SEO Blog

Archive for the ‘google’ Category

, ,

Google to allow gambling ads on its UK Adwords SERPs

In adwords, google on October 16, 2008 at 12:43 pm
Hi, welcome to my blog, please consider subscribing

Pretty big news from Latitude,  Google are to allow gambling ads on UK Adwords!

Due to recent changes in legislation laws surrounding online gambling advertising, Google had decided as of tomorrow to allow gambling PPC adverts to be shown in the UK. They have been speaking direct to clients to ensure all the correct licensing information has been processed in time and there will be a frantic scrap for both clients and their respective agencies to get their accounts setup and put live in time for tomorrow, of which there is no guarantee.

Interesting times indeed, huge move which will shake up the market no end. All sorts of speculation as to why, the obvious one being it’s about the money dummy :)

What next? Alcohol, PR0N? Lean times call for harsh actions, especially when you have a profit annoucement in the offing.

Google Like it – Promote your site in your SERPs

In google, search personlisation on January 20, 2008 at 8:11 pm
13 comments

Here’s an interesting little thing.

This button (fig. 1b) will move the result to the top of the page and add this orange marker (fig. 1a) next to it so you can easily recognize it. The result(s) you promote will appear at the top whenever you search for the same keyword(s) in the future.

Maybe it’s old, I haven’t seen it previously. Looks like one of those personalization of SERP features  that allows you to manipulate your own returned search results.

At the moment it seems like you need a Google account to use the thing, which may be a sign that they’d like to use such signals to affect SERP outcome. Not to mention user demographics, behaviours and all that other track your movement stuff.

What I’d like to know is whether or not they will be taking such factors into account long term. If a lot of people continually push a result to the top, does this mean that it’s a great result, or does it just mean that some group of SEO’s have found a way to cut in and mimic a few natural behaviours? How many Google accounts do you have? ;)

Meanwhile in a search engine vortex oft 53rd street..

In google, matt cutts, naughty list on December 3, 2007 at 7:46 pm
15 comments

pageranktree.gifVery soon, you’ll no longer have to confess to being a sinner in order to use Googles re-inclusion or reconsideration request ( I suspect it’ll be called the take me off the naughty list next week, being xmas and all that)

This is a good thing, a small thing, but a good thing nonetheless. Anything that allows you to challenge without putting you on the back foot from the off, can’t be bad, can it?

Whilst Google are probably of the view that it’s an easy thing to do and even almost a no brainer for them to implement, you do nonetheless find yourself wondering why they employed the whole nasty evil language approach from the outset.

Still, at least now if you find yourself with a white bar or an inability to rank, you can just toodle along to the webmaster tool page and make a bit of a tool of yourself and ask to be let back in, without admitting guilt! Yay! Um…they’ll probably ignore you or leave you where you were at, but at least you get to ask without fessing up! :D

Seriously – it’ll be a good thing if people get feedback, like ‘no dude you have a paid post on blogpost number 234 of your 1500 that you’ve made’ …don’t you agree? Shouldn’t it be a two way process?

I suspect that there’s a strand of thought that runs through the plex of ‘aaaargh, it’s one of those evil bastard spammers asking for some feedback on their evil wicked spammy ways’, and that this might just contribute to a view of ‘let em stew’. But hey, I’ve been wrong once if not a thousand times. I’m sure I’ll be wrong again. :)

Don’t ever bank on free traffic, build on it

In Pagerank, google, marketing, search engines on October 25, 2007 at 8:42 pm
10 comments

Maki wrote a good blog post today that for me spoke about marketing and creating things of value that have the efffect of creating converted users; that’s, people who will buy into whatever it is you do or are trying to achieve.

Be it via a comment, a hit of a subscription button, an add to favourites action , a credit card transaction or a link through to what you wrote or advertised, the bottom line is that without any of these sorts of actions, the likelihood is that you are either writing for yourself or selling something that is overpriced and overvalued or just not worth discussing.

Don’t rely on search engines

Free search engine traffic is great. A most welcome bonus that if used correctly, can help build a following, but that’s where it stops. If you are obsessing about building your rankings then your target sight is off kilter, you are looking at the wrong part of the equation.

Posts like the ones from across the blogosphere today and in the previous weeks regarding PR and paid links should be a wake up call for anyone who is serious about earning a living from a website online. If you remind yourself that your free traffic is very likely to be a transitory thing, if you tell yourself everyday that your free search engine generated traffic is likely to disappear tommorrow, then you’ll be doing yourself a huge favour.

Search Engines are not automated non policed systems, they do employ people to look at certain things and do take actions against people as and when they see fit.

You can complain until the cows come home but at the end of it all, rightly or wrongly they can do whatever the hell they like, when they like and how they like. There is no court of appeal, you can’t storm parliament, go on strike or sit out in the road, neither can you chain yourself to a fence either, if they kill your site and you care about or genuinely need or rely upon the traffic they send to you, then as harsh as it might sound – without a plan or loyal following you might as well just shut up shop, or get used to talking to yourself!

Yeah yeah, so what’s the plan then smarty arse?

Well…but of course there are positives, you don’t have to sit around burying your head in the sand hoping that you are never hit, you can at least try and adopt a meritocratic world view and build real traffic, *your* traffic, people who visit you because others have discussed you in some way because you are doing something or selling something or just saying something that adds value to the world and the playground in which you are kicking your ball around in. Be it via word of mouth or some href piece of html.

Take a look at these blogs here, all of whom have seen a reduction in their visible toolbar PR

Auto Blog
Engadget
Problogger
Copyblogger
SEG
SEJ
Andy
Maki

Then look at their webstats and their site metrics, look at their published subscriber numbers. Look at their Alexa, compete and technorati numbers. Look at the people who are commenting on their stuff, look at how well they are linked to and on what sort of terms. Then ask yourself why that is, I tell you what, I’ll save you the bother with the answer, as the answer is simple – All of the above are quality resources with something to say, it really is that simple.

Maki’s right

Google is an factor that is outside of your control. Sure, you can follow their rules or adjust your behavior to fit in but that still doesn’t put Google within your palm. What do good entrepreneurs do with uncontrollable factors? They create what-if contingency plans to accommodate for possible loss

Sigh – I’ll leave you with this little Portishead track, cos it kinda has a few on target lyrics, ‘you don’t get something for nothing, gotta try a little harder’

Does Google have anything to fear from the blogosphere?

In bullying, google on October 14, 2007 at 2:41 pm
15 comments

Not another paid links post (groan)

The whole paid links are evil for Google idea has been around for some time now. This isn’t a rehash of those. I want to pass comment on how lately that there’s been a lot of Google ill feeling going on, with an increasing number of prominent people speaking out against them. I say ill feeling as hate is too strong a word. Practically all of it is related to the whole paid links and nofollow thing.

What’s particularly interesting for me is how this whole thing seems to have grown legs and started to spread tentacles. It’s almost as if Google needs a new target and that, that target is the blogosphere. Not content with having made it’s SERP’s a tenuous we might kill you at any time place to inhabit, they now seem intent on saying to anyone in their index or who want’s traffic from them, ‘Do as you are told or we will kick your arse’. I won’t rehash any positions that have been expressed previously as these and variations on the theme can be read elsewhere.

History does repeat itself

I think its’s noteworthy to recall that there once was a time when I’d read at WMW and see accounts whereby people had been banned or penalised.

WMW had its constituents of Pro Google – Google is great, Google is great, Google is great brigade all chanting from on high like Sadaam Hussein in some pre Jihadic rant and they too had their opposing voice of anti Googles’, speaking of Google in terms of it being the great Satan and what not. All of which was handled in magnificent form by that omnipresent soother of words GoogleGuy. A curious beast who seldom put a foot wrong, often coming up with double entendre statements that neither denied or confirmed any number of theories. It was ok, a game, a fun one even that I played and enjoyed reding between the lines looking for inconsistencies and clues for what he was trying to debunk versus promote.

A little look at the state of play today and one might be forgiven for thinking that Mr GoogleGuy has been cloned and put out there in the field parroting similiar double speak crap designed to shroud and confuse. Ha! There’s a funny thought, can you imagine a FUD meeting and the discussions arising?

Let’s face facts – Words that could destabilise a multi-billion dollar cash cow are not just going to be left to the whims of one or two individuals playing some fun filled game of lead webmasters up the garden path. There is a strategic approach and right now it’s being executed with stone cold precision.

Has the blogosphere got any balls?

The thing is though, what, if anything can or will the blogosphere do about it? Will everyone just roll over? Will those A-listers getting heaps of nice monetisable Google traffic just keep quiet and say nothing? Or will they take the lead and address the issue for what it is – Which so happens to be a serious and concerted attack on a group of individuals and their right to monetise their works – Heck maybe that great opportunist Calacanis will see a crusadery angle and buy in, or is he too just waiting the Google $ for his Mahalo project?

Why is everyone so scared? Is it really about biting a hand that might feed you, or staving off an attack from something that might kill you? People like Michael Gray and Aaron Wall and John Andrews seem happy enough to tell it like it is, they aren’t too bothered, they don’t stand for the nonsense, why then should any of us?

Harsh – Far fetched a description even?

It’s debatable for sure, you’ve got to choose where to sit in one way or another and if you straddle the fence for too long you’ll be likely to get piles. My “not worth the screen pixels it inhabits maybe” opinion, is that in this instance on this topic, that Google has gone too far and is engaging in behaviour which is reasonable to label as arrogant bullying.

The Google of old would not have come out with guns blazing, nor would it have had the balls to tell people so forcefully, “yes we kicked your arse and we’ll kick it again too if you do that again”.

I was always taught to stand up to bullies. I was taught that if you succumb to their attacks, if you don’t get up there and hit them back smack right hard in the mouth, then they’ll keep on coming back at you, time after time. It might well hurt to do so too, but overtime they’ll get tired of fighting with you and either reconsider their position or move on to different pastures and pick on some easier target.

Maybe some at Google have read too much B F Skinner and decided that a positive reinforcement of the negatives inside the box that is the blogosphere might be one particular way to slay this threat to their income stream.

What is that I hear you say – Paid links are not a threat to their income stream, there really is enough to go around already – they really could have just quietly circumvented the effects without so much brouhaha? Perhaps so, or perhaps they decided that wackamole just isn’t a scalable solution.

Wackamole costs money

Maybe its the whole game of having to filter out the paid effect. Perhaps someone somewhere decided that spending a few million dollars each year on snitches and paid reviewers could be better spent on some big concerted “do it again or do what he did and we’ll kill you” approach. Yet, even if this were the case, they surely can’t be so naive as to think everyone would just say “Oh right, ok then Google, you’re the boss we’ll stop that right now and do what you tell us” Google has to realise that it has no right to a monopoly on making money.

It’s as if there is this obsession within them that seeks at all costs to clamp down hard on anyone who is visibly gaming them. Yet when you look at that whole ‘gaming’ word and look into what could be construed as gaming then you’ll appreciate that the ground becomes very shakey if not like quicksand itself. Where is the line drawn? When do the very creation of properly structured content that uses H tags and relevant keywords, that attracts links from other sites suddenly cross the line? Bah phooey.

Don’t do evil

The recent attack on sites that discuss blog monetisation are one very obvious example. A number of excellent blogs have had their visible PageRank reduced. Interestingly all of these blogs talk about how you can earn money from blogging or how you can best monetise your blog or website. Practically all of them simply observe and comment upon what works and what doesn’t. All of the ones to which I allude have written comprehensive well considered pieces that offer a perspective on how people might like to prosper with their blogs. The message from all is clear – hard work, quality, consistency – anyone who’d suggest that within the grand scheme of the idea of making money online, that these didn’t add considerable value would need to go and get their reality checker fixed. Yet for Google, if their Pagerank meter is adjudged to have any merit or meaning at all, it’s clear that to them at least all of the sites penalised in this way are of low merit or value.

Oh well, I’ve vented my spleen now, and said my bit. I’m kinda tired of railing against the machine, for a machine is what Google has become, a machine that has way too much power and influence that I as an individual can do very little about.

Damn, its 330pm, time to cook that Sunday lunch.

[poll=9]

Google penalizes for paid links and promoting yourself

In google, penalties on October 7, 2007 at 3:12 pm
32 comments

I was going to post this in a comment at Sphinn, but decided to blog it instead.

It related to Google and how they apply penalties to sites who talk about or do things in ways they don’t like. Some people think Google doesn’t penalise for paid links, I disagree, as the evidence seems to suggest otherwise.

Anyhow, this post isn’t completely about paid links, its more about the whole penalty process and the culture that allows it to happen and how it’s just very dificult to challenge or do anything about even.

Two people recently have seen some kind of negative action from Google.

AndyBeard’s visible toolbar drop and David Aireys ranking penalty.

Davids’ has been reversed, whilst Andys’ might not even be a long term thing, so might be a little early to call.

Both of these got me thinking about the whole power and responsiblity theme. Google have lots of power yet at times seem to behave in ways that aren’t the most responsible. Whether they like it or not we do hold them up to greater standards than most, the reasons behind which I couldn’t really do justice to. That said, there is no harm with at least putting a few ideas out there nd see what others think at least.

Transparency is the way forward?

I’d love to be able to read a ‘process’ document on this whole we are penalizing your arse thing. Google have a process. It’s called the reinclusion process. Basically, you check a little box and admit to being evil, they then read what you have to say and restore you if they agree or ignore you if they don’t.

This clearly sucks arse and I don’t doubt has more than pissed offor frustrated a person or two.

Anyhow, I was wondering. Do all ‘quality’ reviewers have the power to instantly penalise, or do they have to justify their position and have 3 or 4 other people agree on their interpretation. If so, is this process fair, should there be more feedback, perhaps a communication of some form? Or is it really ok to just leave people twisting in the wind?

The rules are the rules are the rules…

I know that it isn’t a legal thing, but it is a rule thing. It’s about breaking the rules ,or in the case of Google ‘the guidelines’ and of course it’s their subjective interpretation too. We all know they are a private for profit company, free to do what they like to people who in their opinion who have crossed one of their lines.

Yet it does need to be said that they do have a massive responsibility, yet seem to pay little public heed or acknowledgment of this fact, at least within the microcosm of dealing with individuals.

They might well run around in their $ fuelled PR mobiles postulating how much of a wonderful company they are, they might well be seen to be the fantastic tax generating, profit generating force for good that they are for so many people, and in lots of way there is no disputing that at all, on balance they do a hell of a lot of good things. Yet, that doesn’t mean that the little guy contributing 0.000000000001% to any bottom line shouldn’t matter or in any way count. Doesn’t he still deserve his day in court? His right to reply, his chance to dig his hole deeper even?

Respecting your roots

Whether we like it or not, thanks to many of us (talking them up in the early years) they are now the defacto gateway to the net, a massive percentage of individuals see google and search as synonymous.

Accepting the aforementioned, is it not fair to suggest that when they take action against sites for transgressions, that these actions should have some kind of universality?

Why is it that sites like Davids’ can be hit hard and quick, yet other sites using similar tactic are not? When no action is taken against the big boys for the self same thing then perhaps its no real surprise when people begin to question the integrity of the processes within.

Are they so surprised that if this perception exists that we then put their processes under a greater degree of scrutiny and question their very right to behave is this way? Some might ask, where is the natural justice!

It’s supposed to be a democratic fair world

In the bricks and mortar world of hyper reality, if you are stopped by an officer of the law and accused of breaking a law then you have an option of arguing your case in an open court of law.

2 possible outcomes – guilty, pay the cost, innocent, walk free.

If you are found guilty then whatever way you look at it you suffer, you pay a price; monetarily you suffer. You can appeal too of course, and where so you get the opportunity to hear the reasoning behind any judgement.

If we apply that analogy to Google then we see it falls down somewhat, simply because their business status allows them too. They can hide behind their ‘right’ to act like any other for profit. It’s funny because microsoft once thought they could do the same, justice caught up with them eventually too.

Think about it though, can you imagine a world where you were pulled off the street, muzzled, dismissed from your job, thrown into some padded cell where very few could hear you? How crap would that be! Yet this is the very thing that Google can do to site owners today, acting like some errant bully able to do what it likes and to whom it likes.

Don’t like what we did? Sue us…, we got more money than you and can hide behind the complexities of our proprietary systems and concepts of free enterprise.

Monoply sucks, especially when you lose

The bottom line is that in law or society there is no recognition of their almost monopolistic status on this search stuff, and no apparent will to really do anything about it either. It’s just too easy to hide behind ideas of algorithms and editorial rights and private enterprise.

Yeah yeah, I know a governmentally controlled SE would probably be as bad if not worse, but hell at least we’d be able to hold individuals up to account, examine the decisions, debate the reasons why.

I don’t think it really washes too well to say things similar to , “oh, you know, we’d love to say more and share more with webmasters when we encounter things that we aren’t too comfortable with as to do so would reveal more about our algorithm and processes than we would be happy to share..”, simply because people should be told more, people should have the right to know why some 800lb Gorilla is slamdunking them in the mush and obliterating their voice.

Hit the are you feeling lucky button

David Airey is a fortunate guy. Very few people receive similar treatment. Most are just ignored to the hinterlands. I don’t wish to appear to be mean to David when I say this, but the fact is that Davids’ good fortune is more related to the collective discussion that ensued around his penalty. A less plugged in blogger, IMO, might have struggled to achieve the same outcome.

People can get knocked out of the SERPs just like that. It happens for all sorts of reasons too you only have to be on the wrong end of a conversation before kaput, your 10 year labour of love is suddenley dying in a ditch with little hope for resuscitation, shouldn’t this all be a little more open?

[poll=8]

Ghosts in the Google Machine and Seeing Double

In 302's, google, hacking on September 25, 2007 at 9:02 am
5 comments

David over at science text alerted me to a story that I missed regarding Google and some strange accounts of ‘indexed’ websites that don’t exist installing malaware and viri on Google user machines.

  • Some searches (very specific phrases, and I won’t list any of them right now – Google knows which they are) return results with a large number of .cn (Chinese) sites.
  • The .cn sites are often scraped content from legitimate U.S. websites
  • The legitimate sites are being ranked below the scammed .cn sites for these competitive keywords.

    • Just another hijack story?

    Nothing so new there, we’ve all read accounts of scraper sites outranking ‘legitimate’ sites for their content often by use of a 302 ‘hijack‘ . It’s pretty easy to scrape content and slap a few ads around it here and there, and in fairness to the engines it’s not the easiest thing to eliminate, especially in a world of rss and syndicated content.

    I’m going to be a little lazy and summise that those clever so and so’s use a little commonsense and hook up with the various ping services that blogs like wordpress use when publishing new content. This would you’d think give them a good way of being able to establish who published what 1st where and when. Grab the timestamp , put it into a database and bob’s your uncle. This way, any duplicate content that followed wouldn’t be classed as the original source and would be ranked beneath that of the original.

    Don’t trust the authorities…

    Ok so not every website out there has a ping script installed so perhaps the above scenario is indicative of a problem within the Google ranking machine with its reliance and trust in link data and authority scores. If site A happens to have a higher trust level than site B, and Site A decides to use content from site B, then in a scenario where Site A is indexed more frequently than say site B (because of its higher authority score) then there is a very real chance that Google will decide that the rightful owner of the content is Site A and not the original publisher site B.

    Google advise people who syndicate content to embed a link within it so that its googlebot sees a link back to the original source and handles it correctly.

    Syndicate carefully: If you syndicate your content on other sites, Google will always show the version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you’d prefer. However, it is helpful to ensure that each site on which your content is syndicated includes a link back to your original article. You can also ask those who use your syndicated material to block the version on their sites with robots.txt.

    Whilst this may well work fine and dandy for people who are behaving themselves, it’s clearly inadequate for those who are not.

    It doesn’t take too much effort to strip an href out of a piece of html. Web scripting languages come complete with all manner of string functions that enable a person to do all manner of imaginative things with some text or HTML. A person looking to rank higher with someone else’s content can rank higher up in a SERP and deprive the rightful owner of both kudos and traffic.

    Has this aspect of their systems contributed to this problem? Is it soley attributable to this particular flaw in their algo? I doubt it, but at the end of it all it sure looks like its contributing.

    List my non existent domain please

    The amazing thing about the story from the site calling itself googlewatchdog is that it appears that someone has managed to fool the googlebot completely, getting it to list domain names that do not even exist.

  • The .cn sites don’t appear to be hosted ANYWHERE. They are simply redirected domain names. How they got ranked in Google in such a short period of time for fairly competitive keywords is a mystery. Google’s index even shows legitimate content for the .cn sites.
  • It appears that the faked sites are redirecting the Googlebot to a location where content can be indexed, while at the same time recognizing normal users and redirecting them to a site that includes the malware mentioned earlier. This is an obvious violation of Google’s guidelines, but the spammers have found ways to circumvent the rule and hide it from the Googlebot.
  • These sites are numbering in the millions for many different keywords and phrases, and appear to be developed on an automated basis. Because of privacy laws, it’s hard to track down who owns the domain names – Google has the power to do so, but there has been about exactly zero information from Google about the problem so far, and even many SEO experts and webmasters are not picking up on it.

    • I’m sure that this has made quite a few people sit up and think hmmn how mad is that. How did they do that then. People can spoof user agents and redirect people or bots all over the shop. They can cloak content and have in the past confused the Google technology into believing that an indexed page resided at one place, when in fact it resided elsewhere. This commonly became known as the 302 hijack a phenomenon that Google stayed silent on for some considerable time, refusing to concede its existence. There were literally hundreds upon hundreds of posts at places like Webmasterworld and the busier webmaster and SEO forums from people complaining about how their content had been replaced by other domains using it as some kind of bait and switch tool.

    Yet this one seems different. Very different indeed in that somehow they’ve managed to get around all the accepted safeguards causing Google to output stuff that was at best inaccurate and at worst decidedly harmful to the recipient computer.

    There is of course always the possibility that the people concerned are unaware of an errant piece of scumware that is simply hijacking their browsers and taking over the Google SERP from David’s piece quoting Dr Jenny Oliver

    “I can’t remember what I put in to search with,” she told me, “as I was idly surfing last night, my Mac was suddenly very busy for several seconds as if installing a program.” She rebooted very quickly after that, but her net connection seemed to have become ominously slow.

    Yet this was after she had clicked and not before. Perhaps she was already infected is a chorus I hear from behind, yet David does go on to say that he too saw it with his own eyes on his own pc, seroundtable also provide a screenshot and a little more background and it seems that the Spam team are aware of the issue too.

    If it is true, then its a big step up from the conventional means of manipulating the Google index. To get into the results for such well known keywords is a bit of a blackhat coup de force and of course a huge headache for the Google technology team too.

    How long before this is plugged? God knows. It’s fair to draw the conclusion that we are very unlikely to hear Google say “Yeah, our index isn’t impregnable, spammers can get right on in and do what they like” It’ll either be bluntly denied or dismissed as some kind of browser hijack. We will no doubt see… Interesting nonetheless :)

    Does the Google Algorithm rank pages fairly?

    In algos, google on September 12, 2007 at 1:13 pm
    15 comments

    [poll=6]

    What do you think? What factors should, in your opinion be counted most in any algo. Is there too much emphasis on link pop? Are authority scores poorly arrived at? What, if anything would you do that would improve it?

    Unfairness inherent in authorities – just another flaw in an algo

    In Search marketing, advertising, algos, google, loans, msn, search engines, spam, yahoo on September 11, 2007 at 9:59 am
    4 comments

    Before I say too much else I just wanted to say that generally in most cases I think it unnecessary to be too specific when highlighting the failings and flaws of others. It’s too easy to point fingers and say, oh look at how crap so and so is, or look at how so and so are doing that. In most cases it’s simply not necessary, you can say the same thing without making an enemy for yourself.

    Why am I gabbing on about this? Well I guess I’ve been partially inspired by a piece by a guy named Loren Baker at search engine journal, a site I read regularly and most of the time simply love to bits. Yet today, I was left with a bit of a hmmmn taste in my mouth asking myself whether it was really necessary to out the guys he did in the way he did. In one fell swoop he has effectively smashed the revenue stream of one particular website ( or seriously diminished its efficacy) and no doubt condemned the sites advertising to declining revenue streams at some latter point.

    The power of the written word eh?

    Ok, so sure , anyone could have dobbed these guys in via a search engine report link, we all know that and hey perhaps people have already. The point is though that SEJ is read regularly has a hefty subscriber base what is written there is practically guaranteed to be read by Googlies and Yahoos and Msn search dudes. I don’t know Loren, so I can’t comment on the type of guy he is or even try to second guess his motives. At worst he might have a payday loans site at position 11 and at best he might just be as perplexed as us all by the apparent power of the noscript tag and authority domains and is wondering why this is still so effective, I expect it is the latter.

    Where is the juice – Noscript tag or Authority domain?

    To think that noscript content could have such an impact on SERPs in isolation would be pretty silly.

    Lets get this straight right here right now. The noscript tag is no magic bullet. The examples highlighted at SEJ are not (or weren’t) sitting at positions 1 and 3 in Google simply because of a few links contained in a noscript tag, they were there because the sites that contained their links were from sites of multiple themes and disciplines all of which contained the hit counter code from Hitcountermaster.com.

    False authority too easily attained

    Why does (or soon to be did) Hitcountermaster.com have so much power and authority?

    For those of you who may have been asleep for the past 3 or so years, domain authority in SEM terms relates to a domains ability to rank or convey link juice or pass pagerank. The idea is that if enough domains are linking to a singular site then it might well mean that the site or sites being linked to from so many different points (domains) in the web graph, could well be an on topic site for the keywords being used to link through to it. It’s one of the reasons why blogs and SMO sites are considered favourably in the search ranking fraternity. The idea is bolstered by the belief that individual bloggers are less interested in gaming search engine rankings than the minority of so called SEO’s and webmasters that are. The democratic effect of lots of people talking about a topic dictate that this social effect should be looked at and noticed and absorbed in any over all ranking score.

    This all sounds somewhat perfect and idylic even. A meritocritous way of ranking sites from the social chatter ofweblogs and other live mediums. Harder to game, seemingly more reliable in any scoring system.

    The applied semantic technology of old (we were told) was a vital tool for classifying content into its various themes and classifications. People have blogged and bragged about the importance of getting on topic themed links from related sources ( me included at some point I’m sure) yet when we look at that example it shows that in reality huge aspects of all this is bollocks. Forget your themed links from the right sites and directories, feck that, just go out and get any type of link from any type of domain that you can for your singular target keyword and…kazaaam, you’ll get the rank you want.

    I was going to show what I meant further by using the Google link command link:http://www.hitcountermaster.com yet curiously it shows no backlinks already, I wonder why that might be ;)

    Anyways, not to worry we can use Yahoo’s site explorer with that funny old seo-rd parameter that they like to chuck in there and note that there are actually 2500 + reported backlinks for that domain. I can’t say whether this accurate or not as the SE’s may already have applied their SEO paranoid counter measures, but the point is, that a cursory glance over the sites shown reveals that domains that used the hitcounter code were from a very broad range of domains and blogs. They were not all from finance or loan related sites, in fact very very few of the sites discussed finance or laons in anyway at all!

    Their backlinks came from .edu’s, .orgs, .coms, .co.uk blogs, websites about religion, books, wood, horses in fact you name it and there was probably a site of one sort or another linking back to hitcountermaster.com’s advertisers.

    What it sreveals is that Google in particular doesn’t appear to work too hard in establishing domain authority. It seems to rely on numbers and not very much else. Why else would an uber competive term like payday loans be so easily and readily attainable?

    Success for attaining payday loan SERP numero uno status was arrived at just like this.

    1. Create a keyword domain that discussed finance and loan stuff within its content.

    2. Get lots of links from lots of different domains with your ideal keywords

    Yep, that was all there was to it. No need to get the right types of links from the right types of sites, just get links of whatever type and you are good to go.

    So they went to hitcountermaster.com and checked out their advertising rates and happily used their advertising program to boost them up the SERP’s. Hitmastercounter.com had domain authority, built upon the juice conveyed back from the 1000’s of domains and sites that linked backed to it within their code. This told Google and perhaps other search engines that here was a site that was being linked to from lots of different domains and IP addresses. It must therefore, be some kind of useful resource and worthy of whatever authority score the algo decided to bestow.

    Yet, if you look at that and weigh it against the idea of the social web and multiple voices linking to singular things with related keywords then you see that in this regard, hitmastercounter.com just shouldn’t have been in the same kind of crowd. It hadn’t done anything wrong, hit counters have been around long before Google or link text algorithms; it’s how they work, they sit on a site and link back to the mothership to read things like referals and times and dates and click paths.

    So to me at least it shows that the whole ‘authority’ thing is at best a little weak and at worst completley and utterley underdeveloped. Why isn’t the algo detecting multiple same text incursions?

    Why doesn’t it count the number of instances of keyword anchor text and decide that a number above a certain threshold or % maybe skewed and perhaps marked down a touch?

    Why doesn’t it look insider the containers of where these links are found and make a judgement on that basis. In the payday loan example all of the links were inside a noscript tag! Yet, the algo again didn’t detect this fact and allowed the domain to rank for its keywords.

    Why doesn’t it look at the placement of the code itself and notice a pattern? Whatever happened to the concept of Block Level Link Analysis?

    The tactic as described is nothing new, there are 1000’s of others all doing the same. Just go to do a search on Google or yahoo fro free hit counter and see who is advertising. I’d bet that most are employing similar tactics to boost their own sites or sites of clients up the SERPs. It’s an exploit that is likely to be grown and adapted.

    Is it going to be closed anytime soon? Hell, who knows. Surely it doesn’t take too much effort to say if link is this or that then discount its value. It makes you wonder what some of those search guys get up to all day…

    Google Backlinks

    In google, search engines, seo on February 7, 2007 at 9:42 am
    7 comments

    Matt tells us all about the new Google backlinks feature in the webmaster console.

    I had a little look at this and must confess, think its pretty cool in an ‘ooh this is interesting kind of way’.

    The numbers aside, what I really liked was how it enables you to drill down to individual pages and see the number of external links pointing to each URI.

    If you have a good site with lots of different types of content a thing like this is a handy feature. If there are a high number of links to a certain page, then it could mean that this page is adding lots of value to lots of different people, which could be interpreted as a do-more-of-this type-of-thing signal. Sure, you could find out similar stuff from logfile analysis too, but it might take a little longer to identify such specifics.

    I’m not going to say too much on this as much of it has already been said. What I’d like to see in addition would be a few extras like.The ability to identify what types of links these were; eg were they nofollow, what is the makeup of the anchor text, what were the dates these links were 1st encountered/registered, what is the pagerank of these external in links, how do my pages rank for their target terms. Sure, again, I could go out and look at these things myself, Google could make it all a bit easier though. Maybe someone could make a little app that enabled people to plugin their csv datasets and obtain such a report.

    Anyone for a spot of cURLing?  ;)

    Will a long Blogroll flush your site down the search engine ranking toilet?

    In blogging, blogrolls, google, links, search, seo, social media on January 23, 2007 at 10:35 am
    10 comments

    Brad wrote an interesting piece today which got me thinking about the topic of linking out, authority scores, pagerank leakage and all those old chestnuts.

    Lots of papers out there on PageRank and theories and counter theories on how linking out can effect your PR adversely/positively and all that, so I’m not going to rehash any of those arguments.

    I have to confess, there was a time when I was kinda obsessed with the whole SEO PR leakage thing too, worring about ‘bleeding’ precious PR and all that jazz, however I do think the ‘game’ has moved on a little, in terms of the SE algo’s have matured to a more considered examination of what is and what is not a good or a bad page worth ranking. Why do I think this? Well just go and look at a few well ranking sites and see how they link out. One immediate one that springs to mind is Wikipedia, although their recent decision to stick a nofollow tag on their outbounds may come back and bite them ( I hope) ;) .

    Read the rest of this entry »

    Google Ranking – Want to perform well? Bring on the subs.

    In google, marketing, ranking, subdomains, wordpress on January 17, 2007 at 3:05 pm
    2 comments

    If you’ve ever launched a new website, especially since 2005, then you’ll know that it can take quite some time to be found for your target kw’s and phrases within the search engines.This is a little look at Google and how it treats new domains and how trust and authority are bestowed from parent domains to subdomains and how it can be an effective strategy in kick starting a new campaign, without excessive reliance on PPC campaigns.
    I launched a new subdomain on the 1st January 2007. It fitted in with one of my new years resolutions of blog regularly.

    I wrote a few posts about various odds and sods as and when they occured to me. I gave them logical titles and didn’t give too much thought to any SEO’d page content and structure strategy. It was a Wordpress subdomain in the form of robwatts.wordpress.com.

    SEO – Brain surgery? Perhaps not, but its not so far off!

    In google, html, php, search engines, seo, sql on January 11, 2007 at 12:00 pm
    2 comments

    Reading this blog here from oilman got me thinking about SEO and how people value their worth in terms of what they charge for their services and how some of what he is saying about others and their denigrating what we do can impact upon us negatively.

    Putting to one side all those idiots who say they will submit your site to the search engines for a one off fee of $100 solicited by way of some awful looking spam email or adsense ad somewhere. Those tosspots really don’t help the situation as they help paint a perception that there really is nothing to what people like me do, when the obverse is so blindingly obviously true!

    Read the rest of this entry »

    Watch your CMS – it could be getting you into trouble

    In blogging, google, seo, spam on January 8, 2007 at 1:10 pm

    Graywolf blogged about some Disney Blog getting  de-indexed for hidden text.

    Seems that some blogging platforms/cms’s have issues that could get your site removed  for web spamming by inserting text  that is hidden.

    One commenter there had this to say:

    Some freely available Wordpress templates (specifically from blogthemes.com)contain hidden links from the designer linking to certain cancer websites. I am sure most people do not see that as it is kind of sneaky.

    I do wonder why they don’t just ignore  such aspects for ranking purposes. If its identified as hidden algorithmically then it can be ignored as a ranking factor too…no? Or am I missing some bigger picture here.

    Say no to splogging and yes to blogging

    In blogging, google, seo, spam, splogging, splogs on January 8, 2007 at 10:42 am
    3 comments

    Say yes to Blogging

    So, Ive blogged now for a little over a week. Ok, so Ive blogged in the past on other topics, but not as consitently or comprehensively; at least in the sense of making posts longer than 20 or 30 words and posting everyday writing unique and semi compelling stuff!

    Why am I so surprised that I’m actually enjoying writing about things I find interesting, amusing and entertaining? I haven’t got any huge audience or anything like that, and to be frank I’m not too bothered. I’m just enjoying the process. Its cathartic even, its good to talk.

    As Ive said previously. I have blogged before. Some of the stuff I blogged on was kinda personal. I blogged about my divorce for example, it was an excellent vehicle that helped deal with a shitty time in my life. Ive blogged about my everyday life – its ups and its downs, mostly just sporadic moans and rants.

    Read the rest of this entry »

    Google is Beta-Testing Keyword-based Ad Filtering

    In adsense, contextual advertising, google on January 3, 2007 at 7:29 pm

    This could be kinda cool for publishers. Caydel reports that Google is beta testing keyword based ad filtering. Publishers will be able to input negative keywords so that low priced cpm or cpc ads won’t show…

    Hmmn, interesting eh? How many times have you seen ads that made you think what’s all that about then, a 0.07 cent ad how cool, not!

    I’m hardly a PPC or adsense expert but Ive played with both so can see a few advantages and disadvantages here.

    For advertisers, dependant upon take up and use, couldn’t this well push up costs? As publishers exclude low cost kw’s from appearing, then there would as a consequence be less playgrounds to play in. Less exposure = less clicks =  less revenue/higher cost conversions overall…no? It would also have an impact on the adwords/adsense arbitragers out there too. It’ll sure squeeze their capacity to get that ultra low cost traffic.

    As far as publishers go, would it be all good? Or could they overstep the mark and exclude too many kw’s, just to be left with PSA’s or alt url ad outputs.

    Will be an interesting one to watch!

    Affiliate thoughts for 2007 – keeping ahead of the chop

    In Aff Marketing, google, search, seo on January 1, 2007 at 7:24 pm

    Easy come easy go… 

    It’s no news to say that the days of easy rankings with easy commissions are long gone. With some search engines, it just no longer works. Anyone, and lots are, can whack up a DB or add a feed from some central source. It’s child play, and from a search engine viewpoint its just not welcome. They’d be happy to kick yo ass as soon as look at ya, and who could reasonably blame them? You can have the most well linked, beautifully constructed site in the world full of some mythical kw density perfection, css’ed to the nth with elements positioned to the max, but if you aren’t saying anything new, then the chances are that things could get pretty serious pretty quickly. Search engine death could well become you. Sure, you’ll get spidered, but expect to go supplemental pretty quickly, and if that don’t happen then you might get extra lucky and get lumbered with a nice fat -31 ranking penalty.

    Fat or thin?

    Over the years, there’s been quite a bit of discussion on what constitutes a thin or a fat affiliate. Lets look at travel. Fat boys like tripadvisor for example, are flying with lots of top spots on a range of travel related kw’s whereas others are floundering.

    I recall a time when for like, 4 or 5 years a particular little travel network absolutely kicked arse on all of the big 3, Google, Msn and Yahoo. Be it ‘hotel in town‘ or  ’town hotels’ these guys had top spots usually in the top 5 positions. They were nothing other than a well constructed, well linked network of affiliate feeds that did little other than pump out content that their suppliers provided. It really was an education to look at what these people had done. Their strategy was for the time, basically fab. They hosted a variety of big sites across a variety of IP’s. They mixed pages up with a mishmash of approaches doing things like varying page element factors, curtailing product description content, differing kw and kp densities, different navigational placement, text types, god you name it they’d factored it in one way or another, and it paid them big dividends. I guess really it was a day when it was all about getting as many pages into the search engine db’s as you possibly could. Their duplicate content filters were so underdeveloped that provided you did enough variation in the places that mattered, ie page naming, title tags, H tags general kw peppering here and there in your content spread etc, then you’d be pretty ok. In fact you got massively rewarded and could do some great stuff with inward link creation too. You didn’t have to worry about going out and sourcing zillions of links from here there and everywhere, you’d just create your own and ensure that they were appropriately placed and hidden across a network of unidentifiables, albeit in the sense of what the spider saw and registered at least!

    A different breed of engine

    Today of course, these guys are nowhere to be seen, at least not in any recognisable guise. Their network was nuked and they don’t rank for jack no more. Things like the Google eval team have given people using that particular strategy a short sharp shock.

    New generation networks, if they hope to have sustainable long term SERP viability have to be a whole lot smarter in 007. Content feeds and databases, particularly with regard to outputting their contents within a site needs special attention – noindex tags, robot exclusion protocols really are serious considerations, to not do so could really be a huge folly. Drastic?,Perhaps so, but what with duplication filters and all, the question is one of almost can you afford not to?

    Sure, there will always be those who look to employ methods for circumvention, all that lovely content is just too good to pass up on after all, right? Not sure about you, but I’ve seen all manner of interesting adaptations; things like replacing keywords and phrases programmatically so that an aspect of a phrase like um…this hotel is decorated to a fine standard  is changed to read… this fine placename hotel is adorned to a splendid configuration instead, or variations upon that theme. I’ve seen sites that rank well by using contractions of product descriptions, eg chopping the first 40 characters from the phrase and outputting the remainding 180 chars. Ive seen others that just hide them all together, via a document.write or iframe method. Some go as far as employing people to write phantom reviews, and some even write programs that write reviews on the fly! It really is incredible to see the ingenuity and nous that people have with this stuff, it really is the most elegant of elegant of spamination. I think its fair to say that people do this because they realise that things may well be tenuous, they know that unless you are whitelisted then you need to tread very carefully as your income stream is very precarious.

    As simple as adding value then…

    Perhaps its simple though, isn’t it all about  thinking  in terms of adding value, going above and beyond what your competitors are doing, seriously asking yourself will you be able to pass some random manual inspection, which lets face it, if you are ranking in a competitive earning space, you are likely to receive sooner or later. You’d be an idiot for thinking that just because you managed to outwit the bot via some clever use of string functions, or tag placement or link generation that a human wouldn’t pick up and notice something amiss.It isn’t unreasonable to assume they’d ask whether your site handles all the look up processes - Does it check for availability – Are the payments handled insite, or do they go off elsewhere?-  They’d see through a hidden frame or  include or some obfuscated url redirect,  you just will not be able to get away with what you once did, and if you think you will then, i wish i could share your complacency, as any serious examination of what you do would look at exactly some of these things.

    On the positive, some of the better providers and networks do offer more advanced solutions of course, this helps insulate both them and their partners and is basic good business sense, but lots don’t too and for those who are getting hit via various penalties resulting, its a bit of a shame at best and a damn tragic waste at worst.

    Should these guys be helping their income generators in this way?

    If you are a search rep then you’d prolly say no, it sucks and doesn’t help in the goal of delivering varied unique content, but OTOH why would any big supplier expose themselves to the vagueries of singular url streams of income that could be cut off at the whim of a policy shift. I know what I’d say of course, I go with the majority scatter and seed approach. Watch the darwinian process evolve and reward my best performers. I’d also help nurture and protect  newcomers too, my future top performers. Give them tools to get their users interacting, enable the creation of communities,  feedback tools, make it all that little bit different, employ advisors to help steer and encourage and generally add value all round, but I guess i’m me, and not some multi layered corp that moves real slow.

    I’ve used travel as its any easy example to flesh out and one that I’m at least familiar with. I do wonder whether other sectors face similar challenges; I expect they do no doubt to both lesser and greater extents, especially in some of the mass product markets. It would be great to read some inputs, feel free to call me out!

    Google and People and 007

    In google, search on January 1, 2007 at 10:57 am
    2 comments

    I was just over at Matt Cutts’s blog reading his thoughts on some of the challenges that he sees  Google generally facing through 007. He talked about Googlers in general almost suggesting that they were of the same pod, well not directly perhaps, but it was a thought that occured to me; and kinda got me thinking on this whole corp structure and ethos thing. Why do some organisations flourish whilst others flounder? Great management really does matter, not just of business and ideas, but people too.

    Its interesting how people who work for a large organisation can often split or diversify into different mindsets. A company that treats its workforce well, as in gives good reward, recognition and purpose can do exceptionally well and take on all comers. It really is possible to get groups of people all singing and dancing from the same collective hymn sheet. Iv’e never worked at Google, to my knowledge ive not even physically met a Google employee, but I have watched a bod or 2 over the years, Matt Cutts to be specific. Matt’s online persona is pretty cool. He enages and crosses swords with all sections of the web community and seems to have a knack for staying balanced and true to his core message. You’ll never read Matt slating anybody in a rude or disrespectful way; hell, even when he gets mad at people he manages to inject a little dryness and humour, just go look at his blog and see if you can pick out the odd ass or two! Ok, so im in danger of sounding like I’m a paid up memeber of the MC fan club , I’m not, there’s quite a bit I could say that would give a different opinion, but thats for another day of course and is more Google policy than direct Matt related. No, the point Im getting to is that corporations, organisations, teams, are lead from the front. People stand to  gain a great deal of benefit from those who have purpose and vision. Shared purpose and values are a formidable force in any sphere of life and can be the making or breaking of an organisation.

    A few years back I worked for a company; this company was locked in battle, split right down the middle. Workforce vs management. There existed 2 separate collective identities. Management were commited to winning. Great you’d say, ah but no, let me tell you. It was not so great at all.Management were commited all right, but for the wrong reasons. They were commited to trying to break the organisation of the workforce rather than growing any shared objective of the business and its values. They took great pains publically to paint a face of concilliation and shared objectives, yet their actions suggested that their motives were all together different.

    The workforce representatives were just as bad. Most were locked into ideas of the past, ideas that had an inherent mistrust for the motives and pressures of business resisting change at every opportunity, lobbying intensley to ensure that public ownership was maintained and sustained. There was a complete lack of trust towards any idea that through shared objectives, shared vision, shared rewards the organisation could grow and prosper and move forward united, competing on the stage that rightly or wrongly is global capitalism.

    God, when I think back to where it stood in say 1996 it really did have some massive opportunities to grab this whole internet thing by the balls. It had some 5000 outlets the length and breadth of the country,  a fantastic distribution system that accessed the rail, road and air networks. Some 200, 000 mouthpieces to help grow and spread the word of new products and initiatives. It could have diversified to become a world leader, an Amazon, an Ebay, anything it wanted to really, but was shackled, shackled by inertia and closed mindsets unwilling to either trust or dare to look beyond some point of conflict or dogma. it sat idley by relying on the patronage of governmental control and finance and years upon years of irrelevant industrial collective bargaining agreements.

    Why was this? Well Im not going to go into too much detail about who did where and what and why, as a lotof it is just supposition and more opinion based thn anything else. I did know a fair few of the key movers and shakers and was involved in a lengthy dispute/resolution process or two, so lets just say that I came to recognise some of the almost impossible internal presures and hurdles they seemed to be faced with, on both sides of the divide, not to even touch on any idea of individual complacency!

    So, what am I getting at? I guess Im saying that as organisations grow and get wealthier and are subject to new challenges and pressures then it can be pretty easy to lose track of where one is going. Reading what Matt wrote kinda made me think in terms of, well quite clearly matt is one of those people who knows how to push and prod and get things done within his sphere of influence. I think he may have been responsible for the appointment of Adam Lasnik. If you read Adam’s posts at the google blog or webmasterworld.com you’ll see that he seems to share some of the characterisitics that Matt tends to push out. Even keeled, considerate, user focused , as responsive as he feels he can be. Another firm hand on the tiller that is the tricky path of webmaster public relations. How many Adam’s or Matt’s or Eric’s or Larry’s are there at Google? Probably an army of them. It sure seems to be an organisation that is pretty sorted, and with people like Matt Cutts questioning and responding to criticism of google, even disagreeing with things that he feels are either just wrong or removed from what he sees as the general shared purpose of making the best search engine they can for its users, then its pretty safe to say that for the foreseeable future Google from a web search perspective, will continue to be ok. OTOH of course, should the hawks be able to grab a hold though and the push for profit is put before the push for users, then it could well be a different story. Altavista should be a word that haunts many a Google stock holder. If I ran Google, I’d stick up altavista is dead posters everywhere, just to act as a salutary reminder.

    Happy new year, hope its a good one for you all. Im off to burn a few more calories on this cold English morning, thank god for bicycles :)