Opening remarks for the Simplified Chinese Blog

2007-07-01

Two years ago, I joined Google’s CJK (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) team, and started to work on
fighting spam. This was during a time when spam sites were much more common in our Chinese search
results. For a few popular queries, the top 10 search results could be spammy at times. We had to
find a way to deal with this issue. So, we took initiatives to modify our spam fighting algorithm
by adding some Chinese specific content. It took great effect almost overnight. You can refer to
the
news report
two years ago if you are interested in learning more about this.

While our Chinese search result quality showed great improvement, we realized that many webmasters
did not know the difference between spam and legitimate optimization. What is worse, somebody
even used the Google Webmaster Guidelines as a reference for
making spam, to test if Google can really detect it. We had no choice but to take stronger
actions. By strong, I mean we further modified some parameters of the algorithms to better tackle
spam sites. However, no algorithm will make 100% of people happy. Google’s spam fighting effort
got media exposure again. Since we removed a lot of sites from our index, the media started to
assume that Google was taking action against large sites. What we could do was to work harder and
improve the algorithms continuously.

When Google China was established, I transferred to the Google webspam team. The head of the team
is the famous Matt Cutts. Matt Cutts
is one of the founders of Google webspam team. Probably any webmasters who have read Matt’s blog
know that both his spam fighting skills and blogging skills are second to none. Even though the
blog deals with webspam fighting issues, it is not aggressive or lecturing at all. On the
contrary, it is more like casually chatting with his readers, with a humorous touch. His blog is
highly informative. It is so popular that even his little cat
Ozzie
has caught readers’ attention. On his blog, there is a link pointing to a 2 second
video
of his cat. The total clicks are in the thousands.

Matt has always taken great interest in Chinese webspam. I had been communicating with him ever
since I was on the CJK team. Now that I have joined his team, we work even
closer
on this. After the interview with
Zac
and
timev.com,
Matt encouraged us to create a Chinese blog of our own. We believe that, by communicating with
Chinese Webmasters, helping them to understand Google better, making their voice heard by us and
making sure they follow Google webmaster guidelines while optimizing their sites, our Chinese
search results will greatly benefit. Thus, enhancing the users search experience using Google
Chinese search.

I tried to register on a certain SEO website, just like the “GoogleGuy” (Now the famous
“GoogleGuy” is the username used by a group of Googlers posting on webmaster forum
https://www.webmasterworld.com/ (English).), but to my surprise, I was rejected because of my IP
is from the US. But now, this blog is finally ready!

The domain name of this blog (https://www.googlechinawebmaster.com) follows the blog name of Google
China office (https://www.googlechinablog.com), and the goal of the blog is to “provide a
communication channel, collect information and improve Google Chinese search”. We will constantly
provide updates about Google, delivering our thoughts on Chinese SEO, and answer questions
interested by most of you. We will also post some translated articles from Google’s official
webmaster blogs (in English) and Matt’s blog, to expose our readers with wider range of
information. You are warmly welcomed to visit our blog regularly! If you have any suggestions,
please leave your comments.

Jianfei Zhu (also known as “Gu Hai Yi Su”)