Google announced that it is now including examples of problems in its messaging to webmasters who have been hit with manual webspam penalties. Google’s Matt Cutts actually mentioned it in a Q&A session at SMX Advanced on Tuesday night, but now he has put out a Webmaster Help video discussing it further.
“I’m very happy to say that just recently, we’ve rolled out the ability to, when we send a message, to include more examples,” he says. “We’re not going to be able to show you every single thing that we think is wrong, for a couple reasons. Number one, it might help the spammers, and number two, if there’s a lot of bad pages, we’d be sending out emails that are, you know, like fifty megabytes long. But we do think it’s helpful if we can include a small number of example URLs that will help you, as a webmaster, know where to look whenever you’re trying to fix things and clean the site back up.”
He adds, “It’s much better than it was than even just a few months ago, and we’ll keep looking for ways to provide even more guidance and a little more transparency so that webmasters get [an] even better idea of where to look, but we’re just really happy that now we have the ability, when we send messages, to give you a few concrete examples.”
Cutts notes that it’s going to take some time to roll out, test, ramp up, etc. There might still be some cases where people aren’t getting examples.
Google has clearly had it with sites that have lackluster mobile experiences. This week, the company took to its Webmater Central blog to discuss “several ranking changes” it’s preparing for sites not configured for smartphone users.
But that’s not all.
Google’s Matt Cutts spoke at SMX Advanced on Tuesday evening, and implied that Google might roll out a version of its site speed ranking factor for mobile sites. Google officially revealed that site speed was a ranking factor for search over three years ago after placing a great deal of emphasis on speed for quite some time before that.
Fast forward to 2013, and mobile has grown a lot. Google is making it so you have no excuse to treat your mobile content with less regard than your desktop content. Frankly, sites should be optimizing for mobile anyway, simply for the benefit of their users, but if ignoring the mobile experience is going to cost sites search rankings, perhaps this will light a fire under their butts to do something about poor mobile site performance.
Here’s the relevant section of Search Engine Land’s liveblogged account of what Cutts said about mobile page speed:
At Google I/O, there was a session on instant mobile websites – there were page speed recommendations. We’ve said that before about desktop sites, we might start doing the same thing about mobile websites.
By the way, Cutts said at the event that the smartphone-related changes discussed in the blog post have been approved, but that he’s not sure when they’ll roll out.
Google’s Matt Cutts revealed in a Q&A at SMX Advanced on Tuesday night that Google is rolling out a test of a “structured data dashboard,” according to Search Engine Land. Barry Schwartz writes that he announced “a new beta application is testing within Google Webmaster Tools named the Structured Data Dashboard”.
Google actually announced the launch of the Structured Data Dashboard in Webmaster Tools last July. Our coverage of that is here.
Search Engine Land provides a link the an application for those who want to test the new tool. It appears that the test is just for “structured data error reporting”.
Presumably, this is part of the dashboard announced last year.
A couple weeks ago, Google launched some new tools for webmasters to provide it with structured data from their sites. They added support for new types of data with the Data Highlighter and launched the Structured Data Markup Helper.
Back in March, Google launched a Panda refresh. This is something they’ve done numerous times since first launching the update back in early 2011. There was something special about this particular refresh, however, because it marked the beginning of a new era of Panda in which Google will keep the update going regularly, without announcing all the refreshes.
“Rather than having some huge change that happens on a given day. You are more likely in the future to see Panda deployed gradually as we rebuild the index. So you are less likely to see these large scale sorts of changes,” Google’s Matt Cutts was quoted as saying.
Matt Cutts appeared in a discussion at SMX Advanced Tuesday evening in which he spoke a bit about Panda, among many other things.
Interviewer Danny Sullivan asked Cutts how many Panda updates there have been since Google stopped confirming them. His response was that they had one about a month and a half ago, but hadn’t updated it since then because they’re looking at pulling in a new signal that might help some people out of the gray zone.
This brings to mind recent words from Cutts in an industry-famous video in which he discussed numerous upcoming changes.
In that, Cutts talked about Google changing its update strategy for Panda. “We’ve also been looking at Panda, and seeing if we can find some additional signals (and we think we’ve got some) to help refine things for the sites that are kind of in the border zone – in the gray area a little bit. And so if we can soften the effect a little bit for those sites that we believe have some additional signals of quality, then that will help sites that have previously been affected (to some degree) by Panda.”
Panda will apparently be updated about once a month, and roll out slowly throughout the month.
“What happens is Google will run the update on a particular day, let’s say on the 4th of the month,” explains Barry Schwartz from SMX sister site, Search Engine Land. “Then Google will slowly push out that impact over 10 days or so through the month. Google will typically repeat this cycle over monthly.”
Matt Cutts participated in a Q&A session with Danny Sullivan at the SMX Advanced conference. SMX has now made the video available to all via its YouTube channel, so if you couldn’t make the conference, here you go:
Cutts discusses a variety of things during the session, but he also announced that Google is now rolling out a new algorithm update focusing on spammy queries like “payday loans”. More on that here.
Google’s Matt Cutts announced that Google has “started” a new ranking update to help clean up some spammy queries. It’s one of the changes that Cutts warned us about in that big video a while back.
We just started a new ranking update today for some spammy queries. See 2:30-3:10 of this video: goo.gl/ufCiH#smx
In the video, Cutts talked about working harder on types of queries that tend to draw a lot of spam.
“We get a lot of great feedback from outside of Google, so, for example, there were some people complaining about searches like ‘payday loans’ on Google.co.uk,” he said. “So we have two different changes that try to tackle those kinds of queries in a couple different ways. We can’t get into too much detail about exactly how they work, but I’m kind of excited that we’re going from having just general queries be a little more clean to going to some of these areas that have traditionally been a little more spammy, including for example, some more pornographic queries, and some of these changes might have a little bit more of an impact on those kinds of areas that are a little more contested by various spammers and that sort of thing.”
Cutts discussed the update a little at SMX Advanced. Barry Schwartz from the conference’s sister site, Search Engine Land, reports:
Matt Cutts explained this goes after unique link schemes, many of which are illegal. He also added this is a world-wide update and is not just being rolled out in the U.S. but being rolled out globally.
This update impacted roughly 0.3% of the U.S. queries but Matt said it went as high as 4% for Turkish queries were web spam is typically higher.
They’re calling it the “payday loan algorithm,” by the way (not sure if that’s official).
In another tweet, Cutts said that the update will be rolling out over the course of the next one to two months.
Google announced on Tuesday that it plans to roll out “several ranking changes” in the near future, which address sites that are “misconfigured for smartphone users.”
Essentially, if your content provides errors on smartphones, your rankings are going to suffer.
“Some websites use separate URLs to serve desktop and smartphone users,” explain Google’s Yoshikiyo Kato and Pierre Far. “A faulty redirect is when a desktop page redirects smartphone users to an irrelevant page on the smartphone-optimized website. A typical example is when all pages on the desktop site redirect smartphone users to the homepage of the smartphone-optimized site.”
“This kind of redirect disrupts a user’s workflow and may lead them to stop using the site and go elsewhere,” they add. “Even if the user doesn’t abandon the site, irrelevant redirects add more work for them to handle, which is particularly troublesome when they’re on slow mobile networks. These faulty redirects frustrate users whether they’re looking for a webpage, video, or something else, and our ranking changes will affect many types of searches.”
Google advises that you redirect smartphone users from a desktop page to its equivalent smartphone-optimized page, and if the content in question doesn’t exist in smartphone-optimized form, show the desktop content rather than an irrelevant redirect.
Google also runs down a list of common smartphone-only errors you should avoid, and links to tips for redirects and recommendations for mobile content. Read the post here.
Google’s Matt Cutts recently talked about Google’s Disavow Links tool in the comments of a blog post, in which he suggested using it more like a machete than like a fine-toothed comb.
Today, Google released a new Webmaster Help video discussing the mistakes that people most often make when using the tool.
Cutts says, “The file that you upload is just supposed to be a regular text file, so expect either a comment on its own line, a domain that starts with ‘domain:url’. Anything else is weird syntax, and in theory, could cause the parser to reject the file. What we see is people sometimes uploading Word files, so .doc, Excel spreadsheets, you know, and that’s the sort of thing where our parser is not built to handle. It’s expecting just a text file. So if you upload something really strange, that can cause the parser to throw that file out, and then the reconsideration request would not go through.”
Once again, Cutts advises machete-like use of the tool.
He says, “The other thing that we see is, a lot of the times, the first attempt at a reconsideration request, you see people really trying to take a scalpel, and pick out really individual bad links in a very granular way, and for better or worse, sometimes when you’ve got a really bad link profile, rather than a scalpel, you might be thinking more of a machete sort of thing. You need to go a little bit deeper in terms of getting rid of the really bad links.”
“So, for example, if you’ve got links from some very spammy forum or something like that, rather than trying to identify the individual pages, that might be the opportunity to do a ‘domain:’,” he adds. “So if you’ve got a lot of links that you think are bad from a particular site, just go ahead and do ‘domain:’ and the name of that domain. Don’t maybe try to pick out the individual links because you might be missing a lot more links.”
“The other thing that we see is, the ‘domain:’ needs to have the right syntax,” he says. “So, ‘domain:’ and then a domain name. Don’t do, ‘domain:’ and then ‘http’ or ‘www.’ or something like that. An actual domain like ‘example.com’ or ‘mattcutts.com’ is what we’re looking for there.”
It’s a little surprising that Google’ system can’t tell when somebody’s talking about a domain when they use “http” or “www,” but it is what it is. Good to know.
Cutts continues, “A bunch of people, we sometimes see them putting context, or the story, or the documentation for the reconsideration request in the Disavow Links text file that they try to upload. That’s really not the right place for it. The right place to give us the context, or to describe what’s going on is in the reconsideration request, not in the Disavow Links text file….You probably don’t need a lot of comments. If they’re there, I’d keep ’em short. I wouldn’t make a lot of multiple lines and all that sort of stuff because it increases the likelihood that you might make a copy-and-paste error, and then we would not trust that particular file.”
“The other thing that we see is that some people think that Disavow is be all end all..the panacea that’s going to cure all their ills, and yet we do want, if you’ve been doing some bad SEO and you’re trying to cure it, in an ideal world, you would actually clean up as many links as you can off the actual web,” says Cutts. “That’s just a really helpful way for us to see, when you’re doing a reconsideration request, that you’re putting in the effort to try and make sure things have been corrected and cleaned up, and it’s not going to happen again.”
Google conducts tens of thousands of search experiments every year, and you never know which ones will actually become features of the greater Google experience, but the search engine is running a new one that’s pretty interesting and shares some traits with actual features in other Google products, which could actually improve search results, and lend visibility to deserving content.
The test puts an “In-depth articles” section within the organic Google web results in a Universal Search-like fashion. It highlights (presumably) long form content relevant to your query. Tipped by Dr. Peter Meyers from Moz, Search Engine Land points out the test with a screen cap. Here’s what the relevant portion of the page looks like:
As I mentioned, this shares some similarities with other existing Google features. For one, Google already highlights content as “in-depth” in Google News.
The icons Google shows for each publication match the icons they’re showing in the latest version of the Gmail Android app. When there is a Google profile pic that Google can use to associate with the publication (or in Gmail’s case, sender), it uses it. When there is not a Google profile pic, Google displays the first letter of the publication (or sender) in a box. It’s kind of an odd way to to do it, but it shows some consistency between Google products, and I would not be surprised to start seeing this format pop up in other places throughout the Google universe.
As for the new “In-depth” articles test, the feature seems to keep in line with Google’s mission to surface high quality content, and would complement the Panda algorithm update in that regard. The feature could reward orignal reporting and analysis – at least the kind that takes a great deal of time and effort on the part of the author. Granted, there is certainly plenty of original reporting that is not long-form or in-depth.
Either way, if this becomes an actual feature, this will give content providers more of an SEO reason to produce long articles.
In Google News, Google also has a “highly cited” label. It would be interesting if Google added a feature for that similar to the “in-depth articles” one.
It’s interesting that Google would display this test on results for a query like “mexican restaurants,” where users most likely wouldn’t be looking to read in-depth articles in most cases.
Over the past couple of years, it has become abundantly clear that authorship will continue to play an increasingly important role in how Google determines when and how to rank some types of content in search results. Nothing is changing there, and you can expect Google to continue to look for ways to improve how it uses this signal.
Google’s Matt Cutts put out a new Webmaster Help video today discussing this. Specifically, he responds to the user-submitted question:
Will Google be evaluating the use of rel=”author” moving forward as more sites use the feature on generic, non-article/news pages, such as the home page or an about page?
“My brief answer is yes,” begins Cutts. “I’m pretty excited about the ideas behind rel=’author’. Basically, if you can move from an anonymous web to a web where you have some notion of identity and maybe even reputation of individual authors, then webspam, you kind of get a lot of benefits for free. It’s harder for the spammers to hide over here in some anonymous corner.”
“Now, I continue to support anonymous speech and anonymity, but at the same time, if Danny Sullivan writes something on a forum or something like that I’d like to know about that, even if the forum itself doesn’t have that much PageRank or something along those lines,” he continues. “It’s definitely the case that it was a lot of fun to see the initial launch of rel=’author’. I think we probably will take another look at what else do we need to do to turn the crank and iterate and improve how we handle rel=’author’. Are there other ways that we can use that signal?”
Cutts concludes, “I do expect us to continue exploring that because if we can move to a richer, more annotated web, where we rally know…the philosophy of Google has been moving away from keywords, ‘from strings towards things,’ so we’ve had this Knowledge Graph where we start to learn about the real world entities and the real world relationships between those entities. In the same way, if you know who the real world people are who are actually writing content, that could be really useful as well, and might be able to help you improve search quality. So it’s definitely something that I’m personally interested in, and I think several people in the Search Quality group continue to work on, and I think we’ll continue to look at it, as far as seeing how to use rel=’author’ in ways that can improve the search experience.”
Cutts discussed authorship in a hangout about social search back in the fall. In that, he indicated that authorship could become a weightier signal in the future. In fact, he dubbed it a “long term trend”.
The moral of the story is: If you have started building reputation and credibility yet, you should probably do so. You’ll also want to implement authorship markup.
Google put out a new Webmaster Help video, featuring Matt Cutts once again talking about “misconceptions” in the SEO industry. You may recall a while back when he tackled the “misconception” that Google is doing everything you read about in its patents.
There are two main takeaways from the new video. The first is that Google does not make changes to its algorithm (like Panda and Penguin) in order to generate more revenue for itself. The second is that you should focus more on design and user experience than link building and trying to please search engines.
Do you agree with Matt’s statements? Are you convinced that Google is putting user experience ahead of short-term revenue gains? Let us know in the comments.
First, Cutts points out that a lot of people don’t get the difference between an algorithm update and a data refresh, both of which are common terms associated with Panda and Penguin. He’s talked about this before, but here’s his latest refresher.
“The difference between an algorithm update versus just a data refresh – when you’re changing your algorithm, the signals that you’re using and how you weight those signals are fundamentally changing,” he says. “When you’re doing just a data refresh, then the way that you run your computer program stays the same, but you might have different incoming data. You might refresh the data that the algorithm is using. That’s something that a lot of people just don’t seem to necessarily get.”
Cutts put out a blog post back in 2006 on the difference between algorithm updates and data refreshes. He then gave these straight-forward definitions before pointing to a video in which he compares an algorithm update to changing a car part, and a data refresh to filling up the gas tank:
Algorithm update: Typically yields changes in the search results on the larger end of the spectrum. Algorithms can change at any time, but noticeable changes tend to be less frequent.
Data refresh: When data is refreshed within an existing algorithm. Changes are typically toward the less-impactful end of the spectrum, and are often so small that people don’t even notice.
So that’s the first misconception Cutts aims to clear up (again) in this new video. Then he moves on to “a bigger one they don’t seem to get”.
“I’ve seen a lot of accusations after Panda and Penguin that Google is just trying to increase its revenue, and let me just confront that head on,” says Cutts. “Panda, if you go back and look at Google’s quarterly statements, they actually mention that Panda decreased our revenue. So a lot of people have this conspiracy theory that Google is making these changes to make more money. And not only do we not think that way in the search quality team, we’re more than happy to make changes which are better for the long term loyalty of our users, the user experience, and all that sort of stuff, and if that’s a short-term revenue hit, then that might be okay, right? Because people are going to be coming back to Google long term. So a lot of people…it’s a regular conspiracy theory: ‘Google did this ranking change because they want people to buy more ads,’ and that’s certainly not the case with Panda. It’s certainly not the case with Penguin. It’s kind of funny to see that as a meme within the industry, and it’s just something that I wanted to debunk that misconception.”
“Panda and Penguin,” he continues. “We just want ahead and made those changes, and we’re not going to worry about whether we lose money, we make money, whatever. We just want to return the best users’ results we can. And the mental model you should have is, we want to have the long-term loyalty of our users. We don’t want to lock users in, so we have Data Liberation. People can always get their own data back out of Google, and if we just choose short-term revenue, that might make some money in the short term, but historically we’ve had the long-term view. If you make users happy, they’ll come back. They’ll do more searches. They’ll like Google. They’ll trust Google more. That, in our opinion, is worth more than just some short-term sort of revenue.”
“If you look at the history of the decisions that Google has made, I think you see that over and over again, he adds. “And Panda and Penguin are no exception to that.”
We did look back at some of Google’s earnings reports. The Panda update was first launched in February, 2011. Google’s revenue grew 27% year-over-year in the first quarter of 2011.
“We had a great quarter with 27% year-over-year revenue growth,” said Google CFO Patrick Pichette. “These results demonstrate the value of search and search ads to our users and customers, as well as the extraordinary potential of areas like display and mobile. It’s clear that our past investments have been crucial to our success today—which is why we continue to invest for the long term.”
Some other snippets from that report:
Google Sites Revenues – Google-owned sites generated revenues of $5.88 billion, or 69% of total revenues, in the first quarter of 2011. This represents a 32% increase over first quarter 2010 revenues of $4.44 billion.
Google Network Revenues – Google’s partner sites generated revenues, through AdSense programs, of $2.43 billion, or 28% of total revenues, in the first quarter of 2011. This represents a 19% increase from first quarter 2010 network revenues of $2.04 billion.
…
Paid Clicks – Aggregate paid clicks, which include clicks related to ads served on Google sites and the sites of our AdSense partners, increased approximately 18% over the first quarter of 2010 and increased approximately 4% over the fourth quarter of 2010.
Looking ahead to the next quarter’s report, the first full quarter of post-Panda results, Google’s revenue was up 32% year-over-year. Here’s CEO Larry Page’s statement from that one:
“We had a great quarter, with revenue up 32% year on year for a record breaking over $9 billion of revenue,” said Larry Page, CEO of Google. “I’m super excited about the amazing response to Google+ which lets you share just like in real life.”
A few more snippets from that report:
Google Sites Revenues – Google-owned sites generated revenues of $6.23 billion, or 69% of total revenues, in the second quarter of 2011. This represents a 39% increase over second quarter 2010 revenues of $4.50 billion.
Google Network Revenues – Google’s partner sites generated revenues, through AdSense programs, of $2.48 billion, or 28% of total revenues, in the second quarter of 2011. This represents a 20% increase from second quarter 2010 network revenues of $2.06 billion.
…
Paid Clicks – Aggregate paid clicks, which include clicks related to ads served on Google sites and the sites of our AdSense partners, increased approximately 18% over the second quarter of 2010 and decreased approximately 2% over the first quarter of 2011.
The word “panda” is not mentioned in either report as far I as can tell, but there you do have a slight decrease in paid clicks from quarter to quarter, which given that this takes AdSense into account, and many sites affected by Panda were AdSense sites, could be representative of a direct blow from Panda itself.
The next quarter, however, saw paid clicks increase 13% quarter-over-quarter. In Q4 of that year, they increased 17% quarter-over-quarter.
Interestingly, back in July of 2011, analyst Tom Foremski suggested that Google wasn’t being clear about Panda having an impact on ad revenues, pointing out a “huge disparity between the growth rates of Google sites and partner sites,” which he said was “without precedent for most of its history.”
Cutts actually took issue with some words from Foremski, and reacted in a comment on a Hacker News thread, where he points to transcripts from actual earnings calls, highlighting relevant sentences. Here’s Cutts’ full comment from the thread:
DanielBMarkham, let me try again using quotes from Google’s last two earning transcripts from the last two quarters and see whether that helps to clarify.
I’m loath to go anywhere near a subject like corporate earnings for various reasons, but Foremski says “There is no explanation from Google or Wall Street analysts that I could find,” but anyone can go read Google’s Q2 2011 earnings call transcript, which you can find at http://seekingalpha.com/article/279555-google-s-ceo-discusse… . The relevant sentence is “Network revenue was again negatively impacted by the Search quality improvements made during the latter part of Q1, as you will remember, and know that Q2 reflects a full quarter of this impact.”
Now go read Google’s Q1 earning’s transcript at http://seekingalpha.com/article/263665-google-s-ceo-discusse… . The relevant section is “The Google Network revenue was up 19% year-over-year to $2.4 billion. That Network revenue was negatively impacted by two things, the loss of a Search distribution partnership deal and also, what has been broadly communicated, by Search quality improvement made during the quarter. Regarding the Search quality improvement, remember that we regularly make such trade-offs. We really believe that the quality improvements that benefit the user always serves us well both in the short term and in the mid term in terms of revenue.”
So Foremski claims that “For some strange reason no one has picked up on this or noticed this huge change in its business model. There is no explanation from Google or Wall Street analysts that I could find.” I would contend that Google has actually been quite clear about the reasons for the change in network revenue in its earnings calls.
In particular, Google has been clear in that it’s willing to accept an impact in our revenue in order to improve the quality of our search results.
In Q1 2012, paid clicks were up 7% quarter-over-quarter. In Q2 2012, they were up 1%. In Q3 2012, they were up 6%. In Q4, they were up 9%. In Q1 2013, they were up 3%. So, while there was a short term hit, the long term does seem to see increase after increase in this area.
Now, back to the video. Finally he gets to the topic of what he thinks SEOs are spending too much time doing.
“I think a good proxy for that is link building,” Cutts says. “A lot of people think about, ‘How do I build more links?’ and they dont’ think about the grander, global picture of, ‘How do I make something compelling, and then how do I make sure that I market it well?’ You know, you get too focused on search engines, and then you, for example, would entirely miss social media and social media marketing. And that’s a great way to get out in front of people. So, specifically, I would think, just like Google does, about the user experience of your site. What makes it compelling? What makes it interesting? What makes it fun? Because if you look at the history of sites that have done relatively well or businesses that are doing well now…you can take anywhere from Instagram to Path – even Twitter…there’s a cool app called YardSale, and what those guys try to do is they make design a fundamental piece of why their site is advantageous to go to. It’s a great experience. People enjoy that.”
I think we’ve all pretty much heard this before.
Do you think Panda and Penguin have really helped the quality of Google’s search results and created a better user experience? Is link building still of major importance? Let us know what you think.
Google famously has over 200 ranking factors in its algorithm, and has never (and will never) reveal the exact secret sauce, but that doesn’t stop people from trying to crack it.
Backlinko and SingleGrain have put together this infographic aimed at dissecting the algorithm.
Regardless of how many signals marketers can put their fingers on, Google will never reveal how much weight is given to each one. Google also makes multiple changes every single day, and will always be multiple steps ahead of webmasters.
Back during Google I/O, Google’s Matt Cutts tweeted that Google “took action on several thousand linksellers in a paid-link-that-passes-PageRank network”.
Cutts didn’t provide much in the way of detail, other than also saying, “It’s safe to assume webspam will continue to tackle link networks that violate our guidelines”.
Last week, Cutts tweeted, indicating that it was about Text Link Ads link sellers.
@mikrutd you might have noticed a big drop in PageRank on thousands of TLA linkselling sites a couple weeks ago.
Google has further indicated in recent weeks that it is cracking down on paid links and advertorials even more. If you haven’t seen it yet, watch Cutts discuss this here.
Search is moving more and more toward structured data, which in turn, is leading search engines to delivering the information users are seeking without the need of having to send them to third-party sites. Google, in particular, is making tremendous use of this data in offerings like its Knowledge Graph and in Google Now, and it’s still very early days for both products. Google continues to provide webmasters with tools to help build Google’s structured database, but what ramifications does this have for businesses getting web traffic from Google going forward?
Are you willing to provide Google with structured data from your site, even if it means Google getting users this data without sending them to your site? Let us know in the comments.
“It’s another step away from raw keywords (without knowing what those words really mean) toward understanding things in the real-world and how they relate to each other,” said Google’s Matt Cutts at the time. “The knowledge graph improves our ability to understand the intent of a query so we can give better answers and search results.”
From the user standpoint, it’s been hard to argue with the results, especially these days when you see them interact with your questions in a conversational manner. Outside of the occasional piece of erroneous data, the info has been pretty useful, and even when relevant, more traditional, organic results appear on the page next to a Google “Knowledge Panel,” it’s often the Knowledge Graph part that jumps off the page and captures your attention, and in many cases, let’s you know the information you needed without having to click further.
So far, the biggest loss in site clickthroughs has probably been seen by Wikipedia, simply because it’s typically the first source Google offers up with the Knowledge Graph, but Google is working to greatly expand the Knowledge Graph, and as that happens, more sites face the possibility of a similar sacrifice. It’s also worth noting that Wikipedia, of course, is a nonprofit entity. How much of the Knowledge Graph will consist of info from nonprofits when it’s all said and done?
It will never truly be done though. It will just keep growing, and Google’s giving webmasters the tools to give the search giant better access to the data it needs to give answers to users. For many, this will no doubt be an attractive option in an age where it has become increasingly hard to appear on page one of a Google results page.
Google launched the Data Highlighter back in December. It was initially just for event data, but has already expanded significantly.
“Data Highlighter is a webmaster tool for teaching Google about the pattern of structured data on your website,” Google explains. “You simply use Data Highlighter to tag the data fields on your site with a mouse. Then Google can present your data more attractively — and in new ways — in search results and in other products such as the Google Knowledge Graph.”
“For example, if your site contains event listings you can use Data Highlighter to tag data (name, location, date, and so on) for the events on your site,” the company adds. “The next time Google crawls your site, the event data will be available for rich snippets on search results pages.”
This week, Google announced that it has expanded the tool to support more types of data. Now it supports: events, products, local businesses, articles, software applications, movies, restaurants, and TV episodes. Suddenly, this is starting to involve businesses a lot more directly.
“As with Data Highlighter, one simply points and clicks on a sample web page to indicate its key data fields,” says product manager Justin Boyan. “Structured Data Markup Helper then shows exactly what microdata annotations to add to the page’s HTML code. We hope this helps give HTML authors a running start with adding structured data to their sites, in turn making search results more meaningful.”
“When Google understands a website’s content in a structured way, we can present that content more accurately and more attractively in search,” says Boyan “For example, our algorithms can enhance search results with ‘rich snippets’ when we understand that a page contains an event, recipe, product, review, or similar. We can also feature a page’s data as part of answers in search from the Knowledge Graph or in Google Now cards, helping you find the right information at just the right time.”
To be clear, there will certainly be plenty of cases, as with rich snippets, where new links to sites are created, potentially leading to more clickthroughs, but even sometimes with those, users will get the info they need on the page, without having to click. There are plenty of variables that enter the equation, not least of which is Google deciding when and where to display the data it obtains from sites.
The question is whether this move toward structured data will truly benefit sites in general in the long run or if it simply gives search engines like Google more control as the gatekeepers to information. With Google Now, for that matter, Google is even deciding when to show users this data, without waiting for them to search for it.
Another issue worth considering is just how well Google will be able to deal with accuracy of data as it gets more and more structured data from webmasters, as it is encouraging. We’ve seen Google make mistakes on more than one occasion. They’ve gotten marital status wrong. They’ve let nudity slip through when inappropriate (multiple times). Will they be able to keep too much erroneous information from being passed off as “knowledge”? If not, things could get really out of hand.
Earlier this week, I had a bad experience with Google Maps in which I was directed to a non-existent eye doctor on the other side of town (turn by turn, no less) when the actual doctor was right outside of my neighborhood. I was late for the appointment because of a Google error. What happens if some piece of erroneous data from some webmaster’s site makes it into Google’s Knowledge Graph, and gets served to me via Google Now when I supposedly need it, only for me to find out that it is completely wrong. Who knows what kinds of mishaps that could bring on?
Maybe Google can keep the errors from becoming too prevalent. I guess we’ll see, though I can’t say my confidence is incredibly high. Back when Google launched Knowledge Graph I questioned the company about accuracy with regards to Wikipedia vandalism. I was told that Google has quality controls to “try to mitigate this kind of issue,” and that Google includes a link so users can tell them when they come across inaccuracies.
“Our goal is to be useful,” a spokesperson told me. “We realize we’ll never be perfect, just as a person’s or library’s knowledge is never complete, but we will strive to be accurate. More broadly, this is why we engineer 500+ updates to our algorithms every year — we’re constantly working to improve search, and to make things easier for our users.”
But that was before Google Now, and it was when the Knowledge Graph was significantly smaller than it is now. At Google I/O earlier this month, Google announced that Knowledge Graph was up to over 570 million entities (not to mention rolling out in additional languages), and that it continues to grow. Even since then, Google has announced the launch of nutritional information.
It also remains to be seen how well Google is able to keep spam out of the structured data pool. I can’t say I’ve seen any spam from it thus far, but as more and more businesses look to provide Google with this kind of data in hopes of boosting their search visibility, which again, Google is encouraging them to do, and as long as Google moves further and further into this direction, making it harder for businesses to get traditional first-page rankings, it seems likely that more will try to game the system. Maybe they won’t be successful. Maybe some will find ways.
The point is that it’s still early days for this era of search, and it’s hard to say just what it all means for webmasters and for search quality. Either way, things are getting interesting.
Google took to its Webmaster Central blog on Friday to share some tips for international sites. This comes at a time when an increasing number of online marketing professionals are viewing international SEO as gaining importance.
“Many websites exist in more than one language, and more and more websites are made available for more than one language,” Google’s Web Studio team writes. “Yet, building a website for more than one language doesn’t simply mean translation, or localization (L10N), and that’s it. It requires a few more things, all of which are related to internationalization (I18N).”
First and foremost, Google says you should always use markup, rather than stylesheets, for international purposes, when it comes to language and directionality. You should avoid coming up solutions like special classes or ID, Google says, and use @lang and @dir, at least on the html element (<html lang=”ar” dir=”rtl”>).
Google says you should use just one style sheet for all locales, make use of the [dir=’rtl’] attribute selector and the :lang() pseudo class, as well as mirror left- and right-related values.
Google goes into further detail on all of this and more in the post, which you should definitely read if this concerns you.
According to a recent report from BrightEdge, six out of ten search marketers believe ranking in global search engines will become either “more” or “much more” important this year (compared to last year).
Google has been enforcing its policies on paid links for years, but the search engine is really cracking down on advertorials and native advertising these days. Google’s Matt Cutts has been talking about the subject a lot lately, so if your site offers any advertorial content, you better make sure you’re doing it the right way, under Google’s guidance, or you just might find yourself slapped with a harsh penalty independent of any black and white animal-named algorithms.
Native advertising is rising in popularity on the web. Do you think Google can enforce its guidelines on this well? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Earlier this month, Cutts put out a video talking about a bunch of big SEO-related changes Google is working on, and that webmasters could expect to see over the coming months. The video discussed the most recent Penguin update, which we’ve already seen take effect. One of the other things Cutts mentioned was the use of advertorials and native advertising. He said Google would be “looking at some efforts to be a little bit stronger on our enforcement” on that stuff.
Now, Cutts has a new video talking for five minutes specifically about Google’s policies on advertorials and native advertising. Yes, they’re taking this seriously, so you should too, if you’re at all concerned about your Google rankings.
“Well, it’s advertising, but it’s often the sort of advertising that looks a little closer to editorial, but it basically means that someone gave you some money, rather than you writing about this naturally because you thought it was interesting or because you wanted to,” says Cutts. “So why do I care about this? Why are we making a video about this at all? Well, the reason is, certainly within the webspam team, we’ve seen a little bit of problems where there’s been advertorial or native advertising content or paid content, that hasn’t really been disclosed adequately, so that people realize that what they’re looking at was paid. So that’s a problem. We’ve had longstanding guidance since at least 2005 I think that says, ‘Look, if you pay for links, those links should not pass PageRank,’ and the reason is that Google, for a very long time, in fact, everywhere on the web, people have mostly treated links as editorial votes.”
“Such links can hurt relevance by causing inaccuracies (false popularity and links that are not fundamentally based on merit, relevance, or authority and inequities (unfair advantage in our organic search results to websites with the biggest pocketbooks.”
“In order to stay within Google’s quality guidelines, paid links should be disclosed through a rel=’nofollow’ or other techniques such as doing a redirect through a page which is robots.txt’ed out,” they wrote.
“Well, there’s two-fold things that you should think about,” says Cutts in the video. “The first is on the search engine side of things, and search engine wise, you should make sure that if links are paid – that is if money changed hands in order for a link to be placed on a website – that it should not flow PageRank. In essence, it shouldn’t affect search engines’ rankings. That’s no different than the guidance we’ve had for years, and years, and years.”
The video, again, suggests using rel=”nofollow”.
“Likewise, if you are doing disclosure, you need to make sure that it’s clear to people,” he adds. “A good rule of thumb is that there should be clear and conspicuous disclosure. It shouldn’t be the case that people have to dig around, buried in small print or have to click and look around a long time to find out, ‘Oh, this content that I’m reading was actually paid.’”
The video suggests using text like “Advertisement” or “Sponsored” to make advertorial content clear to users. In other words, it’s not enough to just slap a rel=”nofollow” on the links. You need to make sure it’s clear to users who aren’t necessarily (and most likely aren’t) looking for that.
“So why are we talking about this now?” Cutts continues. “This isn’t a change in our search engine policy. Certainly not in the webspam team. Well, the reason is that we’ve seen some people who have not been doing it correctly. So we’ve seen, for example, in the United Kingdom, a few sites that have been taking money, and writing articles that were paid, and including keyword-rich anchor text in those articles that flowed PageRank, and then not telling anybody that those were paid articles. And that’s the sort of thing where if a regular user happened to be reading your website, and didn’t know that it was paid, they’d really be pretty frustrated and pretty angry when they found out that it was paid.”
Back in February Google slapped a major UK flower site, Interflora, for the issue at hand. While Google itself didn’t specifically call out the company by name, right after reports about it came out, Cutts put out a “reminder” about selling links on the Webmaster Central blog.
“Please be wary if someone approaches you and wants to pay you for links or ‘advertorial’ pages on your site that pass PageRank,” he wrote. “Selling links (or entire advertorial pages with embedded links) that pass PageRank violates our quality guidelines, and Google does take action on such violations. The consequences for a linkselling site start with losing trust in Google’s search results, as well as reduction of the site’s visible PageRank in the Google Toolbar. The consequences can also include lower rankings for that site in Google’s search results.”
“So, we’ve taken action on this sort of thing for years and years, and we’re going to keep taking strong action,” says Cutts in the video. “We do think it’s important to be able to figure out whether something is paid or not on the web, and it’s not just the webspam team. It’s not just search quality and web search results. The Google News team recently published on their blog, and said that if you don’t provide adequate disclosure of paid content – whether it be native advertising, advertorials – whenever there’s money changing hand, if users don’t realize that sufficiently because there’s not adequate disclosure, the Google News team mentioned that they might not only remove the paid content, but we’re willing to go up to and including removing the publication from Google News.”
We covered what the Google News team had to say about it here.
“Credibility and trust are longstanding journalistic values, and ones which we all regard as crucial attributes of a great news site,” wrote Google Sr. Director of News and Social Products, Richard Gingras. “It’s difficult to be trusted when one is being paid by the subject of an article, or selling or monetizing links within an article. Google News is not a marketing service, and we consider articles that employ these types of promotional tactics to be in violation of our quality guidelines.”
“Please remember that like Google search, Google News takes action against sites that violate our quality guidelines,” he added. “Engagement in deceptive or promotional tactics such as those described above may result in the removal of articles, or even the entire publication, from Google News.”
Interestingly, despite Google’s long-standing policy, native advertising spend is on the rise. It’s expected to reach $4.57 billion in 2017, compared to $1.63 billion last year and a projected $2.36 billion this year.
Cutts did say in the earlier video, “There’s nothing wrong inherently with advertorials or native advertising, but they should not flow PageRank, and there should be clear and conspicuous disclosure, so that users realize that something is paid – not organic or editorial.”
On Monday, Google Webmaster Trends analyst John Mueller shared a screen cap of a comment Google’s Matt Cutts posted on his blog earlier this month about the Link Disavow tool. The comment is as follows:
“Hmm. One common issue we see with disavow requests is people going through with a fine-toothed comb when they really need to do something more like a machete on the bad backlinks. For example, often it would help to use the ‘domain:’ operator to disavow all bad backlinks from an entire domain rather than trying to use a scalpel to pick out the individual bad links. That’s one reason why we sometimes see it take a while to clean up those old, not-very-good links.”
The more you know.
Mueller underlined the word “machete” in red, indicating that this is a point many webmasters are likely missing.
Google launched the Link Disavow tool back in October, enabling webmasters to tell Google specific links they want it to ignore, as to avoid potential penalties. If you’ve never used it, and haven’t learned much about it by now, you should start with this video from Cutts:
Webmasters have been expecting a BIG Penguin update from Google for quite some time, and a couple weeks ago, Google’s Matt Cutts promised that one was on the way. Finally, on Wednesday, he announced that Google had not only started the roll-out, but completed it. While it was said to be a big one, it remains to be seen just how big it has been in terms of impacting webmasters.
Just what did Cutts mean by “big” anyway? When discussing the update a couple weeks ago, he said it would be “larger”. When it rolled out, he announced that “about 2.3% of English-US queries are affected to the degree that a regular user might notice,” and that “the scope of Penguin varies by language, e.g. languages with more webspam will see more impact.”
As far as English queries, it would appear that the update is actually smaller. The original Penguin (first called the “Webspam” update) was said to impact about 3.1% of queries in English. So, perhaps this one is significantly larger in terms of other languages.
Cutts has also been tossing around the word “deeper”. In the big “What should we expect in the next few months” video released earlier this month, Cutts said this about Penguin 2.0: “So this one is a little more comprehensive than Penguin 1.0, and we expect it to go a little bit deeper, and have a little bit more of an impact than the original version of Penguin.”
Cutts talked about the update a little more in an interview with Leo Laporte on the day it rolled out, and said, “It is a leap. It’s a brand new generation of algorithms. The previous iteration of Penguin would essentially only look at the homepage of a site. The newer generation of Penguin goes much deeper. It has a really big impact in certain small areas.”
We asked Cutts if he could elaborate on that part about going deeper. He said he didn’t have anything to add:
The SEO community is translating “goes deeper” to mean that Penguin 1.0 only impacted the home page of a web site. That is absolutely false. Deeper has nothing to do with that. Those who were hit by Penguin 1.0 know all to well that their whole site suffered, not just their home page.
What Matt meant by “deeper” is that Google is going deeper into their index, link graph and more sites will be impacted by this than the previous Penguin 1.0 update. By deeper, Matt does not mean how it impacts a specific web site architecture but rather how it impacts the web in general.
He later updated the piece after realizing that Cutts said what he said in the video, adding, “Matt must mean Penguin only analyzed the links to the home page. But anyone who had a site impacted by Penguin noticed not just their home page ranking suffer. So I think that is the distinction.”
Anyhow, there have still been plenty of people complaining that they were hit by the update, though we’re also hearing from a bunch of people that they saw their rankings increase. One reader says this particular update impacted his site negatively, but was not as harsh as the original Penguin. Paul T. writes:
Well, in a way I like this update better than any of the others. It is true I lost about 50% of my traffic on my main site, but the keywords only dropped a spot or two–so far anyway.
The reason I like it is because it is more discriminating. It doesn’t just wipe out your whole site, but it goes page by page.
Some of my smaller sites were untouched. Most of my loss came from hiring people to do automated back-linking. I though I would be safe doing this because I was really careful with anchor text diversity, but it was not to be.
I am going to try to use social signals more to try to bringt back my traffic.
Another reader, Nick Stamoulis, suggests that Google could have taken data from the Link Disavow tool into consideration when putting together Penguin 2.0:
I would guess that the Disavow tool was factored into Penguin 2.0. If thousands of link owners disavowed a particular domain I can’t imagine that is something Google didn’t pick up on. It’s interesting that they are offering site owners the chance to “tell” on spammy sites that Penguin 2.0 might have overlooked.
Cutts has tweeted about the Penguin spam form several times.
With regards to the Link Disavow tool, Google did not rule out the possibility of using it as a ranking signal when quizzed about it in the past. Back in the fall, Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan shared a Q&A with Matt Cutts in which he did not rule out the possibility. Sullivan asked him if “someone decides to disavow link from good sites a perhaps an attempt to send signals to Google these are bad,” is Google mining this data to better understand what bad sites are?
“Right now, we’re using this data in the normal straightforward way, e.g. for reconsideration requests,” Cutts responded. “We haven’t decided whether we’ll look at this data more broadly. Even if we did, we have plenty of other ways of determining bad sites, and we have plenty of other ways of assessing that sites are actually good.”
Searchmetrics released its list of the top losers from the latest Penguin update, which you can see here. It includes some porn, travel, and game sites, as well as a few big brands like Dish and Salvation Army.
As it typically does with many major Google algorithm updates, Searchmetrics has released of the top losers from the Google Penguin 2.0, which the search engine rolled out this week. Based on this list, some big brands like Dish and Salvation Army were hit, as were some porn sites, travel sites and game sites. Even the Educational Testing Service was hit.
“My first analysis shows that many thin sites, sites with thin links and especially untrusted links face the problem,” says Searchmetrics founder and CTO Marcus Tober. “In addition, some small business sites were hit because they haven’t taken SEO serious enough.”
Here’s the list:
Back in April of 2012, after Penguin 1.0, Searchmetrics put out one of these lists. Google’s Matt Cutts spoke out about it, saying it was inaccurate, because there had also been a Panda update, and the list was likely more indicative of that. The fact is that Google puts out algorithm changes every day, and any of these can potentially play into analysis like this.
In fact, Google recently transitioned Panda into a rolling update, meaning it is being pushed out regularly, rather than coming in big waves like it used to. We’re not trying to discredit Searchmetrics’ list here. It’s just always best to take these things with a grain of salt.
Google has been warning of a big and scary new version of the Penguin update for quite some time. When Google’s Matt Cutts released a video discussing the upcoming SEO menu earlier this month, he mentioned that Penguin 2.0 was getting closer. Now it’s here.
In the aforementioned video (below), Cutts said this about the update: “We’re relatively close to deploying the next generation of Penguin. Internally we call it ‘Penguin 2.0,’ and again, Penguin is a webspam change that’s dedicated to try to find black hat webspam, and try to target and address that. So this one is a little more comprehensive than Penguin 1.0, and we expect it to go a little bit deeper, and have a little bit more of an impact than the original version of Penguin.”
Late on Wednesday, Cutts revealed that the update rolled out. He took to his personal blog to say, “We started rolling out the next generation of the Penguin webspam algorithm this afternoon (May 22, 2013), and the rollout is now complete. About 2.3% of English-US queries are affected to the degree that a regular user might notice. The change has also finished rolling out for other languages world-wide. The scope of Penguin varies by language, e.g. languages with more webspam will see more impact.”
“This is the fourth Penguin-related launch Google has done, but because this is an updated algorithm (not just a data refresh), we’ve been referring to this change as Penguin 2.0 internally,” he noted. “For more information on what SEOs should expect in the coming months, see the video that we recently released.”
This does not mean that this is the last we’ll see of Penguin, by any means. When a reader of Cutts’ blog noted that he still sees a lot of spam in results, Cutts responded, “We can adjust the impact but we wanted to start at one level and then we can modify things appropriately.”
Side note: Cutts tweeted out a link to a “special spam report form” for spam that Penguin missed:
Here’s a special spam report form: bit.ly/penguinspamrep… Please tell us about the spammy sites that Penguin missed.
So, it sounds like they’ll still be working on Penguin-ifying results more beyond the update that has already rolled out. I presume this will come in the form of data refreshes, much like the last two version of Penguin we’ve seen.
Penguin is all about webspam, and Cutts discussed other webspam initiatives in that video. Specifically, he talked about denying value upstream for link spammers.This is not part of the Penguin update that just rolled out, so expect more there too.
“That comes later,” said Cutts.
Another reader suggested in the comments of Cutts’ blog post that people are finding it riskier to spend the time buildling authoritative sites that Google supposedly likes, because there’s still a chance that an algo update will (even if unintentionally) knock it down for one reason or another. He makes the case that it’s easier to build a bunch of “throwaway affiliate spam sites” that could easily be replaced if Google shuts them down.
Cutts’ response to that was, “We have some things coming later this summer that should help with the type of sites you mention, so I think you made the right choice to work on building authority.”
Cutts briefly discussed the new Penguin update in a conversation with Leo Laporte on Wednesday right before it was getting ready to roll out. In that, he said, “It is a leap. It’s a brand new generation of algorithms. The previous iteration of Penguin would essentially only look at the homepage of a site. The newer generation of Penguin goes much deeper. It has a really big impact in certain small areas.”
It will be interesting to see how long Google waits for a data refresh on Penguin again. Unlike Panda, which saw many refreshes, before ultimately transforming into a rolling update, Penguin, since originally launching in April, 2012, only saw two refreshes before this new update (May and October, 2012). If this one is even bigger, should we expect refreshes even less often? The less often they happen, the harder it is to recover, some webmasters have discovered. I’m guessing a lot of those impacted negatively by this new update will be looking at starting over with new sites.
It remains to be seen just how big the impact of this update really is on webmasters. If you’ve been affected (either positively or negatively) let us know in the comments.
Today’s Google Webmaster Help video gets a little philosophical. Matt Cutts takes on the question:
How can Google be confident with their SERPs, when relying on inherently subjective signals that influence which sites display (i.e. using human ‘quality raters’ to evaluate entire domains without the context of the search query itself)?
Cutts notes that the quality raters do in fact see the search itself, so they’re not seeing the results out of context.
On the philosophy that there are subjective signals, Cutts says, “I would agree with that. I think people who think that search engines are completely objective ignore the fact that every search engine has its own philosophy. Every search engine has its own set of algorithms, and those algorithms encode the ranking philosophy of that search engine, and some algorithms will veer more towards diversity. Some might show Wikipedia more. Every search engine is going to have different ideas about what the ideal set of search results is. And there is no scientifically provable best way to rank websites, so it’s always going to be a little bit subjective.”
“I think on the bright side, what we do is we try to listen to outside feedback,” he continues. “We have people like Amit Singhal who have been ranking and dealing with information retrieval for longer than a lot of SEOs have been alive (if you’re a young SEO, you know). He got his PhD in information retrieval, and a lot of us have been working on it for a long time, and so I think we have a relatively fine-tuned sense of when people will get angry, [or] of when they’ll be unhappy.”
“For example, with Panda, we were actually working on trying to spot low-quality content – the sort of thing that’s in between the quality team and the webspam team, and the sort of low quality that’s not quite spam, but almost spam,” he says. “We were working on that for months, and thinking about that for months before we started to see the larger public get a little bit angry about that. So I think we do have to say to ourselves, like any engineering organization, it’s possible for people to be wrong. It’s possible for us to show not enough domain diversity or too much domain diversity. That’s why it’s important that we listen to what people say from outside Google, and hear that feedback as well.”
On the Panda front, Cutts did reveal recently that the algorithm might be a little more forgiving, going forward, than it has been in the past. So there’s that.
