WebProNews

Tag: Aaron Wall

  • Is Google More Focused On Penalties Or Positive Features?

    While it’s nothing new, a lot of webmasters are frustrated with Google for penalties their sites have received. The recent attack on guest blog posts has sparked a whole new round of outcries. Google says, however, that it tries to focus more on proactive and positive features, and less on penalties. You wouldn’t know that to read conversations that are happening every day on search blogs and forums, but that’s the stance Google is taking. Meanwhile, Google thinks we’re too bored to want to see lists of algorithm changes (which would presumably include some of these “positive” and “proactive” things). It used to release these regularly.

    We also keep seeing tweets from Matt Cutts about how Google is taking action on various networks. It doesn’t exactly convey a lack of focus on penalties.

    Do you think Google really is more focused on proactive features than it is on penalizing other sites? Let us know what you think.

    So you know how Google penalized a site and cited one link from a guest post that was on a topic that Google didn’t think belonged on the site (even though the site owner felt it did, and most other people can see the natural fit in topic)?

    Danny Sullivan wrote an article about that, which this guy shared on Twitter, saying that Google penalties have “jumped the shark”. Matt Cutts responded:

    Danny also jumped in, and Matt again:

    One that note about Google focusing less on penalties and more on proactive, positive stuff like natural language, Aaron Wall threw up a survey.

    Here’s what it’s showing as of Thursday:

    Maybe perception would be different if Google hadn’t stopped putting out those monthly lists of algorithm updates, which might have illustrated some of that natural language-type stuff more. Maybe.

    Cutts also had to defend Google from comparisons to the Emprie in Star Wars.

    Do you think Google really is more focused on adding positive features to its search engine as opposed to penalizing sites? Let us know in the comments.

    Note: This article has been updated to include more context and tweets.

    Image via PollDaddy

  • Google, Takedown Requests & The Unknown

    Google, Takedown Requests & The Unknown

    As you may know, Google is now using the amount of takedown requests it receives for a site as a ranking signal. Google publicly announced this change earlier this month, and it’s been something of a controversial topic within the webmaster community.

    Interestingly, according to Google’s Transparency Report, the number of takedown requests has actually decreased since the announcement, but the overall trend shows a very significant rise in requests over the past year. There are a lot of concerns about the vagueness of how Google uses this data, and potential abuse of the signal by competitors. More on all of that here.

    SEOBook‘s Aaron Wall shared some additional thoughts about the whole thing with us. He thinks the change may be good for Google, but is less certain how good it is for the rest of the web.

    The unknowns

    “I don’t think the feature hurts Google at all,” he tells WebProNews. “In fact I think it creates a further competitive advantage for them.”

    “It is the rest of the web that the feature is not so good for,” he adds. “The limitations are not known publicly, the level of pain caused is not known publicly, the recovery process is not known publicly, how and where and why they may change limits or penalties associated with it going forward is also unknown, etc.”

    “It is a way to point at basically anything with any sort of remix of culture and say, ‘well it is spam because this over here,’” Wall says.

    Google, as a company, is changing

    “Now to be fair, I think historically Google has been far fairer than most in their position would be,” he adds. “However as time passes, they become larger, they get more employees & they need to keep growing revenues they become more of a typical company (and that means past exceptionalism might be less exceptional in years to come).”

    “As an example of something they wouldn’t have done 10 years ago, today Google’s homepage has a large graphic ad on it for their tablet,” he points out.

    We actually talked about this another piece. It certainly is a pretty interesting turnaround from where the company once was. You have to wonder how much ore of this kind of thing Google will do. User response hasn’t been incredibly positive. Here are some examples of some fo the comments we received about the ad:

    “Definitely the most bold ad to be shown on the homepage ever. I don’t mind a text link, but an animated image? It is 179Kb as well, that is not a tiny file.”

    “How do I get rid of this annoyance?!!!! I don’t want another annoying push to buy things I couldn’t care less about.”

    “This is a sad day!!”

    “Really don’t like it – very annoyed with google.”

    I’m sure there are plenty who are not really bothered by the ad. Frankly, it doesn’t really bother me at all. I just find it noteworthy that Google would do this now after its long history of homepage simplicity.

    What About User-Generated Content Sites?

    Wall shares a quote from a post Google made on its AdSense blog this week:

    “It’s against our policies to show ads on the same page as links to other sites that are hosting copyrighted materials without authorization. Keep in mind that these sites come in various forms such as forums, blogs or community websites.”

    “Notice that YouTube goes unmentioned in the above tip,” Wall says. “Yet if you wanted to list sites that have been on the receiving end of a billion Dollar lawsuit for copyright infringement YouTube would be right up top. That was sort of the point I was trying to make…that new sites that behave like some of Google’s vertical properties do would have a strong risk of being labeled as spam before they could reach a critical mass.”

    Google has acknowledged that YouTube (and Blogger) aren’t counted among takedown requests in its transparency report, as they have different paths for reporting, but Wall makes an interesting point about other user-generated content sites trying to get off the ground.

    The signal is only one of over 200, but for a site that operates in a similar fashion to YouTube, it could be a strong signal, depending on how users use it, even if the site is diligent about responding to requests of its own.

    We’ve reached out to Google for comment on this, and will update if we receive one.

    Update: Talking with Google, the company, while acknowledging that no algorithm is perfect, indicates that it does not feel like the signal will have much of an impact on user-generated content sites, because of the way the signal has been designed. It’s likely that the types of sites seen at the top of the list of the Transparecy Report will be affected most. The company also explains that the bar is pretty high for abuse, given the legal ramifications of submitting false reports, which it says is punishable by penalty of perjury. The signal has also apparently been designed to prevent abuse.

    Google also reminds us that it is only one of over 200 signals, and that it i not using the signal to remove sites from listings.

  • Aaron Wall Interview: Google Paid Link Story Wrap-Up

    The topic of paid links is in the headlines once again, and ironically, Google is the accused. As WebProNews previously reported, Google was recently caught up in a controversy after it violated its own Webmaster Guidelines as part of a marketing campaign for Google Chrome.

    Aaron Wall, the author of SEO Book, first reported on the news after someone posted about it in one of his forums. As he explained in the above interview with WebProNews, the campaign was designed to relate Google Chrome to the Internet and tell why small businesses should use it. However, the posts were not of very high quality. Danny Sullivan, in fact, called the content “garbage.”

    “Basically, all these posts exist for no reason other than they are paid, they’re very low quality, and they’re flowing link juice,” Wall pointed out.

    While Google admits the campaign is theirs, it says that it did not intend to do any paid sponsorships. Apparently, Google hired Essence Digital, a digital media agency, for a video ad campaign to promote Chrome. Unruly Media, which is another media agency, was involved in the ordeal as well, and, from all indication, appears to be the company that actually executed the campaign.

    In the end, Google did come out and take action against itself. For “at least 60 days,” the PageRank for Google Chrome’s homepage will be demoted. On Google+, Matt Cutts said:

    I’ll give the short summary, then I’ll describe the webspam team’s response. Google was trying to buy video ads about Chrome, and these sponsored posts were an inadvertent result of that. If you investigated the two dozen or so sponsored posts (as the webspam team immediately did), the posts typically showed a Google Chrome video but didn’t actually link to Google Chrome. We double-checked, and the video players weren’t flowing PageRank to Google either.

    However, we did find one sponsored post that linked to www.google.com/chrome in a way that flowed PageRank. Even though the intent of the campaign was to get people to watch videos-not link to Google-and even though we only found a single sponsored post that actually linked to Google’s Chrome page and passed PageRank, that’s still a violation of our quality guidelines, which you can find at http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769#3.

    In response, the webspam team has taken manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome for at least 60 days. After that, someone on the Chrome side can submit a reconsideration request documenting their clean-up just like any other company would. During the 60 days, the PageRank of www.google.com/chrome will also be lowered to reflect the fact that we also won’t trust outgoing links from that page.

    Did Google fairly punish itself? Let us know what you think.

    A Google spokesperson also sent us the following statements:

    “Google never agreed to anything more than online ads. We have consistently avoided paid sponsorships, including paying bloggers to promote our products, because these kind of promotions are not transparent or in the best interests of users. We’re now looking at what changes we need to make to ensure that this never happens again.”

    Regarding the action:
    “We’ve investigated and are taking manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome and lower the site’s PageRank for a period of at least 60 days. We strive to enforce Google’s webmaster guidelines consistently in order to provide better search results for users. While Google did not authorize this campaign, and we can find no remaining violations of our webmaster guidelines, we believe Google should be held to a higher standard, so we have taken stricter action than we would against a typical site.    “

    According to Wall, because Google is such a big company, it is possible that all departments don’t know what other parts are doing. For this reason, he believes that Google should be more “lenient” when dealing with other individuals and companies regarding similar issues.

    “The big thing is, if all this stuff can happen to Google and they’re the one that makes those guidelines, then, of course, it can happen to tons of other people,” he said.

    Should Google be more lenient on the issue of paid links? What do you think?