In this community, we are probably all frequent search-engine users, and if your search strings look anything like mine, you're probably used to seeing lists of search results linking to subscription-only, full-text technical journal articles. I am getting alarmed by the volume of pay-per-view redirects, known as doorway pages, that the journal publishers are using. Nothing is more frustrating than wasting time clicking a link that returns a "pay us now" page rather than the content containing your search terms.
Among the publishers, a couple stand out for appropriating these black-hat SEO doorway pages. One of the worst offenders is IEEE Xplore (http://ieeexplore.ieee.org), the publishing arm of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Here's an example of what they do:
Google search string: "x-ray" "cable" "150 kV"
Third result on list: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/6616/17689/00818252.pdf
The result is supposed to link to a PDF document that contains the search terms, as does the "snippet" that was captured by Google's crawler. Instead, this link goes to a page at IEEEXplore whose HTML looks like this:
>HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
>Server: IEEE Web Server
>Date: Mon, 29 Jan 2007 23:45:22 GMT
>Content-length: 0
>Content-type: text/html
>Location: /servlet/Login?&url=/iel5/6616/17689/00818252.pdf
>Connection: close
"Moved temporarily." How convenient. And then we see the redirect to Xplore's "pay us now" subscription page. The nasty thing about IEEE is that you can't even get a citation for whatever journal paper you thought you were going to see a piece of. They're content just to ask for your subscription.
Like the other big users of deceptive doorways, the porn and "warez" industries, the academic journal publishers are in this strictly for the money and don't particularly care that they are diluting the value of search engine results. Guess what: it's time to call them on the carpet. If you get results like that above, REPORT THEM TO GOOGLE for demotion:
http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html
You can also send a message to the people behind this parasitic behavior by calling or emailing them directly. At IEEE Xplore, the WORKING email is onlinesupport@ieee.org (their "online help" forms have never worked for me).
Anyone else have ideas about how to deal with Google spamming from journal publishers?
-Carl |
2007-01-29 19:08 IEEE Xplore: Guilty of Google spamming (Carl Willis) [Latest: 2007-03-12 18:10]
(Carl Willis)