2007-07-01
Two years ago, I joined Google's CJK (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) team, and started to work on fighting spam. This was during a time when spam sites were much more common in our Chinese search results. For a few popular queries, the top 10 search results could be spammy at times. We had to find a way to deal with this issue. So, we took initiatives to modify our spam fighting algorithm by adding some Chinese specific content. It took great effect almost overnight. You can refer to the news report two years ago if you are interested in learning more about this.
While our Chinese search result quality showed great improvement, we realized that many webmasters did not know the difference between spam and legitimate optimization. What is worse, somebody even used the Google Webmaster Guidelines as a reference for making spam, to test if Google can really detect it. We had no choice but to take stronger actions. By strong, I mean we further modified some parameters of the algorithms to better tackle spam sites. However, no algorithm will make 100% of people happy. Google's spam fighting effort got media exposure again. Since we removed a lot of sites from our index, the media started to assume that Google was taking action against large sites. What we could do was to work harder and improve the algorithms continuously.
When Google China was established, I transferred to the Google webspam team. The head of the team is the famous Matt Cutts. Matt Cutts is one of the founders of Google webspam team. Probably any webmasters who have read Matt's blog know that both his spam fighting skills and blogging skills are second to none. Even though the blog deals with webspam fighting issues, it is not aggressive or lecturing at all. On the contrary, it is more like casually chatting with his readers, with a humorous touch. His blog is highly informative. It is so popular that even his little cat Ozzie has caught readers' attention. On his blog, there is a link pointing to a 2 second video of his cat. The total clicks are in the thousands.
Matt has always taken great interest in Chinese webspam. I had been communicating with him ever since I was on the CJK team. Now that I have joined his team, we work even closer on this. After the interview with Zac and timev.com, Matt encouraged us to create a Chinese blog of our own. We believe that, by communicating with Chinese Webmasters, helping them to understand Google better, making their voice heard by us and making sure they follow Google webmaster guidelines while optimizing their sites, our Chinese search results will greatly benefit. Thus, enhancing the users search experience using Google Chinese search.
I tried to register on a certain SEO website, just like the “GoogleGuy” (Now the famous “GoogleGuy” is the username used by a group of Googlers posting on webmaster forum https://www.webmasterworld.com/ (English).), but to my surprise, I was rejected because of my IP is from the US. But now, this blog is finally ready!
The domain name of this blog (https://www.googlechinawebmaster.com) follows the blog name of Google China office (https://www.googlechinablog.com), and the goal of the blog is to “provide a communication channel, collect information and improve Google Chinese search”. We will constantly provide updates about Google, delivering our thoughts on Chinese SEO, and answer questions interested by most of you. We will also post some translated articles from Google's official webmaster blogs (in English) and Matt's blog, to expose our readers with wider range of information. You are warmly welcomed to visit our blog regularly! If you have any suggestions, please leave your comments.