It doesn't appear that Cutts & Co. are looking to address any of the more popular blackhat link building methods that all popular SEO bloggers continually say "work but you shouldn't use them yourself because they're bad".
Until the keyword "buy viagra" isn't littered with forum link and comment spam and parasite pages, Google's algo is still not "fixed"
People can make tens of thousands of dollars a month if they rank highly for certain phrases, so tons of SEOs (and spammers) are trying to rank for phrases like that. Other search engines might hard-code the results for [buy viagra], but Google's first instinct is to use algorithms in these cases, and if you pay attention, the results for queries like that can fluctuate a lot.
With a billion searches a day, I won't claim that we'll get every query right. But just because we don't "solve" one query to your satisfaction doesn't mean we're not working really hard on the problem. It's not an easy problem. :)
How about the more general case of gray and black hat link building techniques? Especially in internet marketing and certain SEO communities, everything from forum profile backlinking to blog comments and mass article submissions are done daily to rank sites in all niches, not just the really spammy viagra-type sites.
There's a growing concern/consensus that in loads of non-spammy niches, the only way to get decent rankings is to build links.
I know this is naturally something that would be very hard for Google to tackle (since if 'junk' backlinks = domain penalty, black hatters would simply spam their competitors' sites with backlinks and get their competitors deindexed), but are there active efforts being made so that gray and black hat link building campaigns aren't (in some cases) pretty essential to a site getting good rankings?
Not to mention link building via satellite site networks. A competitor of ours has hundreds of keyword-niche sites that link back to their URL but also link to several other legitimate domains on each page. How could Google penalize the domain responsible without penalizing sites that have nothing to do with it?
it just seems to me that there is a gaggle of very obvious failing points that can easily become the focus of your guys' attempts to clean up the serps. Buy Viagra is probably the oldest known keyword to be subjected to blackhat seo techniques in the history of Google, yet it's still littered with hacked edu's and spam sites. If 300k broad match searches a month is something you guys feel isn't worth focusing on, then I guess this is a moot point. But at that kind of volume, I think a little bit more attention is warranted.
The simplest response is that link spam works, has worked for years, and coming into 2011, it appears to be as strong as ever in terms of ranking sites for competitive niches.
I think that's a bad example. AFAIK you can't legitimately buy Viagra online, so what results should Google be returning? Where are the awesome web pages about Viagra that you want to see? They don't exist, so the query comes back with spam.
It seems to me a $200M company offering to sell a product to you via their website would seem more legit than, say, a site you're redirected to after someone hacked some .edu account. (At this moment, the second result on Google for buy viagra appears is a link to www.engineering.uga.edu, but that redirects to some pharmacy site if you click through from Google (but not if you load directly).)
So yes, I'd say there's at least some way to compare the legitimacy here.
is it possible that a large number of people who 'dont know any better' are visiting these pages and making purchases and increasing the rankings for these scam sites?
Until the keyword "buy viagra" isn't littered with forum link and comment spam and parasite pages, Google's algo is still not "fixed"