Google’s Matt Cutts tweeted that Google has a form webmasters can fill out if they think they’ve been wrongly hit by Google’s Penguin update (also known as the Webspam Update).
Keep in mind when doing your reporting on either side of the equation, that the Penguin update is specifically aimed at sites that are violating Google’s quality guidelines. Here, you can read about what those are exactly.
Get ready for a barrage of Penguin articles to complement the Panda articles, just as the Penguin update complements the Panda update in bringing quality to Google’s search results (or at least trying to). Yes, the Webspam Update has now been named the Penguin Update, reportedly.
According to Danny Sullivan, whose word is pretty credible within the search industry, Google has officially named the Webspam Update the Penguin update. Sullivan had previously reported that Google’s Matt Cutts specifically called it the Webspam algorithm update, but has now altered his article, saying Google is officially calling it the Penguin update.
Matt Cutts tweeted this Instagram photo (why no Google+?) which would seem to confirm the name:
At least it will be easier to find stock images of penguins (as opposed to webspam) for future articles. And it’s better than the “viagra update” (arguably).
More coverage on the algorithm (and not the silly name) here:
Google’s Matt Cutts has been talking about leveling the playing field for sites that don’t participate in “over-optimization”. Last month at SXSW, Cutts made something of a pre-announcement about such changes, and it looks like a major part of these efforts is now launching.
According to Danny Sullivan, who spoke directly with Cutts, this is indeed the change Cutts was referring to at SXSW, but that Cutts admits “over-optimization” wasn’t he best way of putting it, because it’s really about webspam, and not white hat SEO techniques.
Cutts himself announced a new algorithm change targeted at webpspam, which he describes as black hat techniques. “We see all sorts of webspam techniques every day, from keyword stuffing to link schemes that attempt to propel sites higher in rankings,” he says.
Link schemes are actually something webmasters have been getting messages from Google about already. The company recently de-indexed paid blog/link networks, and notified webmasters about such links.
“The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines,” says Cutts. “We’ve always targeted webspam in our rankings, and this algorithm represents another improvement in our efforts to reduce webspam and promote high quality content. While we can’t divulge specific signals because we don’t want to give people a way to game our search results and worsen the experience for users, our advice for webmasters is to focus on creating high quality sites that create a good user experience and employ white hat SEO methods instead of engaging in aggressive webspam tactics.”
Google has kind of sent webmasters mixed signals about search engine optimization. They recently shared some SEO DOs and DON’Ts, specifically talking about some white hat things webmasters can do to help Google rank their content better. And Cutts’ point about not divulging specific signals so people can’t game search results is one the company has stood by for ages. But at the same time, Google does divulge algorithm changes it makes via monthly lists, which seem to dare webmasters to play to certain signals. That’s not to say they’re encouraging the kind of black hat stuff Cutts is talking about here, but doesn’t it kind of say, “Hey, these are some things we’re focusing on; perhaps you should be thinking about these things with your SEO strategy?” Isn’t that encouraging “gaming” to some extent, rather than just telling webmasters not to worry about it?
Of course Google always says not to focus on any one signal, and just focus on making good, quality content. In fact, this new change (as in line with Cutts’ comments at SXSW) indicates that sites shouldn’t have to worry about SEO at all.
“We want people doing white hat search engine optimization (or even no search engine optimization at all) to be free to focus on creating amazing, compelling web sites,” Cutts says. Emphasis added.
As far as black hat SEO, it’s not as if this is some big change out of the blue. Algorithmically, it’s a change, but Google has always targeted this stuff. There’s a reason Cutts has been the head of webspam. Google has never been shy about penalizing sites violating its quality guidelines. Google even penalized its own Chrome site when some paid linking by the hands of a marketing agency was unearthed.
If you’re engaging in SEO, and Google gets you on black hat tactics, you probably knew what you were doing. You probably knew it was in violation of Google’s guidelines. Of course, that’s assuming Google’s algorithm change does not make any errors. And what are the chances of that happening? Google will be the first to admit that “no algorithm is perfect.” As we saw with the Panda update, there were some sites hit hard, that possibly shouldn’t have been.
So is that happening this time? It’s still early. As far as I can tell, the change hasn’t even finished rolling out. But there are plenty of people already commenting about it.
Others are critical of Google’s search quality in general:
From the comments on Cutts’ announcement:
So far today’s search results are worse than they’ve been for the past month. On one search for a keyword phrase there’s a completely unrelated Wikipedia page, a random Twitter account for some company, and a page from an independent search engine from 1997 showing in the top 10 results. Yeah, that’s the kind of quality user experience we want to see. Way to knock it out of the park.
well now more rubbish results appearing in search than before. more exact domain name match results and unrelated websites . Google failed once again.
so many .info, .co unrelated domains ranked for respected queries. are you sure no mistake in this update?
Surely, whatever these updates are doing, they are not right. Here’s just one example. A search for “ereader comparison chart” brings up “ereadercomparisonchart dot com” on 2nd page of results and it goes “Welcome! This domain was recently registered at namecheap.com. The domain owner may currently be creating a great site for..”
While my site which provided true value to its readers is nowhere to be found.
Please fix this.
there is something wrong with this update . search “viagra” on Google.com 3 edu sites are showing in the first page . is it relevant? matt you failed .
Search Google for a competitive term such as “new shoes” — look who’s #1: Interpretive Simulations – NewShoes – (Intro to Marketing, Marketing Principles). All competitive terms have some youtube videos on the top which aren’t of any good quality even. This is not what is expected of google. Please revert.
These are results have to be a complete joke, so much unrelated content is now surfaced to the top it’s sickening.
That’s just a sampling. There’s more in other forums, of course, such as WebmasterWorld. There is some more talk about exact match domains being hit. User Whitey says:
News just in to me that a large network of destination related exact match domains [ probably 1000+], including many premium ones [ probably 50+], ultra optimized with unique content and only average quality backlinks with perhaps overkill on exact match anchor text, has been hit.
A few of the premium one’s have escaped. Not sure if the deeper long tail network which were exact match have been effected, but they would have had little traffic.
The sites were built for pure ranking purposes, and although largely white hat, didn’t do much beyond what other sites in the category do.
User Haseebnajam says:
Ranking Increase = squidoo, blogspot, forums, subdomains
Ranking Decrease = exact match domains, sites with lots of backlink from spun content sources
User driller41 says:
I am seeing changes in the UK today, most of my affiliate sites are down which is annoying – all are exact match domains btw.
Most of the backlinks are from web2.0 sites with spun content in the downed sites.
One interesting point is that one of the sites which I had built most links to is unafected – the only differnce between this and my downed sites is that I never got around to adding the affiliate outlinks to this website – so google does not know that this site is an affiliate and thus no punishment has been dished out.
We’ll keep digging for more on the Google’s webmspam update.
The new algorithm change is launching over the next few days, Cutts says, and it will impact 3.1% of queries in English, “to a degree that a regular user might notice.” It affects about 3% of queries in German, Chinese and Arabic, but in “more heavily-spammed languages,” he says. “For example, 5% of Polish queries change to a degree that a regular user might notice.”
As you may know, Google launched a new algorithm update, dubbed the Webspam Update. According to Google, it’s designed to keep sites engaging in black hat SEO tactics from ranking. The update is still rolling out, but it’s already been the target of a great deal of criticism. You can just peruse the comments on Google’s Webmaster Central blog post announcing the change, and see what people have to say.
I can’t confirm that Viagra.com was number one in Google for the query “viagra,” but I can’t imagine why it wouldn’t have been. Either way, viagra.com is not the lead result now. That is, unless you count the paid AdWords version.
As you can see, the top organic result comes from HowStuffWorks.com. Then comes….Evaluations: Northern Kentucky University? Interesting. Here’s what that page looks like:
You’ll notice that this has absolutely nothing to do with Viagra.
Browsing through some more of the results, there are some other very suspicious activity going on. Look at this result, which points to : larryfagin.com/poet.html. That URL does’t sound like it would have anything to do with Viagra, yet Google’s title for the result says: “Buy Viagra Online No Prescription. Purchase Generic Viagra…” and the snippet says: “You can buy Viagra online in our store. This product page includes complete information about Viagra. We supply Viagra in the United Kingdom, USA and …”
If you actually click on the result, it has nothing to do with Viagra. It’s about a poet named Larry Fagin. Not once is Viagra mentioned on the page.
Also on the first results page: aiam.edu. That’s the American Institute of Alternative Medicine. At least it’s semi-drug-related. However, once again, no mention of Viagra on this page, though the title and snippet Google is providing, again, indicate otherwise. Google also informs us, “this site may be compromised”. I’m not sure what about this particular result is telling Google’s algorithm that it should be displayed on page one.
The next result is for loislowery.com:
You guessed it. Yet again, nothing to do with Viagra. And once again, Google displays a Viagra-related title and snippet for the result, and tells us the site may compromised.
Note: Not all of these results indicate that they’ve been compromised.
A few people have pointed out the oddities of Google’s viagra SERP in the comments on Google’s announcement of the webspam algorithm change:
Sean Jones says, “There is something wrong with this update. Search ‘viagra’ on Google.com – 3 edu sites are showing in the first page. Is it relevant? Matt you failed.”
Lisaz says, “These results have to be a complete joke, so much unrelated content is now surfaced to the top it’s sickening. As a funny example check this one out….Search VIAGRA and look at the results on first page for USA queries. Two completely unrelated .edu’s without viagra or ED in their content. Another site about poetry with not even a mention of viagra anywhere to be found. Then two more sites that in google that have this site may be compromised warnings. LOL what a joke this update is. Sell your Google stocks now while you can.”
ECM says, “Google.com. buy viagra online. Position 2… UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND lol. I have seen a big mess in results now. Doesn’t this algo change just allow spammers to bring down competitors a lot more easily, just send a heap of junk/spam links to their sites. Nice one google, you’re becoming well liked. Enter BING.”
How’s Bing looking on Viagra these days?
Yeah, I have to give Bing the edge on this one.
And Yahoo:
And Blekko:
And DuckDuckGo:
We’ve seen people suggesting that the new Google update had a direct effect on exact match domain names. That could explain why viagra.com is MIA. However, it doesn’t exactly explain why some of these other results are appearing.
Update: It looks like the top result has been changed now.
Google announced a big algorithm change called the Webspam update. It’s in the process of rolling out, and is designed to penalize sites engaging in black hat SEO – activities that are direct violations of Google’s quality guidelines. In theory, it sounds like a good idea, but users are already complaining about the negative effects the update seems to have had on results.
We looked at some weird things going on with Google’s results page for the query “viagra”. For one, viagra.com is not ranking at the top. This would be the obvious, most relevant choice. Most search engines agree, based on their rankings. Now, it’s nowhere to be found on the first results page for the query in Google. There are other weird results showing up as well.
The lack of viagra.com might be explained as an issue having to do with exact match domains. People have already been talking about this in forums, and in the comments of Google’s blog post. The update, according to various webmasters, appears to have hit a fair amount of exact match domains. For example, viagra.com for the query “viagra”.
Of course, not every exact match domain for every query is missing. For example, if you search “webpronews,” you’re still going to get WebProNews.com. But perhaps there is a subset of queries that tend to have more spam targeting that were hit in this manner, and even in a case like Viagra, in which the exact match actually is the most relevant result, the algorithm is not picking up on that.
We’ve seen a few people point out Google’s SERP for “make money online”. I don’t know that makemoneyonline.com was the top result for this before anyway. It certainly should not be:
But, the top (organic) result now, is makemoneyforbeginners.blogspot.com. As Google tells us from its own snippet, “No posts. No posts.”
I don’t personally believe that the fact that it’s on Blogger (Google-owned) is much of a factor here, but it’s probably worth pointing out, given that Google is often accused of favoring its own content in search results.
Here’s what that page looks like:
Hardly the “quality content” Google is demanding of webmasters these days.
To be fair, Bing’s ranking this result too, for some reason. It’s not number one on Bing, but it’s number 3. Why is it there at all? It could be related to that whole Bing using Google results thing Google called Bing out on last year. It’s the same on Yahoo, which of course uses Bing on the back-end.
On the 17th, we wrote about some webmasters who were suspecting a major update from Google. Google’s Matt Cutts has now come out and said that there was a Panda refresh around the 19th. They just didn’t say anything about it until now, which is interesting itself, considering they were tweeting about Panda updates before.
This latest Panda refresh came to light as Searchmetrics put out its winner and loser lists (though the firm specified that they were not the final lists) for Google’s new Webspam update, which is presumably still rolling out. Cutts commented in response to Danny Sullivan’s article about the lists, saying, “Hey Danny, there’s a pretty big flaw with this “winner/loser” data. Searchmetrics says that they’re comparing by looking at rankings from a week ago. We rolled out a Panda data refresh several days ago. Because of the one week window, the Searchmetrics data include not only drops because of the webspam algorithm update but also Panda-related drops. In fact, when our engineers looked at Searchmetrics’ list of 50 sites that dropped, we only saw 2-3 sites that were affected in any way by the webspam algorithm update. I wouldn’t take the Searchmetrics list as indicative of the sites that were affected by the webspam algorithm update.”
Webmasters have had over a year to get used to the Panda update, but it is clearly still wreaking havoc. For one, here’s the list of losers from Searchmetrics again:
A couple weeks ago, we wrote about DaniWeb, which managed to get hit by Google yet again, after being hit by and recovering from the Panda update multiple times over the course of the past year. The latest incident may or may not have been Panda.
Google’s Matt Cutts put up a new Webmaster Help video, discussing how Google deals with Ajax. He takes on the following user-submitted question:
How effective is Google now at handling content supplied via Ajax, is this likely to improve in the future?
“Well, let me take Ajax, which is Asynchronous Javascript, and make it just Javascript for the time being,” says Cutts. “Google is getting more effective over time, so we actually have the ability not just to scan in strings of Javascript to look for URLs, but to actually process some of the Javascript. And so that can help us improve our crawl coverage quite a bit, especially if people use Javascript to help with navigation or drop-downs or those kinds of things. So Asynchronous Javascript is a little bit more complicated, and that’s maybe further down the road, but the common case is Javascript.”
“And we’re getting better, and we’re continuing to improve how well we’re able to process Javascript,” he continues. “In fact, let me just take a little bit of time and mention, if you block Javascript or CSS in your robots.txt, where Googlebot can’t crawl it, I would change that. I would recommend making it so that Googlebot can crawl the Javascript and can crawl the CSS, because that makes it a lot easier for us to figure out what’s going on if we’re processing the Javascript or if we’re seeing and able to process and get a better idea of what the page is like.”
As a matter of fact, Cutts actually put out a separate video about this last month, in which he said, “If you block Googlebot from crawling javascript or CSS, please take a few minutes and take that out of the robots.txt and let us crawl the javascript. Let us crawl the CSS, and get a better idea of what’s going on on the page.”
“So I absolutely would recommend trying to check through your robots.txt, and if you have disallow slash Javascript, or star JS, or star CS, go ahead and remove that, because that helps Googlebot get a better idea of what’s going on on the page,” he reiterates in the new video.
In another new video, Cutts talks about why Google won’t remove pages from its index at your request.
Systems and methods that identify manipulated articles are described. In one embodiment, a search engine implements a method comprising determining at least one cluster comprising a plurality of articles, analyzing signals to determine an overall signal for the cluster, and determining if the articles are manipulated articles based at least in part on the overall signal.
The patent was filed all the way back in 2003 and was awarded in 2007. Of course, the new update is really based on principles Google has held for years. The update is designed to target violators of its quality guidelines.
Patent jargon makes my head hurt, and I’m willing to bet there’s a strong possibility you don’t want to sift through this whole thing. Slawski is a master at explaining these things, so I’ll just quote him from his piece.
“There are a couple of different elements to this patent,” he writes. “One is that a search engine might identify a cluster of pages that might be related to each other in some way, like being on the same host, or interlinked by doorway pages and articles targeted by those pages. Once such a cluster is identified, documents within the cluster might be examined for individual signals, such as whether or not the text within them appears to have been generated by a computer, or if meta tags are stuffed with repeated keywords, if there is hidden text on pages, or if those pages might contain a lot of unrelated links.”
He goes on to talk about many of the improvements Google has made to its infrastructure, and spam detecting technologies. He also notes that two phrase-based patents were granted to Google this week. One is for “Phrase extraction using subphrase scoring” and the other, “Query phrasification“. The abstracts for those, are (respectively):
An information retrieval system uses phrases to index, retrieve, organize and describe documents. Phrases are extracted from the document collection. Documents are the indexed according to their included phrases, using phrase posting lists. The phrase posting lists are stored in an cluster of index servers. The phrase posting lists can be tiered into groups, and sharded into partitions. Phrases in a query are identified based on possible phrasifications. A query schedule based on the phrases is created from the phrases, and then optimized to reduce query processing and communication costs. The execution of the query schedule is managed to further reduce or eliminate query processing operations at various ones of the index servers.
And…
An information retrieval system uses phrases to index, retrieve, organize and describe documents. Phrases are extracted from the document collection. Documents are the indexed according to their included phrases, using phrase posting lists. The phrase posting lists are stored in an cluster of index servers. The phrase posting lists can be tiered into groups, and sharded into partitions. Phrases in a query are identified based on possible phrasifications. A query schedule based on the phrases is created from the phrases, and then optimized to reduce query processing and communication costs. The execution of the query schedule is managed to further reduce or eliminate query processing operations at various ones of the index servers.
If you’re really interested in tech patents and the inner-workings of how search engines work, I’d suggest reading Slawski’s post. I’d also suggest watching Matt Cutts explain how Google Search works.
Google’s Matt Cutts put out a new Webmaster Help video. It’s one of those where he answers his own question (as opposed to a user-submitted one), so you know it’s something Google deals with all the time. The question:
There’s a page about me on the web that I don’t like. Will Google remove the page from its search results? Why or why not?
In short, Google will not remove a page just because it says something about you that you don’t like. This isn’t really news. In fact, Cutts even references a blog post he wrote about it back in 2009. However, such requests are clearly still something Google has to deal with on a regular basis, hence this video.
“In general, when you come to Google, and you say I don’t like this page, if it’s under your control, we’re happy to have you remove it,” says Cutts. “But if it’s under somebody else’s control, that can be a little bit more of a delicate situation. Because if there’s a he said, she said situation, and we don’t know who’s right, it can be a little bit risky for us to try to just pick sides arbitrarily. We don’t really have the resources to investigate all the different people who come to us and say I’m right. This person’s wrong, and this page should go away.”
I’m not sure Google doesn’t have the resources. According to its most recent earnings report, the company employed 33,077 full-time employees as of March 31, 2012 (up from 32,467 at the end of last year). But clearly, Google would rather have these resources focused on other things. That said, I can’t say I disagree with their approach.
“And if you think about it, in cyberspace, there’s many of the same laws that apply,” Cutts says. “So if somebody has libeled you, if they’re saying something that is factually, completely wrong, or if there’s some fraud going on, you can take that person to court. And there’s even ways that are shy of taking them to court, like sending a cease-and-desist letter. So there are other avenues available to you than coming to Google. And if you just come to Google, and you get something removed from Google, that doesn’t take it off of the web. It only removes it from our index. So people could still find it on Twitter. They could still find it on Facebook. They could navigate directly to it. They can find it in other search engines. So just removing a piece of content from Google’s index doesn’t remove it from the web. It doesn’t keep people from finding it. ”
Yes, the web does still exist without Google, which is kind of Google’s point with all of the antitrust stuff. “Competition is always a click away,” as the company likes to say.
“So think about some of the situations,” Cutts continues. “If there’s something that’s just egregiously wrong, hopefully the webmaster will listen to reason or listen to a threat of legal action and take it down. And then everybody’s happy. Now, if it’s something like a newspaper, where it’s factually accurate, and you don’t like it, there may not be that much that you can do about that. In that sense, Google is trying to reflect the web. We’re trying to show the web as it is, almost like a mirror. And so if something’s true, if you were convicted of a crime or something like that, and it ranks for your name naturally, that’s not the sort of thing that we would typically take action on.”
Cutts goes onto talk about how you should be managing your online reputation.
“If something happened 10 years ago, and you’ve got a lot of fresh new content, that can often outrank the stuff that’s a lot older,” he says.
He’s certainly right about that. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had trouble finding specific older content in Google, as it’s buried under more recent content, particularly since Google launched its freshness update last year. And freshness continues to be a theme in Google’s monthly lists of algorithm updates.
Update: It turns out that Google launched a Panda refresh a few days ago, and Matt Cutts says this is more likely the culprit for Searchmetrics’ lists.
There’s a pretty big flaw with this “winner/loser” data. Searchmetrics says that they’re comparing by looking at rankings from a week ago. We rolled out a Panda data refresh several days ago. Because of the one week window, the Searchmetrics data include not only drops because of the webspam algorithm update but also Panda-related drops. In fact, when our engineers looked at Searchmetrics’ list of 50 sites that dropped, we only saw 2-3 sites that were affected in any way by the webspam algorithm update. I wouldn’t take the Searchmetrics list as indicative of the sites that were affected by the webspam algorithm update.
Google is in the process of rolling out its Webspam update, which the company says will impact about 3.1% of queries in English.
Whenever Google announces major updates, Searchmetrics usually puts together some data about what it determines to be the top winners and losers from the update, in terms of search visibility. They’ve put out their first lists for this update.
“There could be other iterations from Google that we’re not aware of at the moment, but Searchmetrics is tracking closely and will update the list accordingly,” a Searchmetrics spokesperson tells WebProNews. “These are the first numbers and Searchmetrics will have more in the future, but we want to stress that the loser list could change in the next few days.”
“It’s unusual for Google to make major update on a Wednesday,” says Searchmetrics Founder Marcus Tober. “Normally Google makes this kind of updates on a Monday or Thursday. That’s why I assume that in the next days we’ll see more updates and this update is just the beginning. That’s why, all results in the winner and loser tables are marked as preview.”
“In a first study I took over 50.000 keywords from short-head to medium and low search volume and looked at the current rankings from position 1 to 100,” Tober adds. “So I analyzed 5,000,000 URLs and compared the rankings to last week. In my second study which is not finished yet I take one million keywords to get a complete overview, but this will take more time.”
Nothing sucks more than having to move your Web site. Whether it’s because you don’t agree with the philosophy of your host or you can’t afford the fees associated with the current domain, there comes a time when it’s just time to move. Doesn’t make it any easier, but Google has some tips for making the transition smoother while retaining precious SEO and users.
The tips featured below are all about making sure search engines understand the new site structure if you happen to move, but it also has the benefit of making the Web site more user friendly. SEO and user friendliness go hand-in-hand.
One of the first things to do is make sure you’re redirecting all bots and users visiting your old cotent to the new content using 301 redirects. It’s also important to highlight the “relationship between the two locations, make sure that each old URL points to the new URL that hosts similar content.” If you can’t use 301 redirects, Google recommends using cross domain canonicals.
For SEO purposes, make sure you have the new old and location for your Web site verified in the same Google Webmaster Tools account. On a similar note, make sure the new location can be crawled by using the Fetch as Googlebot feature. Even though Google is discontinuing the robots.txt feature, old URLs may still implement it. Get rid of it so that the redirect can be found.
Just as you would in the real world, the virtual world requires a change of address submission form when moving to an entirely new domain. Google has a handy form available in their Webmaster Tools that lets them know about the move.
A move to a new site always runs the risk of your the user running into the 404 errors. That’s no good and it’s a major deterrent to people wanting to visit your site again. To combat this problem, Google provides a Diagnostics tool that looks for Crawl errors.
Checking and verifying your Sitemap might seem like common sense, but it’s still important. To that end, catalog the instances whenever a user hits a 404 error page. Find the offending URL and update your 301 redirect rules to deal with the problem.
Google Webmaster Tools offers a Links to your site tool that tells you which important sites link to your content. Inform these sites about your move so they can update their links accordingly.
Google Webmaster Tools are also there to help if your Web site is meant to target a specific geographic region. Check out the geotargeting preferences for your new site structure. It’s also important to note that you shouldn’t run two crawlable sites with largely similar content.
As a final suggestion, take it easy during the move. Don’t make a lot of big changes at once. This means no changes to “large scale content, URL structure or navigational updates.” Not only does it confuse the user trying to get to your site, but it throws search engines for a loop.
With the helpful tips, it shouldn’t be a problem when it comes time to move your Web site. You can still retain your valuable SEO and keep users happy.
Google’s Matt Cutts explained these concepts in a video made last August. Check it out:
Rand Fishkin, the well known SEO expert and Founder/CEO of SEOmoz, has challenged the web to see if anyone can take down his sites’ rankings in Google by way of negative SEO – the practice of implementing tactics specifically aimed at hurting competitors in search, as opposed to improving the rankings of one’s own site. Fishkin tells WebProNews about why he’s made such a challenge.
Do you think negative SEO practices can be effective in hurting a competitors’ rankings, even if that competitor is playing by all of Google’s rules and has a squeaky clean reputation? Let us know what you think.
First, you’ll need a little background. There’s a thread in the forum Traffic Planet started by member Jammy (hat tip to Barry Schwartz), who talks about an experiment run with the cooperation of another member in which they were successfully able to have a hugely negative impact on two sites.
“We carried out a massive scrapebox blast on two sites to ensure an accurate result,” Jammy writes. I’m not going to get into all of the details about why they targeted specific sites or even the sites themselves here. You can read the lengthy forum thread if you want to go through all of that.
The important thing to note, however, is that the experiment apparently worked. BUT, Fishkin maintains that the sites in question weren’t necessarily in the best situations to begin with.
“In terms of negative SEO on the whole – I think it’s terrible that it could hurt a site’s rankings,” Fishkin said in the forum thread. “That creates an entire industry and practice that no one (not engines, not marketers, not brands) benefits from. Only the spammers and link network owners win, and that’s exactly the opposite of what every legitimate player in the field wants. Thus, I’m wholeheartedly behind identifying and exposing whether Google or Bing are wrongly penalizing sites rather than merely removing the value passed by spam links. If we can remove that fear and that process, we’ve done the entire marketing and web world a huge favor.”
“I’ve never seen it work on a truly clean, established site,” Fishkin tells WebProNews, regarding negative SEO. He says the examples from the forum “all had some slightly-seriously suspicious characteristics and not wholly clean link profiles already, and it’s hard to know whether the bad links hurt them or whether they merely triggered a review or algorithm that said ‘this site doesn’t deserve to rank.’”
“If negative SEO can take down 100% clean sites that have never done anything untoward and that have built up a good reputation on the web, it’s more concerning and something Google’s search quality engineers would need to address immediately (or risk a shadow industry of spammers popping up to do website takedowns),” he adds.
When asked why he would antagonize those who disagree with his view by offering his own sites as targets, Fishkin says, “Two things – one, I’d rather they target me/us than someone else. We can take the hit and we can help publicize/reach the right folks if something does go wrong. Other targets probably wouldn’t be so lucky.”
“Two – if this is indeed possible, it’s important for someone who can warn the search/marketing industry to have evidence and be aware of it,” says Fishkin. “Since we carefully monitor our metrics/analytics, haven’t ever engaged in any spam and have lines over to some folks who could help, we’re a good early warning system.”
So what happens if challengers are successful at taking down either SEOmoz or RandFishkin.com?
“SEOmoz gets ~20% of its traffic from non-branded Google searches, so worst case, we’d see a 20-25% hit for a few days or a few weeks,” Fishkin tells WebProNews. “That’s survivable and it’s worth the price to uncover whether the practice is a problem. Our core values (TAGFEE) dictate that this is precisely the kind of area where we’d be willing to take some pain in order to prevent harm to others.”
When asked if he’s confident that Google will correct the problem in a timely fashion if he’s proven wrong, Fishkin says, “Fairly confident, though not 100%. I have my fingers crossed it won’t get too messy for too long, but my COO and community manager are a little nervous.”
Fishkin concludes our conversation with: “I’d say that the evidence on the Traffic Power thread is strong that if a site already has some questionable elements, a takedown is possible. But, it’s not yet proven whether wholly clean sites can be brought down with negative SEO. I hope that’s not the case, but I suspect the hornet’s nest I kicked up will probably answer that for us in the next month or two.”
Word around the industry is that Google is making SEO matter less, in terms of over-optimization. Google’s Matt Cutts talked about this last month at SXSW, and that discussion had led to a great deal of discussion and speculation as to just what this would entail.
“The idea,” he said, “is basically to try and level the playing ground a little bit, so all those people who have sort of been doing, for lack of a better word, ‘over-optimization’ or overly doing their SEO, compared to the people who are just making great content and trying to make a fantastic site, we want to sort of make that playing field a little more level.”
One thing’s for sure though: If negative SEO can truly impact clean sites, that’s not quite the level playing field Google is aspiring to create.
Fishkin’s experiment is going to be an interesting one to keep an eye on. If SEOmoz can be severely impacted from this, who’s to say your site can’t? Do you think it’s possible? Tell us in the comments.
What is optimization? The dictionary definition, according to Merriam-Webster, optimization is:
“An act, process, or methodology of making something (as a design, system, or decision) as fully perfect, functional, or effective as possible; specifically: the mathematical procedures (as finding the maximum of a function) involved in this.”
In the online business world, optimization is often thought of in terms of search engine optimization and social media optimization. While these tactics are very important aspects of optimization, Lee Odden, the CEO of TopRank Online Marketing and author of new book Optimize, told us that it doesn’t stop with them.
Odden, who is a 14-year veteran Internet marketer, came to this new understanding of optimization after a conversation with Google engineer Maile Ohye. As he explained to WebProNews, Ohye gave him a “palm forehead moment” after he voiced concerns over his speaking skills to her. She suggested that he optimize his speaking just like he would optimize a website for better performance. In that moment, he said it dawned on him that he should be looking at optimization differently.
“I just thought… why not make that the focal point of discussion when we’re talking about how to connect customers with brands using content, using social [and] using search,” he recalled to us, “and how to approach optimization as a state of mind… as a way of viewing the world versus just keywords and links and the on page sort of thing.”
The revelation inspired Odden to write a book and tell others why modern marketing calls for a broader customer-centric approach to optimization. He told us that understanding the customer is the element that is missing in most discussions today. When optimization efforts look at the totality of the customer experience, they have the ability to surpass individual efforts in search and social.
“If you’re focused on customer behaviors – what their goals and pinpoints are, what is it that they care about, and how we can solve those problems with brand information, brand solutions, or products or services – then we’re going to be on top of what it means to grow revenue, to retain customers, to increase orders, to increase referrals, and that sort of thing,” he said.
What’s your optimization strategy? Does it focus on SEO and social media, or does it go beyond these tactics? Let us know.
Traditional SEO tactics involve identifying the most popular keyword phrases relative to the products and services a business offers. Then, traditional SEO would have you make sure all your content, including the existing, new, and social media content, includes them as well. While checklist-type SEO tactics are effective, Odden told us that many more opportunities are present beyond them.
“I think you’ll find more opportunities when we take the effort to understand how is it that customers think about the problems that they’re having,” he said.
“It’s not just the checklist,” Odden continued, ”it’s having the wherewithal to understand customers, to understand the market, to understand the kinds of content that are meaningful, and also paying attention to the marketplace so you can actually on-demand come up with stuff that’s a marketing asset right here [and] right now – not just following a fixed editorial calendar or fixed marketing plan.”
In his book, Odden further details the opportunities in optimization and explains how they lead to attracting customers, engaging with them, and inspiring them to share, purchase, or refer others to the product or service. According to him, the book is geared toward anyone that publishes content on the Web. He believes it will equip them with the information they need to not only reach customers, but also to grow their business.
“It will empower them with a knowledge that will allow them to get more productivity out of the content that they’re publishing, [a] more meaningful versus mechanical experience for the audiences that actually consume that content, and a framework for how to create a process in an organization that will help you scale,” said Odden.
Optimize is currently available in all major bookstores and online.
Google’s Matt Cutts has put out a new Webmaster Help video. This one is particularly interesting and nearly 8 minutes long – much longer than the norm. It goes fairly in depth about how Google crawls content and attempts to rank it based on relevancy. PageRank, you’ll find is still the key ingredient.
He starts off by talking about how far Google has come in terms of crawling. When Cutts started at Google, they were only crawling every three or four months.
“We basically take page rank as the primary determinant,” says Cutts. “And the more page rank you have– that is, the more people who link to you and the more reputable those people are– the more likely it is we’re going to discover your page relatively early in the crawl. In fact, you could imagine crawling in strict page rank order, and you’d get the CNNs of the world and The New York Times of the world and really very high page rank sites. And if you think about how things used to be, we used to crawl for 30 days. So we’d crawl for several weeks. And then we would index for about a week. And then we would push that data out. And that would take about a week.”
He continues on with the history lesson, talking about the Google Dance, Update Fritz and things, and eventually gets to the present.
“So at this point, we can get very, very fresh,” he says. “Any time we see updates, we can usually find them very quickly. And in the old days, you would have not just a main or a base index, but you could have what were called supplemental results, or the supplemental index. And that was something that we wouldn’t crawl and refresh quite as often. But it was a lot more documents. And so you could almost imagine having really fresh content, a layer of our main index, and then more documents that are not refreshed quite as often, but there’s a lot more of them.”
“What you do then is you pass things around,” Cutts continues. “And you basically say, OK, I have crawled a large fraction of the web. And within that web you have, for example, one document. And indexing is basically taking things in word order. Well, let’s just work through an example. Suppose you say Katy Perry. In a document, Katy Perry appears right next to each other. But what you want in an index is which documents does the word Katy appear in, and which documents does the word Perry appear in? So you might say Katy appears in documents 1, and 2, and 89, and 555, and 789. And Perry might appear in documents number 2, and 8, and 73, and 555, and 1,000. And so the whole process of doing the index is reversing, so that instead of having the documents in word order, you have the words, and they have it in document order. So it’s, OK, these are all the documents that a word appears in.”
“Now when someone comes to Google and they type in Katy Perry, you want to say, OK, what documents might match Katy Perry?” he continues. “Well, document one has Katy, but it doesn’t have Perry. So it’s out. Document number two has both Katy and Perry, so that’s a possibility. Document eight has Perry but not Katy. 89 and 73 are out because they don’t have the right combination of words. 555 has both Katy and Perry. And then these two are also out. And so when someone comes to Google and they type in Chicken Little, Britney Spears, Matt Cutts, Katy Perry, whatever it is, we find the documents that we believe have those words, either on the page or maybe in back links, in anchor text pointing to that document.”
“Once you’ve done what’s called document selection, you try to figure out, how should you rank those?” he explains. “And that’s really tricky.We use page rank as well as over 200 other factors in our rankings to try to say, OK, maybe this document is really authoritative. It has a lot of reputation because it has a lot of page rank. But it only has the word Perry once. And it just happens to have the word Katy somewhere else on the page. Whereas here is a document that has the word Katy and Perry right next to each other, so there’s proximity. And it’s got a lot of reputation. It’s got a lot of links pointing to it.”
He doesn’t really talk about Search Plus Your World, which is clearly influencing how users see content a great deal these days. And while he does talk about freshness he doesn’t really talk about how that seems to drive rankings either. Freshness is great, as far as Google’s ability to quickly crawl, but sometimes, it feels like how fresh something is, is getting a little too much weight in Google. Sometimes the more relevant content is older, and I’ve seen plenty of SERPs that lean towards freshness, making it particularly hard to find specific things I’m looking for. What do you think?
“You want to find reputable documents that are also about what the user typed in,” continues Cutts in the video. “And that’s kind of the secret sauce, trying to figure out a way to combine those 200 different ranking signals in order to find the most relevant document. So at any given time, hundreds of millions of times a day, someone comes to Google. We try to find the closest data center to them.”
“They type in something like Katy Perry,” he says . “We send that query out to hundreds of different machines all at once, which look through their little tiny fraction of the web that we’ve indexed. And we find, OK, these are the documents that we think best match. All those machines return their matches. And we say, OK, what’s the creme de la creme? What’s the needle in the haystack? What’s the best page that matches this query across our entire index? And then we take that page and we try to show it with a useful snippet. So you show the key words in the context of the document. And you get it all back in under half a second.”
As Cutts notes in the intro to the video, he could talk for hours about all of this stuff. I’m sure you didn’t expect him to reveal Google’s 200 signals in the video, but it does provide an some interesting commentary from the inside on how Google is approaching ranking, even if it omits these signals as a whole.
Once again, webmasters are complaining about what may have been a major update from Google. They’ve taken to the Google Webmaster Help forums to express their grievances, although to be fair, it’s not all bad for everybody. When sites drop, others rise. That’s how it works.
Barry Schwartz, at Search Engine Roundtable, who wonders if it could be the “overly SEO penalty” Matt Cutts discussed at SXSW last month, points to 11 separate forum threads with complaints. There’s definitely something going on.
Of course, in these situations, the Panda update is always mentioned. We’ve reached out to Google for more info. Sometimes they respond. Sometimes they don’t. It will most likely be one of the generic “we make changes every day” kind of responses, and we’ll probably have to wait until the end of April or the beginning of May to get the real list of changes Google has made.
The last time there was a known Panda update, Google went so far as to tweet about it. They know people want to know when this happens. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll tweet every time, but I wouldn’t be surprised. This time, no tweet from Google so far.
For a refresher on the “overly SEO penalty” Schwartz speaks of, read the following:
Not only does Google make changes every day, it runs even more experiments, with subsets of users. Matt Cutts recently talked about how Google runs 20,000 search experiments a year.
Update: A Google spokesperson tells WebProNews, “We’ve currently disabled the experimental ‘Author stats’ feature in Webmaster Tools Labs as we work to fix a bug in the way stats are attributed.”
Google announced that Product Rich Snippets are now supported on a global scale, so businesses around the world can take advantage of them, and stand our more in search results for the products they’re selling – those, which searchers are looking for. Product Rich Snippets had only been available in certain locations until now.
“Users viewing your site’s results in Google search can now preview information about products available on your website, regardless of where they’re searching from,” said product manager Anthony Chavez on the Google Webmaster Central blog.
Chavez also announced that Google’s Rich Snippets Testing Tool has also been updated to support HTML input. “We heard from many users that they wanted to be able to test their HTML source without having to publish it to a web page,” he says.
There’s some interesting discussion in the comments section of Google’s blog post announcing these changes. Some are clearly happy to see the HTML suppor for the tool.
As mentioned in that other piece, Google has been providing author clicks and impressions data in Webmaster Tools. Now some are finding that author stats have gone missing. “Thanks for the upgrade 😉 But now the author stats are disappeared,” one user commented on Google’s blog post.
I went to check my “Author Stats”, under the “Labs” tab in Google Webmaster Tools. GONE!
Anyone else?
In the past, they only gave me credit for about 50% of the pages that I have “fixed up with Google-required special authorship tags”, according to their specifications.
At the bottom of the “Labs” page, their disclaimer prevails –
“Webmaster Tools Labs is a testing ground for experimental features that aren’t quite ready for primetime (sic). They may change, break or DISAPPEAR AT ANY TIME.”
Nothing about the probably of return, however. (sic)
This was followed by a couple of interesting replies. Lucy24 writes:
They never got as far as crediting me with anything, although the Rich Snippets Testing Tool (under More Resources) still comes through with “verified author markup”.
:: mopping brow ::
The author function definitely still exists. Saw it within the last 24 hours while doing a search. (Not, alas, a search for my own pages.)
Sgt_Kickaxe writes:
Lots of changes going on still.
Did you know that after you verify your authorship with G+ you can UNverify it by removing the markup (you can even close your Google+ profile!) but Google will still give you special search results (including picture)? They forget nothing. That’s something to think about if you’re running a plugin of any sort to handle markup, save your resources and shut it down 🙂
With regards to the Product Rich Snippets, one reader commented, “WHY are adult-related products not supported for rich snippets ? What is the problem, since there is no picture displayed?Are loveshops, selling perfectly legal items, not worthy of having nice SERPs displayed too ? I find that really unjust.”
We’ve reached out to Google for comment regarding the missing author stats. We’ll update when we know more.
Google’s Matt Cutts, as you may or may not know, often appears in Webmaster Help videos addressing questions about what Google does (and what it doesn’t do) in certain situations. Usually, the questions are submitted buy users, though sometimes, Cutts will deem an issue important enough to ask the question himself.
In the lastest video, which Cutts tweeted out on Monday, a user asks:
“Just to confirm: does Google take manual action on webspam? Does manual action result in a removal or can it also be a demotion? Are there other situations where Google remove content from its search results?”
Who better to address this question than Google’s head of webspam himself, Matt Cutts?
Cutts responds, “I’m really glad to have a chance to clarify this, because some people might not know this, although we’ve written this quite a bit in various places online. Google is willing to take manual action to remove spam. So if you write an algorithm to detect spam, and then someone searches for their own name, and they find off-topic porn, they’re really unhappy about that. And they’ll write into Google and let us know that they’re unhappy.”
“And if we write back and say, ‘Well, we hope in six to nine months to be able to have an algorithm that catches this off-topic porn,’ that’s not a really satisfactory answer for the guy who has off-topic porn showing up for his name,” he says. “So in some situations, we are willing to take manual action on our results. It’s when there are violations of our web spam quality guidelines.”
“So, the answer to your question is, yes, we are willing to take manual action when we see violations of our quality guidelines,” he says. “Another follow-up question was whether it has to be removal or whether it can be a demotion. It can be a demotion. It tends to be removal, because the spam we see tends to be very clear-cut. But there are some cases where you might see cookie cutter content that’s maybe not truly, truly awful, but is duplicative, or you can find in tons of other places. And so it’s content that is really not a lot of value add – those sorts of things.”
“And we say in our guidelines to avoid duplicate content, whether it’s a cross-domain, so having lots of different domains with very, very similar or even identical content,” he says. “So when we see truly malicious, really bad stuff, we’re often taking action to remove it. If we see things that are still a violation of our quality guidelines, but not quite as bad, then you might see a demotion.”
A bad enough demotion might as well be a removal anyway. I’m sure a lot of Panda victims out there have a thing or two to say about that.
“And then the last question was, ‘Are there other situations where Google will remove content from it search results?’,” continues Cutts. “So, we do reserve the right to remove content for spam. Content can be removed for legal reasons, like we might get a DMCA complaint or some valid court order that says we have to remove something within this particular country.”
“We’re also willing to remove stuff for security reaons, so malware, Trojan horses, viruses, worms, those sorts of things,” he says. “Another example of security might be if you have your own credit card number on the web. So those are some of the areas that we are willing to take action, and we are willing to remove stuff from our search results. We don’t claim that that’s a comprehensive list. We think that it’s important to be able to exercise judgment. So if there is some safety issue, or of course, things like child porn, which would fall under legal. But those are the major areas that we’ve seen, would be spam, legal reasons, and security. And certainly, the vast majority of action that we take falls under those three broad areas.”
“But just to be clear, we do reserve the right to take action, whether it could be demotion or removal,” he reiterates. “And we think we have to apply our best judgment. We want to return the best results that we can for users. And the action that we take is in service of that, trying to make sure that we get the best search results we can out to people when they’re doing searches.”
Speaking of those security concerns, Cutts also tweeted on Monday that Google has sent messages to 20,000 sites, indicating that they may have been hacked. He attributes this to some “weird redirecting.”
Google has been sending out a lot of messages to webmasters lately. A lot have been getting them based on questionable links pointing to their sites, in relation to Google’s cracking down on paid blog/link networks.
Now, over 20,000 sites have received messages from Google for a very different reason: hacking (or the possibility of hacking). Matt Cutts tweeted the following today:
Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land claims to have seen some related activity. “I’ve personally seen a spike in the number of sites redirecting from their web site to a non-authorized site recently,” he writes. “The webmaster is typically unaware of this redirect because the redirects only occur when someone clicks from Google’s search results to the web site. Typically the site owner doesn’t go to Google to find his web site, the site owner goes directly to the site.”
It’s unclear if Google’s messages are related, but TheNextWeb recently reported on some hacking that was going on, on some sites, where the hacker was sneaking in and inserting backlinks to his/her own spammy content, and even messing with canonical link elements, tricking Google’s algorithm into thinking the hacker was the originator of content, even though he/she was simply scraping. They were even able to hijack +1’s in search results.
Google has a help center article in Webmaster Tools about what to do if your site has been hacked. That includes taking your site offline and cleaning it of malicious software, and requesting a malware review from Google.
“You can find out if your site has been identified as a site that may host or distribute malicious software (one type of ‘badware’) by checking the Webmaster Tools home page (Note: you need to verify site ownership to see this information.),” says Google.
Google sends out notices to affected sites at the following email addresses: abuse@, admin@, administrator@, contact@, info@, postmaster@, support@ and webmaster@.
Google bases its identifictions of “badware” on guidelines from StopBadware.org, the company says, though it also uses its own criteria and tools to identify sites that host/distribute badware.
“In some cases, third parties can add malicious code to legitimate sites, which would cause us to show the warning message,” Google says in the help center. “If you feel your site has been mistakenly identified, or if you make changes to your site so that it no longer hosts or distributes malicious software and you secure your site so that it is no longer vulnerable to the insertion of badware, you can request that your site be reviewed.”
Google has instructions for cleaning your site here. This involves quarantining the site, assessing the damage, cleaning it up and asking for Google to review it.
Last summer, Google announced that it would begin supporting authorship markup, or rel=”author”. It’s still in pilot mode, but Google has been making use of it in search results ever since, in increasing numbers, as more web content authors use it.
No matter how many places you produce content on the web, the idea is that you tie them all back to your Google profile, so Google understands that it’s all coming from you. Among the benefits to authors, is an extra visual link in Google search results – an author photo pointing to that Google profile, when your content appears in the results. It can lend to reputation and increased exposure of your personal brand. It even shows your Google+ circle count. Author info can appear both on Google web search and Google News:
“If you associate your content with your Google Profile either via e-mail verification or a simple link, you can visit Webmaster Tools to see how many impressions and clicks your content got on the Google search results page,” explained Google at the time.
Update: This feature appears to have suddenly gone missing. At this time, we’re unable to determine whether this is temporary or not. We’ve reached out to Google for more info, and will update accordingly.
Setting Up Authorship
There are actually 3 different ways to implement authorship markup on your content: original – three-link method (author’s Google profile, author pages and article page link to one another), the two-link method (Google Profile and Content) and the email method (when you have an email address on the site you’re writing for). Sagar Kamdar, Google’s authorship mastermind talked about each of these in an interesting interview with Eric Enge at Stone Temple Consulting. There’s an email verification tool you can use, by the way.
According to Kamdar, the email method might actually get you setup more quickly. “Sometimes authors don’t have the ability to add additional links from the bio portion of their article or they need to request their webmaster to make some tweaks to enable that,” he is quoted as saying. “The email method doesn’t require any modification to the website to get setup, so it is possible that you could get setup a little bit faster for that than the 2 link method. In addition, with email verification, it is far more dependent upon our heuristics and analysis to figure out if content is associated to your Google profile and that’s a science that we are constantly tuning.”
You can go to your Google Profile, go to “Edit Profile,” scroll down and click on “work,” click the drop down arrow next to “phone,” click on “email,” and put in your address where it says new contact info. Change the visibility of the section from “only you” to “everyone on the web,” click “save,” and click “done editing.”
Here are a couple videos of Google talking about getting authorship set up:
Authorship As A Ranking Signal
In that first one, Google’s Matt Cutts asks, “Will people get higher rankings? Is there a rankings boost for rel=’author’?”
Google’s Othar Hansson then replies, “It’s obviously early days, so we hope to use this information and any information as a ranking signal at Google. In this case, we want to get information on credibility of authors from all kinds of sources, and eventually use it in ranking. We’re only experimenting with that now. Who knows where it will go?”
The video was released in August. Obviously a great deal of time has passed since then. We can’t say with 100% certainty that it’s already a ranking factor, but I wouldn’t be surprised. I certainly see a lot of authorship-enabled results in my daily search activity.
Kamdar actually addresses it in his interview with Enge. Enge brought up the idea that “this will feed into social signals and author authority in the long term.”
Kamdar responded, “Yes, you could eventually see that type of thing happening.”
Another change in March was listed as “UI refresh for News Universal.” Google described this: “We’ve refreshed the design of News Universal results by providing more results from the top cluster, unifying the UI treatment of clusters of different sizes, adding a larger font for the top article, adding larger images (from licensed sources), and adding author information.”
Author info was already appearing in Google News, but now, through Google’s Universal results, here is another opportunity for your authorship-enabled Google profile to show up.
There are obvious benefits to authors from enabling authorship for Google. There are, of course, benefits to Google as well. The main one would be increased emphasis on Google+. As Google CEO Larry Page explained during an earnings call last week, there are two parts of Google+: the “social destination” (what most people think of as Google+) and the “social spine,” which is the social layer over the rest of Google’s products – including search.
Google has already implemented Search Plus Your World this year, which includes increased integration of Google+ into search results. It relies on social connections Google+ users have made with others, to personalize search results based, in part, on those social connections.
Authorship further integrates Google+ into search results (granted, this was going on ahead of SPYW’s launch). Every time it shows a user a Google profile because of authorship, it is providing another doorway to Google+, the social destination.
If you go to my Google profile, for example, you’ll see my recent Google+ posts, public +1’s, etc. The Google Profile, which has been around much longer than Google+, still serves as the central part of a Google+ user’s account. This is another reason Google+ should simply be thought of as Google at large.
It’s about online identity more than anything else. Kamdar acknowledges this in that interview as well.
“The main thing that we are trying to address is the faceless nature of the web,” he is quoted as saying. That alone should be a clear indicator just how much of a competitor Google is to Facebook.
It’s also for that reason that Google is really picky about how authors represent themselves online. At first, Google didn’t even allow pseudonyms on Google+.
“It was largely an issue of development priorities,” Google’s Vic Gundotra explained at last year’s Web 2.0 summit. “It’s complicated to get this right. It’s complicated on multiple dimensions. One of the complications it’s complicated on is atmosphere. If you’re a woman and you post a photo and Captain Crunch or Dog Fart comments on it, it changes the atmosphere of the product.”
After a while, Google began allowing for pseudonyms.
But that’s not the only area where Google has shown stinginess in author representation. Google has actually told people to change their profile pictures if they didn’t feel they were a good representation. We talked about this last year, when my colleague Josh Wolford was asked to change his Google profile picture. Wolford was using an image of himself made up as a Zombie from a Halloween party. This photo:
As a matter of fact, it was Kamdar himself, who emailed Wolford to say, “We noticed you’ve set things up correctly on your end. However, while we’re in this limited testing, we’re trying to make sure that we’ve got the best author pictures we can get–is there any way you could have a non-zombie picture for your profile?”
Kamdar also briefly addressed this issue in his interview with Enge. “The basic criteria is that you are setup correctly, you provide a high quality photo of yourself, and then based on our algorithm when your content shows up, we just try to make sure the photo would be relevant to the user. In terms of timeline, it just depends on the frequency of how often we crawl and index your content which is variable, based on sites. We just follow the natural progression of our crawling and indexing technology and it could be setup in days or it could take weeks.”
Other Authorship-Related Things To Consider
There were a few more noteworthy takeaways from Kamdar’s conversation with Enge.
One is that he (and presumably Google) sees authorship as a way for users to identify the authors they already like when they write about something they’re searching for. To me, this only adds to the “filter bubble”. Readers could be missing out on content from other great authors just because they’re going to the ones they’re familiar with.
Another is that you should use the Rich Snippets testing tool, which Kamdar suggest using for seeing if you have authorship implemented correctly.
Finally, it’s ok to link to sites on your Google Profile, which you contribute to, without having authorship set up on those sites. It won’t hurt you in any way, other than keeping your content from that site from appearing with your Google Profile in search results.
The most important takeaway from all of this, however, is that if you are concerned about your visibility in search results, and you’re creating content on the web, you should be implementing this. From the sound of it, Google is only going to use the info more in ranking going forward. Of course, it also suggests that you’d be wise to use Google+ more as a social tool. Remember, with authorship, Google is showing circle counts, and you’re not going to be in many circles without some level of engagement. Of course, even without the search visibility aspect, engaging in the community is likely to help you on its own.
The good thing, for many content creators, is that you don’t have to write for a major publication to use it. These days, thanks to blogs, social media and other user-generated content sites, anyone can be a content creator, and the more weight Google gives to authorship, the more authors on all levels will be able to compete for visibility.
IT discussion community site DaniWeb has had a rather hectic year or so. Hit by Google’s Panda update last year, the site has seen a series of ups and downs – hard hits from Google’s algorithm and tremendous recoveries. The site has been hit yet again, and Founder/CEO Dani Horowitz is telling us about what’s going on this time. She’s not sure if it’s the Panda update, though the whole thing just happens to coincide with a recent iteration of it.
Have you seen traffic increase or decrease since the latest known Panda update? Let us know in the comments.
DaniWeb is one of those sites, which in the heart of the mad Panda scramble of 2011, seemed to be unjustly hit. It’s a forum with a solid user base, where people can discuss issues related to hardware, software, software development, web development, Internet marketing ,etc. It’s the kind of site that often provides just the right kind of answer for a troubled searcher.
We did an interview with Horowitz last year, who told us about some of the things she was doing to help the site recover from the Panda trauma. Here’s the interview, or you can click the link for more about that.
That was in May. In July, Horowitz claimed DaniWeb had made a 110% recovery from Google. In September, Panda appeared to have slapped the site again, causing it to lose over half of its traffic. Shortly thereafter, in early October, Horowitz announced that the site had managed to recover yet again. “Clearly Google admitted they screwed up with us,” she said at the time.
Now, six months later, DaniWeb has been hit yet again, but this time, Horowitz is taking at least part of the blame.
The tweet links to this Google Groups forum discussion, where Horowitz describes her new issues in great depth, also noting that the site had eventually made a 130% recovery from its pre-Panda numbers. DaniWeb rolled out a new platform, coincidentally at the same time a Panda update was made in March, and she says the site’s been going downhill ever since.
Horowitz tells WebProNews she’s been “hibernating in a cave the past few months coding the new version of the site.”
“I do not believe that we were hit by Panda,” she says in the forum post. “Unlike Panda, which was an instantaneous 50-60% drop in traffic literally overnight, we’ve instead had a steady decrease in traffic every day ever since our launch. At this point, we’re down about 45%. We are using 301 redirects, but our site’s URL structure *DID* change. While we’re on an entirely new platform, the actual content is entirely the same, and there is a 1-to-1 relationship between each page in the old system and the new system (all being 301-redirected).”
Later in the post, she says, “This mess is partially my fault, I will have to admit. As mentioned, we changed our URL structure, and I am 301 redirecting the old URLs to the new URLs. However, we also changed our URL structure last February, right after Panda originally hit. I have to admit that when we first went live, I completely forgot about that. While I was 301 redirecting the old version to the new, I was *NOT* redirecting the old old version to the new for about 72 hours, until I remembered! However, by that time, it was too late, and we ended up with over 500,000 404 errors in Google Webmaster Tools. That has been fixed for quite a few weeks already though.”
In between those two quotes, she details the observations in Google’s behavior with her site she’s not happy with. The first one:
If you visit a page such as: http://www.daniweb.com/web-development/php/17 you will see that the article titles have URLs in the format http://www.daniweb.com/web-development/php/threads/420572/php-apotrophe-issue … However, you can also click on the timestamp of the last post to jump to the last post in the article (a url such as http://www.daniweb.com/posts/jump/1794174)
The /posts/jump/ URLs will 301 redirect you to the full article pages. For example, in this specific example, to http://www.daniweb.com/web-development/php/threads/420572/php-apotrophe-issue/1#post1794174 (the first page of the thread, with an anchor to the specific post).
The page specifies rel=”canonical” pointing to http://www.daniweb.com/web-development/php/threads/420572/php-apotrophe-issue
Why then, does the /posts/jump/ URL show up in the Google search results instead of my preferred URL?? Not only am I doing a 301 redirect away from the /posts/jump/ format, but I am also specifying a rel=”canonical” of my preferred URL.
“I don’t like this at all for a few reasons,” she continues. “Firstly, the breadcrumb trail doesn’t show up in the SERPS. Secondly, there is no reason for Google to be sending everyone to shortened URLs, because now nearly every visitor coming in from Google has to go through a 301 redirect before seeing any content, which causes an unnecessary delay in page load time. Thirdly, the /posts/jump/ URLs all tack on a #post123 anchor to the end, meaning that everyone is being instantaneously jumped halfway down the page to a specific post, instead of getting the complete picture, where they can start reading from the beginning. This certainly isn’t desirable behavior!”
You can read the post for further elaboration.
Dani’s second observation:
After skimming the first 40 or 50 pages of the Google search results for site:daniweb.com, it’s essentially entirely a mix of two types of URLs. Those in the /posts/jump/ format, and links to member profiles. Essentially, two types of pages which are both not what I would consider putting our best foot forward.
We currently have nearly one million members, and therefore nearly one million member profiles. However, we choose to use the rel=”noindex” meta tag directive on about 850,000 of the member profiles, only allowing those by good contributors to be indexed. I think it’s a happy medium between allowing our good contributors to have their profiles found in Google by prospective employers and clients searching for their name, and not having one million member profiles saturate our search results. We allow just under 100,000 of our 950,000+ member profiles to be indexed.
However, as mentioned, it just seems as if member profiles are being ranked too high up and just way too abundant when doing a site:daniweb.com, overshadowing our content. This was no the case before the relaunch, and nothing changed in terms of our noindex approach.
Based on prior experience, the quality of the results when I do a site:daniweb.com has a direct correlation to whether Google has a strong grasp of our navigation structure and is indexing our site the way that I want them to. I noticed when I was going through my Panda ordeal that, at the beginning, doing a site: query gave very random results, listing our non-important pages first and really giving very messy, non-quality results. Towards the end of our recovery, the results were really high quality, with our best content being shown on the first chunk of pages.
The bottom line, it seems, according to Horowitz, is that Google has “no grasp on the structure” of the site. Once again, you can read her post in its entirety for further details and explanation from Horowitz herself.
Until the most recent issue, DaniWeb was clearly having a lot of success in the post-Panda world. When asked what she attributes this success to, Horowitz tells WebProNews, “We were at an all-time high in terms of traffic, and there was still constant growth. I definitely don’t think it was just the Panda recovery but all of the other positive SEO changes I made when we were being Pandalized that contributed to our post-Panda success.”
It goes to show, Panda is just one of many signals Google has (over 200, in fact).
“I’ve already documented just about everything that I did along the way, so there’s not much that I can think of adding,” she says. You can go back through the other links in these articles for more discussion with Dani about all of that. “At the end of the day, I think it just comes down to Google having a really good grasp of your entire site structure.”
“Taking yet another massive hit was completely unexpected for us,” she says. “We launched at the exact same time as Panda rolled out (completely not planned), and therefore I don’t know which to attribute our latest round of issues to. It might be Panda, it might be issues with our new version, it might be a little of both, or it might be new signals that Google is now factoring into their algorithm.”
Google has, of course, been providing monthly updates on many of the new changes it has been making. You can see the list for March here.
There’s no question that search engines, including Google, are putting a lot more emphasis on social media these days. We asked Horowitz if she believes social media played a significant role in DaniWeb’s search visibility.
“Absolutely,” she says. “I can definitely see the value in Twitter and Facebook likes, recommendations, and mentions. I think it just all goes into building a solid brand on the web. I forget where I read somewhere recently about how Google is favoring big brands. I don’t think you need to be a fortune 500 company to have earned a reputation for yourself on the web.”
“While I personally still haven’t quite found the value in Google+, I’m not going to discount it for its part in building brand equity in the eyes of Google, either.”
When asked if Google’s “Search Plus Your World” has been a positive thing for Daniweb, and/or the Google user experience (it’s received a lot of criticism), she says, “I happen to be a fan of personalized search results. Am I the only one?”
We posted a video Google uploaded this week of a Matt Cutts presentation from late January at a webmaster conference in Korea. Here it is again, in case you missed it:
There’s a interesting section of his talk, in which he notes that Google runs over 20,000 search experiments a year. We know Google makes hundreds of changes to its algorithm each year, but Cutts sheds a little more light on the process Google goes when making a change. Here’s one of the slides he showed demonstrating the process a change goes through from the idea stage to the launch stage:
“So these are numbers from 2009, but the proportions, the rough percentages, are about the same,” says Cutts. “We would try out anywhere from 10,000 to 20,000 ideas. Of that, many more thousand, 8,549, we would send to these blind side-by-sides, and then a smaller fraction of that actually get sent out to real users and to see whether users tend to click on the newer results or tend to click on the older results. And the final number changes that we launched last year was 585.”
If you have the time, check out the full 45-minute presentation.
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