- From: Martin Hepp <martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org>
- Date: Thu, 7 Oct 2010 21:13:32 +0200
- To: Thomas Steiner <tomac@google.com>
- Cc: Karl Dubost <karl+w3c@la-grange.net>, public-lod@w3.org, semantic-web@w3.org
Hi Tom, taking our thread to the public is definitely good. My point is that, yes, it is tempting to tweak your invisible data to polish your ranking. Example: In HTML, you say the price is 100 USD, in RDFa you say it was 50 USD. However, it is - from a computational perspective - very, very easy for Google or anybody else to spot divergences between the visible and the invisible content and punish pages that use such "semantic black- hat SEO". My main argument is that structured data also simplifies checking for black-hat SEO. A very simple algorithm would be to tag pages that don't contain the sequence of digits contained in an invisible r:hasCurrencyValue property anywhere in the visible part of the page. True algorithms for such checks will be more complex, but I hope this gives a hint. Bottomline: I think the fraud issue is overrated, since Google, Bing, and Yahoo have the pretty strong instrument of delisting sites that use black-hat SEO. Martin On 07.10.2010, at 17:05, Thomas Steiner wrote: > Hi Martin, > > We have discussed this off-list before, but maybe others would like to > chime in... > >> I don't think it is sad; because using invisible div / span >> elements nicely >> decouple the organization of the visual content from the embedded >> data. > > Martin, you never fail to hash-mark your #GoodRelations tweets with > #SEO. Decoupling triples and content raises an interesting SEO > problem: state A in the visible content, state B in the invisible > triples. Now which information do we trust? It's the "white text on a > white background" search engine fooling of the 21st century. I'm not > yet sure if it's a real problem, but could imagine that "tweaking" > price tags might be tempting to some. Opinions? > > Thanks, > Tom > > Disclaimer: I work for Google, but I have no insider information at > all how/if we deal with this. > > -- > Thomas Steiner, Research Scientist, Google Inc. > http://blog.tomayac.com, http://twitter.com/tomayac >
Received on Thursday, 7 October 2010 19:47:17 UTC