Google and Spam: Matt Cutts Analyzes Feedback Results

Give Google Feedback on “No Results” Pages

“Recently, I posted asking what topics the Google spam team should focus on in 2009. It’s useful to get this external feedback because we need to compare our perception of what bothers hundreds of people outside of Google. After the first 150 comments, I drafted a list of suggestions to understand the most recurring themes.

The primary cause of dissatisfaction (over 20 comments) relates to thin content sites. Many people expressed this sentiment: ‘I hate it when I search for a product name, click the result, and land on a page that says ‘no results for this product.’ Grrr.’ Often, these pages aren’t created to deceive users, but finding pages with no results or content can be frustrating and contributes to a poor user experience.

These pages can also fall under Google’s Webmaster Guidelines in several ways:

Use robots.txt to prevent search result pages or other auto-generated pages that don’t provide much value to search engine users from being crawled.
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Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with duplicate content.
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Avoid “doorway pages” created solely for search engines or other “cookie-cutter” approaches.

If a site does add a lot of valuable content, our most typical reaction would be to remove individual low-value or auto-generated pages from our index, but not the entire site.

Given the number of people who have complained about this behavior, I’d like to ask for your help in collecting examples of these kinds of pages.

Specifically, you can help us by providing concrete examples of “no results” or “empty pages.”

I want to receive the actual URL that is bothering you. We will examine every report closely, so this is your opportunity to provide examples of “no results” pages directly to the web spam team.

Here’s how to report a bad user experience.

1. Go to our authenticated spam reporting form. You’ll need a Google account to register in our Webmaster Tools console. This form is available in many languages, not just English.

2. In the “Additional details” section, make sure to include the string “noresults” as a single word and in lowercase. Feel free to fill in all other fields with relevant information if you deem it necessary.

3. Provide an actual example URL indicating “no results found” or “empty review.” In the “Additional details” section, for instance, the text can be as brief as the following:

When I searched Google for “blue widget reviews,” the URL http://www.example.com/review/2008?q=blue+widget appears to have content, but when clicked, it shows the message “No comments | 0 Positive Reviews | 0 Negative Reviews.”Overall Rating: No Ratings. “Leave Your Ratings or Reviews Here.” The page actually provides no information or results about the “blue widget” product.

This is a perfect example of a detailed report. The main data I intend to collect are the specific URLs of sites that highlight the “no reviews found” phenomenon.

Please, once again, don’t forget to include “noresults” as a keyword in your report so we can extract all specific feedback. If this issue is particularly important to you (and if it seems to be important to many people), we thank you in advance for listing the specific pages that users find problematic.