlad
What I will cover here is the following:
1. Thin Affiliate Sites What I Looked For
2. Internal Optimization 1 - Content structure
3. Internal Optimization 2 - Site trust
4. Shady practices I looked for (your not as smart as you think 13 year old black hatter
)5. Tbd
6. tbd
Lets begin...two years ago was my last day on the job as a Google Manual Reviewer, they have a different name for it with a fancy acronym. But basically my job was to use a software they had developed to compare different sites on the first page then go through each one manually and decide whether they were legitimate sites, thin affiliates, thin content sites, authority sites. etc and rank them as such. After that its only my guess what my rankings would lead google to do perhaps a small rank penalty or perhaps it would be passed to a more high level review, I can only tell you what I did on my level.
What the software I used looked like:
This is the format of sites I was given on the google software. I would see top 10 results and I would see another suggested top 10 results, from these I would have to review and decide which one was the more suited result. Sometimes the top result would be a google asset such as a calendar or a calculator or an automatic answer such as "whats the standard hat size" "25 blah blah this is a google quick answer". The software was very basic and it tracked my hours while I looked at different sites and I would be given a specific time frame to complete each ranking task. I would click through to these sites and on the site itself there was no google tool or plugin. BUT I was encouraged to use inspect element and search for anything shady, Ill cover that more in another section.
#1 - Checking a site for affiliate content.
This was all down to the eye test and some criteria I was told to watch for. Firstly I would check the site for an overload of ad content, if there was ad content higher up "more priority" such as right below the header or on the head that would be fine but I would keep that in mind, then if there was ad content on the right hand side I would mark that down and take down some more points from the site, It was basically the eye test for how much ads to content ratio you had. The thing that surprised me here is the way I was taught if you used google adsense it was okay if you had two ads but once you got to the adsense ALLOWED three I could still mark you down as too much ads if your ads were big enough and obscuring the content ex. If you put all three of your ads as banner ads one on top of the other at the top of the page I wouldn't even think twice before I flagged you and put a comment down (extreme example).
I was told for shopping sites to click through links and add something to the cart and try to check out all the way to make sure it didn't take me to an amazon site.
Some sites were harder to judge since they would have affiliate links but they weren't a "thin" affiliate since they would have more content on them. I can't give an exact measure since this was down to my personal eye test and not an algorithm. But the way they taught me was about 20% or more affiliate content would make it a thin affiliate.
Amazon sites were super suspicious for this tag as soon as we saw anything amazon it was an immediate flag going up in my head it would be guilty until proven innocent hehe.
Recommendation: Keep affiliate content below 15% if your doing a product review try to have only one product link a image or a click here to see the price. Do not make amazon product charts, unless your either a churn and burn site or its located somewhere with tons of content to support it OR there aren't many links inside. If you have cloaked links and those auto amazon sites that you can add to cart and redirect, don't think your immune a manual reviewer will click through your entire buying process to see if it goes to amazon an you're a thin affiliate.
Phew lots of typing for today, hope this is helping someone let me know since its all pretty vague I assume they kept it that way to avoid me making this eventual article any more detailed hehe.
More to come...
Cheers,
Vlad
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