Ha – it’s presumptuous to suggest improvements to huge companies like Google, but that is what the internet, and blogging in particular, is all about.    Master UK SEO  Dave Naylor has got five suggestions over at his blog and several others have chimed in.     I wasn’t sure why  Dave suggested clustering all the WordPress sites, forcing people to get a new domain, but this small inconvenience might be a good form of spam filtering because it prevents spammers from using free WordPress sites.       There’s now a conflict between the desire of search engines to screen out “junk” content and spammers and the desire to rapidly include new content.    It is not as easy as many like to think to even define junk content.    Last year I had a good talk with Brian White of Google’s search quality team about how to “value” content.  I posed a question along these lines:

What if you have two sites that are extremely similar in content and quality.
Both are about pet cats.
Both are of horrible quality with terrible grammer, bad facts, and spelling errors.

Site 1 is from  a spammer to boost rankings for a site selling pet food.
Site 2 is from a 3rd grade student working hard on her school report.

In this case site 1 is spam and site 2 is not, but how does Google tell the difference since they are virtually identical?

His answer was to suggest that the links structure in to these sites is likely to be different, and that through this you could probably determine which was the “real” and which was the “spam” site.

Of course this gets even more interesting when you make site 1 – the “spammy” site – of much higher quality.    In that case you might have a case where 99% of all users would prefer going to the site that is trying to manipulate Google but Google has removed that site and left the lower quality, natural one.

This is a very interesting case because I think search has recently devolved into many such ranking challenges.   Much of the content pouring online now is specifically designed to fool the search engines.

This would be an example of what  I’ve noted before – how linking relationships built the web and now the value of linking seems to be hurting it.

Here were my 5 suggestions to Dave / Google:

* Paid site reviews to identify simple problems or penalties. The subtle confusion Google spawns from ambiguous rules applied to mom and pop sites who have no clue is hurting everybody, including Google.

* Implement “site ID” where all sites showing adsense must have a contact person who is identified publicly. Forward site complaints to this person.

* Have more Google parties but drop the cold hamburgers from Google Dance 2007

* Transparency on publisher revenue share from Adsense

* MORE transparency on guidelines and penalties. Less vague references to “sites built for users not adsense”.