WebProNews

Tag: SEO

  • Matt Cutts Answers A Good Question About Paid Link Penalties

    The latest Webmaster Help video is once again about the topic of paid links, but this time it’s about the effects of a paid link penalty on an innocent site that happened to be linked to by a site that was caught selling links.

    Matt Cutts responds to the following submitted question:

    If some site that is linking to my site gets penalized for purchasing links, will my site get affected by that penalty?

    “Normally what happens is when we find a site that’s selling links, we say, ‘Okay, this is a link seller,’” says Cutts. “It’s PageRank goes down by thirty percent, forty percent, fifty percent as a visible indicator that we’ve lost trust in that domain, and it typically loses its ability to send PageRank going forward.”

    “So for example, suppose we have a selling site that is selling links to a buying site, and the selling site also happens to link to you,” he continues. “The sort of situation that might happen is we find out that that’s a link seller, and as a result, we just don’t trust the outgoing links from that site. So the most likely scenario is if there is a link-selling site, and they get caught for selling links, and they just happen to be linking to you, the value of that link that the site was providing, it just goes away. So it’s the sort of thing where maybe you were benefiting – getting a little bit of PageRank from that site. Now, since we don’t trust that site, you wouldn’t be getting that benefit.”

    “So typically, it’s not the sort of thing where you get affected by that penalty in the sense that you get demoted or anything harsh like that,” says Cutts. “It’s just you no longer get the benefit of the link from that site because we don’t trust it anymore.”

    Here’s another recent video in which Cutts talks about paid links.

  • Why Google Might Rank Sites With Bad Links Highly

    Today’s Webmaster Help video from Google doesn’t appear to be an April Fools’ joke. It’s just Matt Cutts responding to a question like normal. The question at hand is probably something a lot of people have wondered:

    I’ve seen multiple websites that appear in the #1 spot for various keywords, whose backlink profiles are pretty low quality (i.e. lower quality blog pages). Why wouldn’t Penguin have moved these sites further down in rankings?

    “There’s a lot of possible reasons,” says Cutts. “One is, Penguin is geared for certain types of spam, but it’s not geared for every type of spam. For example, it doesn’t help with hacked sites. So if a site is being propelled up the rankings on the basis of illegal hacking of sites, that’s not something that Penguin attempts to tackle. There are other other algorithms that try to tackle that.”

    “The simplest explanation might just be that we don’t want that to rank, but the algorithms haven’t gotten good enough yet. We need to make sure that things get better. If that’s the case, we’re happy to get spam reports or if you want to show up on a forum, or a webmaster forum, and say, ‘Hey, here’s a site that doesn’t look like it should be ranking,’ we’re happy to hear feedback like that.”

    He also notes that unless you’re the site owner, you may not be getting the complete list of links for that site.

    It seems fairly likely that much of the time it’s that explanation about the algorithms not being good enough. As Google has noted on plenty of occasions in the past, no algorithm is perfect, and Google tweaks them all the time.

  • Bing’s New SEO Tags Let You Tell Them Exactly Where You Should Rank (April Fools’)

    Attention SEOs: Bing is finally rewarding you for all your hard work. Starting today, new Bing SEO tags let you tell Bing exactly where your page should rank. Easy as that.

    The new SEO tags cut out the middleman and let you insert a couple of tags into your page code that direct Bing as to where to place you on results pages. There are two new tags, “set to position” and “must be before.”

    <link rel=”SEO” query=”weather” set_to_position=”2″ />

    <link rel=”SEO” must_be_before=”*.mycompetitor.com/*” />

    Now you can make sure that your page always ranks on spot ahead of your competitor’s page. It’s so easy!

    Along the way, some SEOs abused the systems to try to game the results. Back and forth for years, the engines and so-called “black hat” SEOs have waged a behind-the-scenes battle to position content on the Search Results pages. It’s pretty easy for the engine to win this battle in the long run, though, as we own the pages.

    As time has progressed, we’ve been able to tackle spamming issues at many levels. In most cases today, most websites follow the known best practices and simply do the right thing. They’re too busy running a business to try trickery to rank better, trusting we will sort the rankings properly. And now it’s time to reward that trust and your hard work.

    For a year, you’ll only be able to use one “must_be_before” tag, so choose wisely. Bing says that next April 1st, they’ll give you 50!

    “To ensure compliance with this request, should you insert more than one “must_be_before” tag this year, we’ll simply contact your host and arrange for the server hosting your site to be put into a low-earth orbit for the following 365 days.”

    Harsh.

    For more April Fools’ Day prank fun, check here.

  • Google Webmaster Academy Launches In 20 New Languages

    Last May, Google introduced Webmaster Academy, a program designed to help would be webmasters learn what they need to know about getting a site up and running with Google. This includes information about how Google Search works, how to create a site, and how to use Google’s diagnostic tools like Webmsater Tools.

    The program is divided up into short lessons, which let you track your progress (not entirely unlike Khan Academy).

    Webmaster Academy

    Until now, Webmaster Academy was only available in English. Today, Google announced that it is launching in 20 new languages.

    “The Webmaster Academy was built to guide webmasters in creating great sites that perform well in Google search results. It is an ideal guide for beginner webmasters but also a recommended read for experienced users who wish to learn more about advanced topics,” says Giacomo Gnecchi Ruscone from Google’s Search Quality team.

    Webmaster Academy is accessible from Webmaster Central. You can see the full language list at the bottom of this page.

  • Google’s Cutts Talks About Blocking JavaScript

    For the second day in a row, Matt Cutts answers a question from a fellow Googler in a Webmaster Help video. This one comes from Webmaster Trends analyst John Mueller:

    “Googlebot keeps crawling my JavaScript and thinking that text in my scripts refers to URLs. Can I just disallow crawling of my JavaScript files to fix that.”

    Long story short, he wouldn’t advise it. If there’s one individual JavaScript file that’s the source of the problem, you could disallow that, he says.

    Also, don’t block CSS.

    He says, “It turns out, as we’re executing JavaScript, we do look at the attributes, so you can actually use JavaScript, and put like a nofollow attribute on individual URLs, and so it is the sort of thing where you can do link level granularity there. And you can block, for example, and individual JavaScript file, but in general, I would not recommend blocking all of your JavaScript files.”

    Cutts has talked about blocking Google from crawling JavaScript, and how it can hurt your rankings, in the past. Watch that video here.

  • Google Announces Opt-Out Tool To Keep Content Out Of Its Specialized Search Engines

    Google has launched a new way for sites to opt out of having their content show up in Google Shopping, Advisor, Flights, Hotels, and Google+ Local search.

    Matt Cutts announced the feature in a very brief post on the Google Webmaster Central blog, saying, “Webmasters can now choose this option through our Webmaster Tools, and crawled content currently being displayed on Shopping, Advisor, Flights, Hotels, or Google+ Local search pages will be removed within 30 days.”

    This is obviously not a feature that Google would want a ton of people to use, because the less content that appears in these services, the less useful they are. Perhaps that’s why Cutts hasn’t tweeted about the tool (maybe not, but perhaps). At least with the short announcement, they have something they can point to.

    The feature is a direct response to an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission. When Google settled with the FTC, one of the voluntary concessions Google made was a feature that would let sites opt out of Google’s specialized search engines.

    As Danny Sullivan notes, the feature doesn’t let you choose which search engines you wish to opt out of. If you use the feature, you’re opting out of all of those mentioned.

    On a help page, Google says, “This opt-out option currently applies only to services hosted on google.com and won’t apply to other Google domains.”

  • Getting Google Rankings Back After Site Downtime

    Getting Google Rankings Back After Site Downtime

    The latest Google Webmaster Help video deals with getting your site’s rankings back after experiencing some downtime.

    Google’s Matt Cutts will often provides answers to his own questions in these videos. This time the question comes from Googler Pierre Far, a Webmaster Trends analyst at Google UK. The question is:

    My website was down for a couple of days and now has lost all of its Google rankings. What can I do to get them back?

    Basically, Cutts’ answer is just to put the site back up, make sure it’s reliable, and make sure the pages that were there before are still there.

    “There’s a tension at Google where if a page goes away (maybe there’s a 404), we don’t know if it’s really gone away or whether that page will be back,” he says. “Sometimes there’s a server time out, you know, the server is kind of slow. And so, on one hand, you don’t want to keep showing a page that would be a bad user experience, like it’s really gone away. On the other hand, it’s very common for websites to go down for an hour, two hours, a day, two days…and so you also want to give the benefit of the doubt, so you can revisit those pages and see whether they’ve gone up.”

    “So we do have different varying time periods where we basically allow, if a domain looks like it’s gone away, but it comes back – you know, it’s back online, then we just sort of say, ‘Okay, it was a transient error,’ so the short and simple advice is just make sure you put the website back up the way it was, and hopefully things should recover relatively quickly,” says Cutts.

    This may not be quite the answer you were looking for, but that’s the one Google is giving. It would certainly be interesting to know more about these “varying periods of time”.

  • You Can Get Keyword Data From Facebook Graph Search in Google Analytics

    Will Facebook’s Graph Search become a major piece of successful online marketing strategies? It’s still in its infancy, and does only a small fraction of what it promises to do at this point, but just given the fact that it’s the search feature of Facebook (over a billion users), it seems like something that should play a significant part.

    Not only does Graph Search not currently have all the functionality that Facebook has planned for it, but it’s also still in the process of slowly rolling out. And I do mean slowly. Any notions you have about Graph Search thus far are simply incomplete. What’s available now is nothing compared to what will be available.

    Even still, some have big hope for Facebook’s revamped search and its potential effects on small businesses. Consider this infographic from Advantage Capital Funds:

    Infographic: Can Facebook Graph Make You Money?

    Infographic by Advantage Capital Funds

    That’s all fine and good, but online marketers need data. When it comes to search marketing, keyword data is obviously of the utmost importance (though it’s getting harder to come by thanks to the whole “not provided” ordeal), but this isn’t something that’s readily available from Facebook. You can’t just look at your search data in Google Analytics and see the Graph Search referrals, because Graph Search is part of Facebook, which Google considers social rather than search, even though Graph Search sends users to Bing results in cases where Facebook’s own data doesn’t match the query.

    It’s entirely possible that the situation will get better for webmasters and marketers in the future, but for now, there is a workaround, which Glenn Gabe discusses in a blog post (via Search Engine Land).

    Facebook does have keyword data available via referral strings. As Gabe noticed, the keyword is being passed along int he referrer. He shows this example:

    Graph Search keyword

    “As you can guess, I jumped into Google Analytics to see how this was being picked up,” Gabe writes. “Since Facebook isn’t an official search engine in GA, it was still showing up as a referring site (without the keyword showing up). But, since the q= querystring parameter was being passed in the referrer, I knew I could surface those keywords via advanced filters. So, I quickly set up a new profile and added a filter that would capture graph searches from Facebook. And it works.”

    Gabe goes on to provide step-by-step instructions for doing this, so check out the post if this is something you want to do.

    Tracking this data is bound to make Graph Search a lot more helpful to your business. And wait until the product really gets into full swing.

  • Google: We Still Need Text To Index Your Content

    Google’s latest Webmaster Help video discusses Google’s need for text in indexing content. Matt Cutts responds to a question about how important text is in getting Google to understand their site. The user has a site that is mostly made up of images, and says that users like it better, bounce rate has declined, and conversions are up.

    “Google does still want text,” he says. “So there’s a couple options. One is: if you have an image that you’ve made of some text that’s really beautiful, you can include some textual content there. You can sort of say, ‘alt,’ you know, or the title – that sort of thing. So you can say, for an image, here’s some text to go along with that, and that can help.”

    He goes on to say that one reason a site might be having more user interaction, time on site, conversions, etc., is because it’s prettier. “And we see that,” he says. “Better design can help people enjoy and use your site more.”

    He also suggests considering Google Web Fonts.

  • Digg This: Digg Gets De-Indexed From Google [Updated]

    Apparently Google doesn’t think Digg is worth much more than a few kilos of panda poop tea these days. Digg.com is currently MIA in Google’s index.

    While we’ve yet to hear comment on the matter from either Google or Digg, it looks like Digg has been penalized for something or other. Either that or Google made a huge mistake.

    Matt Sawyer first noticed the lack of Digg results, which State of Search picked up. You can see for yourself by searching: site:digg.com on Google and getting no results.

    If you just search for “digg,” digg.com is nowhere to be found. Instead, you’ll be treated to the Digg WIkipedia entry, the Digg Twitter account, and various other pieces of content about Digg.

    Some are already wondering if Digg was busted for paid links or other some other kind of link scheme kind of thing. I’m sure we’ll find out soon enough, and we’ll update as we learn more about what’s really going on.

    Digg, as you may know, recently said that it’s working on an alternative to Google Reader.

    Update: TechCrunch managed to get a statement from Google, saying, “We’re sorry about the inconvenience this morning to people trying to search for Digg. In the process of removing a spammy link on Digg.com, we inadvertently applied the webspam action to the whole site. We’re correcting this, and the fix should be deployed shortly.”

    So yeah, Google made a huge mistake.

  • Google: If We Mistakenly Penalize You For Paid Links, There Would Be A ‘Ton Of Collateral Damage’

    There has been a lot of talk about Google and paid links in the news lately, so it’s only fitting that they’re the topic of the latest Webmaster Help video from the company. In this one, Matt Cutts responds to this question:

    On our travel site, we recommend and link out to hotels and B&B’s in our niche. Our readers find it useful. They’re not paid links, so we don’t add the nofollow attribute. What stops Google from suspecting these are paid links and penalizing us?

    “The short answer is: if you’re linking to high quality sites, and you editorially think that they’re good sites, that’s how most of the web works,” says Cutts. “We get into this tiny little area of search and SEO, and we’re convinced all links are nofollowed, and if a link looks good, it must be paid or something like that, and the fact is that for the most part, whenever you’re looking at links, people are linking to stuff that they like. They’re linking to stuff that they enjoy.”

    “So, if we mistakenly thought that those were paid links, and as a result, penalized you, there would be a ton of collateral damage,” he says. “There would be a ton of algorithmic damage to our search rankings. So it’s in our enlightened, best self interest, as well as in the interest of our users to make sure that we don’t accidentally classify links as paid and penalize the site. And normally, even if we would classify links as paid, we might not trust the links from your site, but we wouldn’t have things where your site would necessarily stop ranking as well. It can happen if somebody is selling a lot of links, they’ve been selling them for a long time, and those sorts of things, so we do take strong action in some situations, but a lot of the times if we think that a link might be sold or if we have very good reason to suspect, we might just not trust that site’s links nearly as much or maybe zero.”

    Concluding the video, Cutts reiterates that it’s in the company’s best interest to be precise when it comes to getting paid links right.

  • Are You More Or Less Worried About Google’s Panda Update Now?

    Are You More Or Less Worried About Google’s Panda Update Now?

    As previously reported, Google’s Matt Cutts revealed at SMX this week that Google would be pushing a refresh to its famous (or perhaps infamous) Panda update on either Friday or Monday. As of Friday, it appears that the refresh has arrived.

    Have you felt the effects of the latest Panda update? Noticed any improvements in Google’s search results? Let us know in the comments.

    Barry Schwartz is pointing to some forum chatter about webmasters already seeing the effects of the refresh, indicating that it has likely begun to roll out. As others have pointed out, it’s not uncommon for Google to do this on a Friday. Schwartz says signs point to the roll out starting on Thursday afternoon and into Friday.

    This isn’t just your typical run of the mill Panda refresh, however. This could very well be the last time Google manually pushes one, as Panda is becoming more of a “rolling” update. Schwartz quotes Cutts from SMX:

    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.

    As of the time of this writing, Google has not made a formal announcement about this latest Panda refreshed, and it’s entirely possible that they won’t. Given the nature of Pand deployment going forward, it’s unlikely that Google will do so from here on out. We have to just accept Panda as an ongoing thing. No more anticipation of the next big Pand update. You can just count on it happening on a regular, ongoing basis. Actually, Google has come out and said that it’s unlikely to confirm Panda updates from now on.

    It remains to be seen just what kind of an impact this will truly have on sites, but it’s not likely to make things much easier.

    Don’t worry though, you can still anticipate the next big Penguin update, which Cutts also discussed at SMX. He said they’re working on the “next generation of Penguin,” which he is implying is going to be a big one. Google is also talking about cracking down on “bad online merchants”. It will be interesting to see how this affects ecommerce sites, and what Google really considers “bad”.

    “We have a potential launch later this year, maybe a little bit sooner, looking at the quality of merchants and whether we can do a better job on that, because we don’t want low quality experience merchants to be ranking in the search results,” Cutts said about that.

    We have been waiting for the next Panda/Penguin. Maybe that’s the one we’re looking at. You have to wonder how many sites it will impact. I can easily envision a firestorm of merchant freak-out.

    Cutts also reportedly said Google will be targeting more link networks this year.

    We’re also still waiting on Google to put out what used to be its monthly lists of algorithm changes (or “search quality highlights” if you will) for the past several months, dating back to October. This is the longest Google has gone without releasing the lists since they started doing it, which they were doing in the name of “transparency”.

    Panda recently turned two years old, and opinions of Google’s search results since its implementation vary. With the latest refresh, Google has gone through 25 iterations of Panda.

    Now that Google has a new approach to how it deploys Panda, are you more or less worried about its impact? Let us know in the comments.

    Image: Tekken 5 (via YouTube)

  • Matt Cutts On Google’s Handling Of Single-Page Sites

    Google has released its latest Webmaster Help video. This time, Matt Cutts discusses single-page sites, and how Google handles them. Specifically, he responds to the following user-submitted question:

    What does Google think of single-page websites? They are becoming more complex and there are some great websites using only a single page (+lots of CSS and JavaScript) bringing the same user experience as a regular website with many subpages.

    “Google has gotten better at handling javascript, and a lot of the time, if you’re doing some strange or unusual javascript interaction, or pinning some part of the page, or something like that, or having things fold in or fold out, we’re pretty good at being able to process that,” says Cutts. “In general, I would run a test first. I wouldn’t bet your SEO legacy on this one single page working well if the javascript or CSS is really obscure or maybe you’ve forgotten and blocked that out in robots.txt. But if you run the test, and you’re pretty happy with it, I don’t necessarily see a problem with that.”

    “It’s a different convention,” he continues. “Sometimes it works. Maybe you get better conversions, maybe you don’t. It’s going to depend on what your particular area is, what the topic is, what kind of layout you come out with…but if it works for you, and for users to have that all on one page, for the most part, it should work for Google as well.”

    On a semi-related topic, here’s what Cutts had to say about a year ago about blocking Google from javascript and CSS. Here, he talks about Google getting better at handling javascript.

  • Even The BBC Can Get Unnatural Link Warnings From Google

    This seems to be proof that Google does not favor big brands of major media outlets when it comes to obeying the quality guidelines. Even the BBC has been getting unnatural link warnings from Google.

    A representative from the organization posted in a Google Webmaster Help forum (as noticed by Search Engine Roundtable):

    My URL is: www.bbc.co.uk

    I am a representative of the BBC site and on Saturday we got a ‘notice of detected unnatural links’.

    Given the BBC site is so huge, with so many independently run sub sections, with literally thousands or agents and authors, can you give us a little clue as to where we might look for these ‘unnatural links’.

    Later in the thread, he adds:

    Yeah the problem is that the site is so big, and has so many agents, that something stupid might have been done, but without being given a clue to what or where, it is kind of hard to track the culprits down and ‘advise them to be a better web citizen’. I have certainly been involved previously is stopping people before they do something ‘unwise’ in relation to the site.

    Of course, I’m not saying someone connected with the site has done something naughty, just that it is a possibility.

    He says he sent a reconsideration request, and explained the situation to Google.

    At SMX West, earlier this week, Google’s Matt Cutts made a point of saying that big brands are penalized often. Of course, we recently saw UK flower site Interflora get penalized, though that didn’t last long.

  • Google Offers ‘First Steps’ Cheat Sheet for Beginning Webmasters

    Google has just released a new single-page guide for beginning webmasters that features information on looking good in Google search results through page titles, proper domain names and sub-pages, and meta descriptions. It also offers a brief primer on images and links to additional info and support.

    The cheat sheet is a single page, “short how-to list with basic tips on search engine-friendly design, that can help Google and others better understand the content and increase your site’s visibility.”

    And it’s available in 13 languages.

    “We hope this content will help those who are just about to start their webmaster adventure or have so far not paid too much attention to search engine-friendly design,” says Google.

    You can grab the pdf today.

  • Google Launched 665 Search ‘Improvements’ In 2012

    Google says on its new “How Search Works” site that it launched 665 “improvements to search” in 2012.

    In a graphic looking at data from 2012, Google explains that it had 118,812 “precision evaluations,” which are described as “The first phase is to get feedback from evaluators, people who evaluate search quality based on our guidelines. We show evaluators search results and ask them to rate the usefulness of the results for a given search.”

    From there, it had 10,391 side-by-side experiments.

    “In a side-by-side experiment, we show evaluators two different sets of search results: one from the old algorithm and one from the new, and we ask them for details about which results they prefer,” Google explains.

    You can see Google’s Search Quality Raters Guidelines (at least a “cliffs notes version“) here (pdf).

    Google ran 7,018 live traffic experiments in 2012. “If the evaluators’ feedback looks good, we move forward with a ‘live traffic experiment,’” Google explains. “In these experiments, we change search for a small percentage of real Google users and see how it changes the way they interact with the results. We carefully analyze the results to understand whether the change is an improvement to the search results. For example, do searchers click the new first result more often? If so, that’s generally a good sign.”

    From there, came the 665 actual launches.

    “Finally, our most experienced search engineers carefully review the data from all the different experiments and decide if the change is approved to launch,” says Google. “It sounds like a lot, but the process is well refined, so an engineer can go from idea to live on Google for a percentage of users in 24 hours. Based on all of this experimentation, evaluation and analysis, we launched 665 improvements to search in 2012.”

    Typically, Google has been providing monthly lists of “search quality highlights” showing some of the tweaks they’ve made, but they haven’t done it in months. Despite today’s effort in transparency, it remains to be seen whether we’ll see exactly what Google has been up to since October.

  • Have Google’s Results Improved After Two Years Of Panda?

    Have Google’s Results Improved After Two Years Of Panda?

    Google Panda Update It’s been two years since Google unleashed the Panda update. How the time flies.

    Do you think Google’s search results have improved significantly in that time? Let us know in the comments.

    As you probably know, the update was designed to promote higher quality content from sites in Google’s search results. Shortly after launching Panda, Google laid out some unofficial guidelines for what it means by “quality”. Victims of the update strived to recover from the huge drop in search visibility suffered as a result of it, by following these guidelines as best as possible. Few have been successful.

    Let’s revisit these guidelines, and see if Google is living up to its part of the bargain.

    Would you trust the information presented in this article?

    How often do you find search results with information that appears untrustworthy? This was a big issue when Panda was launched. So called “content farms” were cluttering up the results, and often getting top rankings with articles written by people with no real trustworthy credentials. Google continues to try and tackle this issue with authorship, but that’s completely separate from Panda. How do you think it’s done on the Panda front?

    Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?

    In my opinion, this is kind of a trick question. This gives the impression that a result needs to be a long, in-depth piece on any given subject, yet when it comes down to it, a more “shallow” post (or even a tweet) from the right “expert” can carry a lot more weight in credibility. You can just browse Techmeme on any given day and get that impression (though that site certainly has its share of other issues).

    Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?

    Is Google doing well at delivering trustworthy ecommerce results? Is it burying legitimate ecommerce sites because it doesn’t think they look trustworthy enough?

    Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?

    Let’s be honest, these things happen to even the most highly-read publications on the web from time to time. The fast-paced culture of web content often breeds a “get it out, and update later” nature, and I’m not sure Panda has done anything to change that.

    Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?

    As Rafat Ali, the founder of media industry follower PaidContent recently said:

    That said, isn’t it Google’s job to provide content that’s useful to its own users (searchers) as opposed to what’s useful to any given site’s audience? Sites typically want to expand their audiences anyway.

    Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?

    It’s a good question, but how often is this kind of content truly rewarded by the Panda update?

    Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?

    Ditto from last question.

    How much quality control is done on content?

    Ditto from question about spelling, stylistic, or factual errors.

    Does the article describe both sides of a story?

    I’m curious to know how Google might algorithmically approach this one. I’m also curious to know how much Google is really holding content accountable to this. What do you think?

    Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?

    Nothing wrong with showing users content from recognized authorities, but this also begs the question: How does one gain recognition without visibility?

    Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care?

    If a piece of content is relevant for a query, isn’t that more important to the user experience than what content on some other page looks like? Sure, it’s good practice to maintain quality control, but should good, relevant content suffer because of lesser content on other parts of a site?

    Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?

    Once again, this goes along with the other questions about quality control and errors.

    For a health related query, would you trust information from this site?

    I think we pretty much covered this with the “trust” question, though for medical queries, the stakes can go up. In fact, this was one of the big concerns before Panda launched. Has Google gotten better at providing trustworthy medical-related results? It has launched its own Knowledge Graph results for some of this stuff. But again, that’s not really Panda-related.

    Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name?

    Sites who are more authoritative on certain subjects often cover a much broader range of topics. This should really be more about the author of the article (along with other factors), should it not? Again, Google is really into this authorship thing, and probably with good reason, but I’m not sure Panda has all the answers on this one.

    Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?

    Frankly, this is not always needed in every article. That’s why the web is based around links. It’s probably also why Google loves Wikipedia so much.

    Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?

    Can this be determined algorithmically?

    Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?

    Wouldn’t it be helpful if Google tapped into Facebook for the social relevance of content?

    Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?

    I think this is covered by the page layout update.

    Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?.

    Isn’t print dying?

    Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?

    Does the right answer always have to be long?

    Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?

    Didn’t we already cover this?

    Would users complain when they see pages from this site?

    Not the most specific of guidelines.

    Some companies had to rethink their entire business models because of Panda. Smart content providers found ways to diversify their web traffic better as to not have to rely as much on Google. Demand Media’s site eHow has been the prime example of this. While it did go through a massive quality clean-up initiative to get back in Google’s good graces, it has also largely expanded its social media strategies, and increased partnerships, and the site is in as good of shape as ever, based on recent earnings calls from the company (which is now separating its content business from its registrar business).

    Demand Media ranked as a top 20 U.S. web property throughout last year, and was ranked at number 13 in January, according to comScore. The company reached over 125 million unique visitors worldwide in January, and eHow itself was ranked number 12 in the U.S. with 62 million unique visitors in January.

    Not everyone has been as successful as Demand Media. Matt McGee at Search Engine Land has put together some articles (apparently the first two in an ongoing series) looking at Panda victims two years later. He finds, citing Searchmetrics data (which has been questionable at times in the past, for the record), that none of 22 victims from the original Panda update, as listed by Searchmetrics, has returned to pre-Panda visibility, and that only two have improved compared to their post-Panda visibility.

    MotorTrend.com, which was hit by the original update for some reason, has managed to bounce back, and McGee calls it the “true Panda recovery” in terms of search visibility. Today, he says (again, citing Searchmetrics data), it appears to have better visibility than it had pre-Panda.

    For sites like EzineArticles, HubPages, and the like, no such luck. He says that even eHow’s visibility is down 63% from pre-Panda levels.

    But again, the Demand Media strategy is not as reliant on Google as it was pre-Panda. And that’s probably the best thing to take away from the whole thing. ChaCha, another Panda victim, has adopted a similar approach, as CEO Scott Jones recently described to us.

    Last year was all about Penguin, though Google continued to push Panda refreshes on a regular basis. Panda was kind of in the background as the Internet was already accustomed to it. Still, it’s Panda that tends to rear its head more often than Penguin.

    Google has been pushing out a major update early in each of the past couple years. We’re still wondering if they have a 2013 counterpart to Panda and Penguin in store. We’re also still waiting for Google to release months worth of its “search quality highlights”.

    Google announced the launch of its latest known Panda refresh in late January. The company said it affected 1.2% of English queries.

    Have Google’s results gotten better since it first launched Panda? Has quality gone up? Let us know what you think.

    Photo: Ken Bohn, San Diego Zoo (via National Geographic)

  • Matt Cutts Talks Location And ccTLDs

    In Google’s latest Webmaster Help video, Matt Cutts discusses location and ccTLDs. Specifically, he responds to the following user-submitted question:

    We have a vanity domain (http://ran.ge) that unfortunately isn’t one of the generic TLDs, which means we can’t set our geographic target in Webmaster Tools. Is there any way to still target our proper location?

    “We’ve seen this trend – as the domain name space gets a little more exhausted in .com, people get creative, and so Matt Mullenweg at WordPress grabbed ma.tt, for example, which is a really creative URL, but something that people don’t think about is: what is .tt? Or what is .ge?” says Cutts. “It’s Georgia, you know, there’s a lot of startups that have been using .io, which is the TLD for the Indian Ocean, I believe. So you have to think hard about is it the case that this is going to be known as an international area? If your’e just using .es because you can find some cool word that ends in .es, most people using that domain are targeting Spain. So that is our assumption – that you’re targeting Spain.”

    He says that some people want .li to be associated with Long Island, but it’s really associated with Lichtenstein, and that’s how Google views it.

    “In some sense, it comes down to a little bit of a call about when a domain becomes truly generic. When it becomes appropriate for the entire world. So .co, which used to be, I think, Columbia, might be more generic now, where everybody’s using it as if it is another .com, but some domains, I would put some thought into. Just because it’s a cool URL, a lot of the times we’re going to be looking at it and thinking, ‘Hmm, this is actually related more to Lichtenstein that it is to Long Island, and so even though people want to do a Long Island business, we’re more likely to think that it’s in Lichtenstein.”

    He goes on to suggest that you post on Webmaster forums and “rally your case,” and do a blog post that says, “.iO is mostly startups, and this should not be related to this country…” Still, he says, Google has to look at the data and look at the domains that are in use, and make a judgment call.

  • Google Emphasizes Brands More In Search Results

    Google appears to be taking another step toward emphasizing brands in search results. As pointed out by Gordon Campbell a few days ago, and then again today by Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable, Google is placing brand names at the beginning of titles for links in search results.

    One example both point to is for York Fitness.

    York Fitness

    As Campbell points out, “Google has presented us with the page title ‘York Fitness: Gym Equipment & Machines | Weights | Boxing’ but the page title that York Fitness has set is ‘Gym Equipment & Machines | Weights | Boxing Equipment | York Fitness’ and truth be told, Google’s version of the page title looks far better.”

    They appear to be doing the same thing on a variety of pages.

    While it didn’t speak about the brand-specific method of retitling pages, Google has talked about its process for retitling pages in the past.

    Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Pierre Far wrote on the Google Webmaster Central Blog over a year ago, “Page titles are an important part of our search results: they’re the first line of each result and they’re the actual links our searchers click to reach websites. Our advice to webmasters has always been to write unique, descriptive page titles (and meta descriptions for the snippets) to describe to searchers what the page is about.”

    “We use many signals to decide which title to show to users, primarily the <title> tag if the webmaster specified one,” he continued. “But for some pages, a single title might not be the best one to show for all queries, and so we have algorithms that generate alternative titles to make it easier for our users to recognize relevant pages. Our testing has shown that these alternative titles are generally more relevant to the query and can substantially improve the clickthrough rate to the result, helping both our searchers and webmasters. About half of the time, this is the reason we show an alternative title.”

    “Other times, alternative titles are displayed for pages that have no title or a non-descriptive title specified by the webmaster in the HTML,” he said. “For example, a title using simply the word “Home” is not really indicative of what the page is about. Another common issue we see is when a webmaster uses the same title on almost all of a website’s pages, sometimes exactly duplicating it and sometimes using only minor variations. Lastly, we also try to replace unnecessarily long or hard-to-read titles with more concise and descriptive alternatives.”

    As far as brands go, brands are associated with trust and identity. We all know how important Google considers identity these days. A brand is the identity of a company or a product. Google seems to be be making sure content is clearly associated with the brand that puts it out.

  • Wondering What Percentage Of PageRank Disappears Through 301 Redirects?

    Google’s Matt Cutts discusses loss of PageRank from 301 redirects in the latest Webmaster Help video. Specifically, he answers the following user-submitted question:

    Roughly what percentage of PageRank is lost through a 301 redirect?

    After providing some history about the context of this question, Cutts says, “I sent an email to the team who is in charge of this, and of course the implementation of this can very over time, but this has been roughly the same for quite a while. The amount of PageRank that dissipates through a 301 is currently identical to the amount of PageRank that dissipates through a link. So they are utterly the same in terms of the amount of PageRank that dissipates going through a 301 versus through a link. So that doesn’t mean use a 301. It doesn’t mean use a link. It means use whatever is best for your purposes because you don’t get to hoard or conserve any more PageRank if you use a 301, and likewise it doesn’t hurt you if you use a 301.”

    He is careful to point out that this could change in the future.

    “That’s the current implementation,” he says. “We don’t promise it will be that way for all time and eternity, but I don’t see any reason why in particular it would change.”

  • Are These Google’s Ranking Signals For Google News?

    Computerworld has a new report out about an old patent of Google’s that is drawing some attention. It looks at ways Google might be ranking content in Google News, which is not only helpful for all publications trying to gain eyeballs from the aggregator, but interesting in light of how Google is dealing with unhappy publishers around the world.

    Does Google News do a good job of ranking content as it should be ranked? Does it favor certain publications too much? Tell us what you think.

    Computerworld reports that the application was filed a year ago, and published in July, but patent analyst Bill Slawki points out that the updated version of the patent from 2003 gets rid of some of the old media ideals.

    Note: We’ve updated as Slawski has pointed this out.

    The patent describes a number of metrics, listed as: the number of articles produced by the news source during a given time period, an average length of an article from the news source, the importance of coverage from the news source, a breaking news score, usage pattern, human opinion, circulation statistics, the size of the staff associated with the news source, the number of news bureaus associated with the news source, the number of original named entities the source news produces within a cluster of articles, the breath of coverage, international diversity, writing style, and the like.

    Slawki notes:

    In February of 2012, a new version of the Google patent was published as a pending application. (A second version was granted in 2012). The third version has the same name as the first version, and it has substantially the same description section as the first version. What’s different is the “claims” section. The claims section of the new version of the patent starts off with:

    1-31. (canceled)

    Gone are things like the “circulation statistics of the news source,” the “number of bureaus associated with the news source,” and other things associated with the kind of journalism that’s done in print.

    Either way, the signals listed are worth taking a look at.

    Now, it’s important to note that just because these are listed as such in the patent, it does not mean that this is the exact recipe to Google’s secret News sauce (which is separate from Google web search). Still, it does tell you some of the stuff Google might be thinking about when it comes to news stories. And of course, ranking in Google News can also put you in regular Google web results for hot news items, via Universal Search.

    It’s hard to say how much weight any one signal would be given, and that would likely fluctuate, anyway, based on the strength of the remaining signals, and an on article-by-article basis.

    The article length metric is painted as a valid one in the Computerworld article, but I wonder how much weight that really should be given. Certainly it depends on the content of any particular article. Additional length does not always make a story better. Sometimes it’s simply added fluff. More text from one source may not be as relevant as less text from the right source.

    Here’s what the patent says about that particular metric (labeled as the “second metric”):

    The average length may be measured, for example, in words or sentences. In one implementation consistent with the principles of the invention, the second metric may be determined by determining the average length of non-duplicate articles produced by the news source. For example, it may be determined that the average length of an article from CNN is 300 words, while the average article length from Amateur News Network is 150 words. Therefore, the value of the second metric for CNN may be 300 and for Amateur News Network may be 150.

    So, based on that description, it would seem that adding additional text to articles regularly, even when it is not needed, would help one better compete with CNN for rankings. Of course, even assuming Google’s secret sauce is comprised of these metrics alone (and remember, “and the like” is listed with the metrics, leading one to believe there are more things Google is looking at), there’s always the chance other signals will be used more strongly in some cases.

    Google does like stories to have substance though. If nothing else, the Panda update taught the web as much. Still, as I discussed with ChaCha CEO (and Panda victim) Scott Jones recently, sometimes a quick answer is really better for the user. It really just depends on the case.

    I wonder how valid the “number of articles produced by the news source during a given time period” metric is too. If given too much weight, one could see this signal easily burying an original source, which could come from anywhere. It wouldn’t serve the niche blog (which might have a great deal more authority on a subject than a big news outlet like CNN) very well when it covers something first (because it is focused on said niche), if the story is later picked up by said big news outlet.

    As Slawki points out, he pretty much made this case about the patent years ago.

    This could, however, be offset by the “importance of coverage from the news source” metric, which appears to basically be how many articles a publication produces on a particular subject. For example, a publication writing 500 articles on the crash of the Columbia Shuttle (example given in patent) should rank better for this particular metric than a publication who only put out 10 articles about it. Depending on the story, this could actually benefit the industry-focused niche blog. Again, it comes down to how Google is weighing these signals against one another.

    Google’s Matt Cutts recently put out a video discussing news stories – specifically whether it”s better to use one article or multiple articles for developing stories. I’m not sure you could call his take on the subject the definitive answer to such a question, but he seems to prefer the one-page route. Interestingly, this seems almost contrary to the signal described above. Of course, one could see how such a metric could be ripe for abuse, but that all depends on how Google is able to fight this kind of spam. I’d still recommend only writing relevant articles, and not just blasting out a bunch of useless stories about a subject.

    You can see further description of each of the metrics by reading the patent here. Scroll down to the “Exemplary Processing” section.

    Google recently launched a new News Keywords meta tag to give it an additional signal for ranking news content. This simply allows publications to include keywords they want their stories to be associated with, making the importance of having such keywords in a title a little less important. At least that’s how Google portrayed the addition.

    Do you think Google is currently doing a good job of getting the right stories in front of users? Do you often see examples of where Google is getting it wrong? Let us know in the comments.