What if instead of waiting for Google to act on a spam report, you could just remove the site yourself?
A new experimental Google Chrome extension does exactly that. It allows you to remove sites from your Google search results, and then sends that information to Google. This pool of user feedback may become a signal in Google’s algorithm for dealing with web spam.
Losing the Fight on Spam?
Google took a lot of heat in 2010 and into 2011 for the increase in web spam. Ironically, Google claimed those changes were a result of improving the algorithm to better handle spam. Most people would tell you it had the opposite affect–except for the spammers of course. Google also reworked document-level classifiers to make it harder to rank well using spammy on page content, or hacked sites.
Google feels the focus must now turn to content farms. They’re asking Chrome users to provide feedback on low quality sites by using the Blocklist extension.
Chrome Blocklist Extension
Download Chrome here.
Install the Blocklist extension.
How it Works
Perform a search on Google.
Below each description are three links: Cache, Similar, and Block.
Clicking the Block link will remove the entry from your search results. This will not cause an entry from the next page to advance. If you remove one entry, then instead of 10 results on the page you’ll only have nine.
A red icon (Wilson! Wilson!) will appear in the upper right corner next to the tools icon. Click on this to see a list of sites you’re currently blocking. Each site will have a link with an option to unblock which you can do at any site.
As you block and unblock sites, the information is transmitted to Google.
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