It looks like Google wants you to think PR doesn't matter, but don't let them fool you! For more than a decade now, Google has been trying to retrieve this metric from the radar of webmasters. That Google has stopped pushing regular updates to their toolbar is one more step in the strategy to convince you that PageRank doesn't matter anymore.
Balderdash. Let's look at the trouble Google's gone to pull the wool over our eyes.
PageRank wasn't unknown to webmasters in Google's in the late 90s, but the search giant really spilled the beans on PageRank in December 2000 when it released the Google toolbar that included the metric that Google still describes today as "basis of Google's search technology."
Google knew that the metric would be of vital – and viral - interest to webmasters and webmasters not only flocked to install the toolbar, they began using the metric for link swapping, selling and buying. It made PR manipulation so much easier when you could easily see Google's estimation of the importance of a page.
Google has been backpedaling ever since. Unhappy with the manipulation of PageRank that was greatly enhanced by the ability to see the PR on any page, (but apparently unwilling to withdraw entirely the prime reason to keep the toolbar installed on your browser), Google fought back with a publicity campaign and with tools that sometimes backfired.
For example, in 2005, Google introduced the nofollow attribute to fight comment spam and encouraged webmasters to add it to their blogs. Not long after, they demanded that anyone selling text links use the nofollow attribute to discourage selling PR.
This handy attribute opened yet another can of PR worms for Google, as webmasters quickly learned how to apply to sculpt PageRank within a site and Google engineers had to change the way that Google divides links on a page to prevent webmasters from reassigning it with the use of nofollow.
Google stopped pushing data to the toolbar in late 2004 and established something of a quarterly schedule of updates with the hope, one assumes, that outdated PR would devalue the commodity. "The PageRank that is displayed in the Google Toolbar is for entertainment purposes only," Googlers reportedly announced that December.
In October of 2009, the ability to see the "importance of a page" was removed from Google's Webmaster tools in the search giant's ongoing campaign to take the focus off the PR metric, and 6 months later in April '10, released what appears to be the last quarterly update. Webmasters report updates to toolbar PR often with no pattern, as though updates are now simply random and sporadic.
Google does seem to have effectively rendered the toolbar more useless than not, and it's common to hear many webmasters insist that PageRank is no longer important.
Again, I say, balderdash! If PR wasn't still a central factor in Google's
algorithm – or as Google puts it, the basis of their technology -- why would
they go to all this trouble to pretend otherwise?
·
Google's Matt Cutts Talks Facebook/Twitter Links' Influence on Search Ranking
We recently looked at
how Google and Bing use links on Twitter and Facebook for organic
ranking, following an
informative piece from Danny Sullivan on the matter. Google's Matt
Cutts has now addressed the subject a bit more in a new video uploaded to
Googles' Webmaster Help Channel.
Do you want social media to influence search rankings?
Comment here.
"We do use Twitter and Facebook links in ranking as we always have in our web
search rankings, but in addition we're also trying to figure out a little bit
about the reputation of an author or creator on Twitter or Facebook," says Cutts.
"I filmed a video back in May 2010 where I said that we didn't use that as a
signal, and at the time, we did not use that as a signal, but now, we're taping
this in December 2010, and we are using that as a signal."
Now, this doesn't mean that suddenly Twitter and Facebook links are the main
ranking factor determining where your content is showing up in organic searches.
If anything, Google seems to be tiptoeing into the waters in this area.
"The web search quality team has a lot of different groups in a lot of different
offices, so people including the original Blog Search team, people who worked on
Realtime Search...have been working on using these sorts of things as a signal,"
explains Cutts. "So primarily, it has been used a little bit more in the
realtime sort of search, where you might see individual tweets or other links
showing up, and streaming up on the page. We're studying how much sense it makes
to use it a little more widely within our web search rankings."
To reiterate, you'll still see this playing more of a role in realtime search,
but Google is "looking at it more broadly within web search as well," according
to Cutts.
"Now, there's a few things to remember," Cutts warns. "Number one is: if we
can't crawl a page (if we can't see a page), then we can't really assign
PageRank to it, and it doesn't really count. So if we're able to obtain the
data, then we can use it, but if for some reason a page is forbidden for us to
crawl or if we're not able to obtain it somehow, then we wouldn't be able to use
it within our rankings."
This would appear to mean that links within Facebook will not mean a whole lot
when the user isn't sharing their updates with everyone. Many Facebook users
have their privacy settings adjusted to only share with their friends. While
Facebook may have far more users than Twitter, privacy settings will greatly
reduce that number in terms of links that will potentially help your search
rankings.
"This is something that is used relatively lightly for now, and we'll see how
much we use it over time depending on how useful it is and how robust it ends up
being," says Cutts. "The one thing I would caution people about is don't
necessarily say to yourself, 'Ha. Now I'm going to go out and get reciprocal
follows, and I'm gonna get a ton of followers,' just like people used to get a
ton of links. In the same way that PageRank depends on not just the number of
links, but the quality of those links, you have to think about what are the
followers who mean quality. Who are the people who actually are not just bots or
some software program or things like that."
Would you like to see Facebook/Twitter
links carry more weight in organic search?
Share your thoughts here.
Related:
Google & Bing Are Looking at Links on Twitter & Facebook for Organic Ranking
Update: Matt
Cutts says they probably won't rename PageRank. However, he agrees with Peter
Norvig that people obsess about it too much.
Original article:
Last year, Google quietly
got rid of PageRank in Webmaster Tools. Google Webmaster Trends
Analyst Susan Moskwa had
said, "We've been telling people for a long time that they shouldn't
focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it's the most
important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it
because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to
show them the data, implying that they should look at it."
Note: Watch
our exclusive interview with Google's Matt Cutts at 1pm Pacific/4pm Eastern at
live.webpronews.com.
A lot of people wondered why Google would keep PageRank in the Google Toolbar,
where it still sits to this day. Search enthusiast Barry Schwartz of Rusty Brick
speculated that Google would not want to remove it because PageRank
is "too much of their branding." After some words from Google's Director of
Research, Peter Norvig today, however, I'm not so sure that's the case.
Norvig said at SMX today that PageRank is still one thing that is "overhyped,"
and that Google never felt that it was such a big factor. They have always
looked at all available data, combining every available signal and tiring to
figure out the best way to combine them.
Norvig also said that it may be time for some re-branding with regard to
PageRank. There may be a different term in the pipeline. "There's a technical
formula that's PageRank, which is the way of judging the links between pages,
and that's just one component of how we rank the pages and you get your final
search results. There's all these other things that come in, but they don't have
a catchy name. So some people apply PageRank to mean all the components that
give you the final ranking, and that's where we get confused. So probably we
need some other term for that...We'll get some marketing guys on it."
I don't know how seriously the company is considering this, as Norvig seems to
simply be speaking off the cuff, but given the company's repeated emphasis on a
lack of emphasis on PageRank, it would not be surprising to see them change the
name. However, the problem with that could be, that these same PR-obsessed
webmasters would just become obsessed with the re-branded term.
·
Ways to Get Fresh Links to Old Content for Better Search Rankings
You may have gotten some good links in the past, but don't count on them helping
you forever. Old links go stale in the eyes of Google.
Do you still get links to old content? Tell
us why you think that is.
Google's Matt Cutts responded to a user-submitted question asking if Google
removes PageRank coming from links on pages that no longer exist (for example,
GeoCities pages that have been shut down). The answer to this
question is unsurprisingly yes, but Cutts makes a statement within his response
that may not be so obvious to everybody.
"In order to prevent things from becoming stale,
we tend to use the current link graph,
rather than a link graph of all of time," he says. (Emphasis
added)
Now, this isn't exactly news, and to the seasoned search professional, probably
not much of a revelation. However, to the average business owner looking to
improve search engine performance (and not necessarily adapting to the
ever-changing ways of SEO), it could be something that really hasn't
resonated. Businesses have always been told about the power of links, but even
if you got a lot of significant links a year or two ago, that doesn't mean your
content will continue to perform well based on that. WebProNews has discussed
the value of "link velocity" and
Google's need for freshness in the past:
Link velocity refers to the speed at
which new links to a webpage are formed, and by this term we may gain some new
and vital insight. Historically, great bursts of new links to a specific page
has been considered a red flag, the quickest way to identify a spammer trying to
manipulate the results by creating the appearance of user trust. This led to
Google’s famous assaults on link farms and paid link directories.
But the Web has changed, become more of
a live Web than a static document Web. We have the advent of social bookmarking,
embedded videos, links, buttons, and badges, social networks, real-time networks
like Twitter and Friendfeed. Certainly the age of a website is still an
indication of success and trustworthiness, but in an environment of live, real
time updating, the age of a link as well as the slowing velocity of incoming
links may be indicators of stale content in a world that values freshness.
Do you think link freshness should play a role in search engine rankings? Let
us know.
So how do you keep getting "fresh"
links?
If you want fresh links, there are a number of things you can do. For one, keep
putting out content. Write content that has staying power. You can link to your
old content when appropriate. Always promote the sharing of your content.
Include buttons to make it easy for people to share your content on their social
network of choice. You may want to make sure your old content is presented in
the same template as your new content so it has the same sharing features.
People still may find their way to that old content, and they may want to share
it if encouraged.
Go back over old content, and look for stuff that is still relevant. You can
update stories with new posts adding a fresher take, linking to the original.
Encourage readers to follow the link and read the original article, which they
may then link to themselves.
Leave commenting on for ongoing discussion. This can keep an old post relevant.
Just because you wrote an article a year ago, does not mean that people will
still not add to it, and sometimes people will link to articles based on
comments that are left.
Share old posts through social networks if they are still about relevant topics.
You don't want to just start flooding your Twitter account with tweets to all of
your old content, but if you have an older article that is relevant to a current
discussion, you may share it, as your take on the subject. A follower who has
not seen it before, or perhaps has forgotten about it, may find it worth linking
to themselves. Can you think of other ways to get more link value out of old
content?
The first
Matt Cutts Answers Questions About Google video of the year has been
posted, and in it Matt addresses links from Twitter and Facebook, after talking
about his shaved head again. Specifically, the submitted question he answers is:
Links from relevant and important sites
have always been a great way to get traffic & acceptance for a website. How do
you rate links from new platforms like Twitter, FB to a website?
Do you rely on links from Facebook and Twitter updates?
Discuss here.
Essentially, Matt says Google treats links the same whether they are from
Facebook or Twitter, as they would if they were from any other site. It's just
an extension of the pagerank formula, where its not the amount of links, but how
reputable those links are (the company uses
a similar strategy for ranking Tweets themselves in real-time
search).
While Facebook and Twitter links may be treated like any other links, they do
still come with things to keep in mind. For one, with Facebook, you have to keep
in mind that a lot of profiles are not public. When a profile is not public,
Google can't crawl it, and it can't assign pagerank on the outgoing links if it
can't fetch the page to see what the outgoing links are. If the page is public,
it might be able to flow pagerank, Matt says. With Twitter, most links are
nofollowed anyway.
"At least in our web search (our organic rankings), we treat links the same from
Twitter or Facebook or, you know, pick your favorite platform or website, just
like we'd treat links from Wordpress or .edus or.govs or anything like that,"
says Cutts. "It's not like a link from an .edu automatically carries more weight
or a link from a .gov automatically carries more weight. But, the specific
platforms might have issues, whether it's not being crawled or it might be
nofollow. It would keep those particular links from flowing pagerank."
There you have it. Matt's response probably doesn't come as much of a surprise
to most of you, but it's always nice to hear information like this straight from
Google.
Do you like the way Google
handls links from Facebook and Twitter? Would you do it differently?
Share your thoughts.
Google has quietly gotten rid of PageRank in Webmaster Tools. Barry Schwartz at
Search Engine Roundtable points to
a thread featuring an explanation from Google Webmaster Trends
Analyst Susan Moskwa.
"We've been telling people for a long time that they shouldn't focus on PageRank
so much; many site owners seem to think it's the most important metric for them
to track, which is simply not true," says Moskwa. "We removed it because we felt
it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the
data, implying that they should look at it."
Search marketers are wondering why Google tells people not to focus on PageRank
and removes it from Webmaster Tools, but still keeps it in the Google Toolbar.
"Back in 2007, Google wanted feedback on removing PageRank from the Toolbar,"
says Schwartz. "I felt it was a good idea but the idea died out.
Google cannot remove PageRank from the Toolbar, it is too much of their
branding. No matter how much Matt Cutts and the Google search quality and
webmaster trends team want it removed, I cannot see Google's executives allowing
it."
Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim
says the role of PageRank has been reduced to nothing more than a
"comfort blanket for SEO Noobs." He adds, "I say this, with a high degree of
confidence that most experienced SEOs pour over the data in Google Webmaster
Tools, whereas those new to the industry likely let the toolbar be their only
guiding light."
He also notes, however, that PageRank data can still be useful. For example, it
can be a good indicator of a site's behavior in Google's index. "Any green means
'go.' No green, means there's something to investigate," says Beal.
Despite this usefulness though, Moskwa pretty much closes the case on Google's
position on it. In fact, she even points to
a FAQ page about crawling, indexing, and ranking, which says that
webmasters shouldn't even bother thinking about it. It also says that PageRank
is just one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled,
indexed, and ranked.
In the latest
Google Webmaster Central YouTube Channel upload from Matt Cutts, he
talks about whether or not Google places value on its own links with
regards to Pagerank. Cutts took on the following user question:
Question: Does Google value its own
links for PR/Linkjuice? Google Bookmarks, Google Profiles, etc. Reason - Google
links never appear in Webmaster Tools.
Have you had similar questions about Google sites and PageRank? Comment.
Google has plenty of products that spawn links, so the question is certainly a
legitimate one. You've got Google Bookmarks, Google Profiles, Google Knol,
YouTube, Blogger, and many others. Matt doesn't go through each product and
specify Google's practices for each one, but he gives a general explanation
about Google's policies regarding links from Google-owned sites.
Cutts says he doesn't know about whether Google links never appear in Webmaster
Tools, but in general, people hold Google to a very high standard. He gives the
example that if Google delivers search results that aren't blocked by robots.txt,
people find out about it and draw a lot of attention to it, whether that be by
blogging or forums, or whatever.
"We try to be relatively careful," says Cutts.
With search results, Google tries to make sure they're properties aren't too
spammable, and if they are worried that something might be potentially abused,
they will often use a nofollow attribute.
Cutts says with Google Knol for example, most of the external links started out
as nofollow, but then over time as they learned which Knol authors were more
trustworthy, they lifted the nofollow on those Knol authors.
Google Knol has not received a whole lot of media attention since it was
launched in late December 2007. It is a site where users can write articles on
any number of topics that they feel they are experts on. An article is referred
to as a knol, which Google defines as "a unit of knowledge."
"Sometimes we do flow pagerank, but we try to be relatively careful because
we're mindful of the people who do try to abuse it," he says.
The video is below in case you'd rather hear it straight from Matt's mouth,
but I think I've pretty much covered what he says in the above text. That said,
it is only a minute and a half, so it won't take too long to watch.
Google has a lot of properties, and this might not answer everybody's questions
on the subject, but I would bet that the trust factor mentioned with regards to
Google Knol, could probably be applied to other products.
Did you find Matt's response to
the question useful?
Share your thoughts.
We made a video at SMX Advanced with
Stephen Spencer recently where we discussed (among other things) some
changes expected(?) to be coming to Google in terms of the no-follow attribute.
These no-follow changes have some pretty significant implications for lots of
things, first and foremost though it seems these changes are specifically geared
to mitigate, to some degree, the effectiveness of PR sculpting.
Ever tried PR Sculpting? Did you find it effective? Let us know in the
comments section.
Now, PR sculpting is a fairly advanced concept a lot of folks may not fully
understand. So, I figured I would try to provide some explanation of at least
the general ideas involved. That seems like the best way to go about explaining
why Google is looking to make some sort of change in their treatment of
no-follow. If you understand PageRank sculpting, on other words, you will get
why Google might not like it so much.
I expect I will have at least 5 people ‘way smarter than me’ hop in the comments
or rip me in
Twitter for leaving out ‘this’ or ‘that’ in terms of the subtle
nuances of PR sculpting. My response to this would be; for the purposes of this
article, the subtleties are immaterial. So simmer down. I would be remiss
however if I didn’t add a little warning in here for people to thoroughly read
up and make sure you understand PR sculpting before you start slapping
no-follows all over your site. You really can screw your site up if you do it
wrong.
So what the heck is it anyway? I’m so glad you asked. We’ll start with the
concept of your Page Rank ‘power’ or ‘authority’. This is the overall ‘value’
of a given page in terms of how much ‘authority’ that page has to pass along via
it’s outbound links. You have no doubt heard people talk about ‘link juice’,
that’s what link juice is. The more important (in Google’s eyes) a page is, the
more link juice it possesses.
Now think of your website as a bucket (or maybe an elegant punchbowl or some
kind of fine china bowl if a bucket is too base of a mental image for you). Your
bucket contains all of your link juice. Now think of your outbound links as
tiny holes in your bucket. Your link juice flows through the holes and passes
on your page’s authority.
Now, the PR sculpting theory holds that the more holes you have in your bucket,
the more your link juice is spread around or diluted. This is at least in part
supported by the search engine accepted and approved concept of Crawl Efficiency
(see the Vanessa Fox
video or
article for more on that). Search engines aren’t going to spend
forever crawling and indexing every link on every page, so the concept of crawl
efficiency basically means you prioritize the important stuff for them.
How do you do this? Well you stick no-follow attributes on non-important
links. PR sculpting theory takes this one step further and says that ALL
outbound links count as a hole in your bucket, so you would then want to make
more liberal use of no-follow to help direct the flow of the link juice. For
example; if you had navigation links at the top of your page, in the side bar
and again in your footer, PR sculpting would say you add no-follow attributes to
all but one set of them. Less holes = more juice flowing through the holes that
are left. Get the idea? Good.
Now, the hullaballoo at SMX Advanced had to do with some rumors or suggestions
that Google may be going to change how they look at no-follow in relation to how
the link juice is passed along. So if you had, for example, 10 outbound links
on a page and no-followed all but 2 of them, effective PR sculpting would funnel
all of your juice through those 2 and not dilute it over all 10. Google,
being... well, Google, doesn’t like to have situations where people can
‘control’ the value of links - especially for the purposes of ranking better in
Google.
Does Google need to make changes to manage the effectiveness of PR Sculpting?
What do you think?
So much buzzing and grumbling ensued when it was suggested that Google might not
look at no-follow in quite the same way moving forward. If you have 10 links
and no-follow 8 of them in other words, they were still going to count you as
having 10 holes in your bucket instead of sending more love to the 2 regular
links you didn’t add no-follow to.
By the end of the show, there still hadn’t been much at all in the way of an
official word from Google on the subject. However, I very strongly suspect we
will have one soon. The implications for counting no-follow links ‘against’ you
in terms of authority passing ability raises all sorts of difficulties.
For one, let’s say you have a popular article that gets 500 comments. Most
everybody that leaves a comment also leaves a link. Generally these links are
no-followed. If more links = some sort of diminished or diluted authority of a
page, that would seem to suggest your fantastic article that got 500 comments
was maybe not as good as an article that only got maybe 5 comments.
Second, the whole no-follow thing was Google’s idea to begin with. It’s very
existence is arguably not much more than a Google helper to assist them in
managing the whole link economy they created out of their heavy reliance on
links as a ranking factor.
Google hates paid links because paid links have the potential to impact search
results and if you can buy links you can essentially raise your result in Google.
The problem is, paid links have been around longer than Google.... we used to
just call them ads. So, Google decided if you slap a no-follow attribute on a
link, it meant you were not trying to pass your page authority on to that link
and therefore weren’t being paid to elevate said link in their index.
Now, it seems like Google is starting to see people using no-follow to emphasize
links via the PR sculpting thing and they want to do something about it. A
cynical person might say they sound like they are trying to have their cake and
eat it too... but a Google person would just say they are just trying to
protect the integrity of their index. Personally, I’m all for Google protecting
the integrity of their index... but I think it gets to a point when maybe they
need to do something about their index’s over-reliance on inbound links as a
ranking factor. Maybe then they wouldn’t have to sweat this sort of thing quite
so much and/or dump the burden of link formatting and management off on the
webmasters and the SEOs of the world. Those guys have enough on their plate as
it is.
Do you expect Google will make changes to the way they handle no-follow?
Comment below
A week or so ago, some people noticed some updates to Google Toolbar PageRank scores. It was unconfirmed however if this was an official update. Matt Cutts eventually confirmed on Twitter that it was indeed a Google update.
Cutts later said
on his blog, "In case you didn’t see where I confirmed it on Twitter,
Google recently did a toolbar PageRank update. It’s pretty much done now. If you
want more info, I’ve answered questions about PageRank and the Google Toolbar in
the past."
People's sites are going both up and down, but it is important to remember that
the toolbar is "not an accurate indicator of how Google ranks or values a site,"
as Loren Baker
notes at Search Engine Journal. Though it is still a factor.
Cutts also makes the bold prediction that this will be the last PageRank update
of the year. Haha.
·
BrowseRank The Next PageRank, Says Microsoft
It shouldn’t be the links that come in, but the time spent browsing a relevant page, that should help determine where a page ranks for a given query.
Microsoft has a big idea on ranking pages listed in a search engine index for later retrieval. A query seeking information on a topic ought to bring up pages ordered at least in part by how long people spent on such pages in their browsers.
CNET called it a move to one-up search leader Google, which itself only uses PageRank as one of dozens of factors in determining where a page lists in response to a query. Google's dominance of the search market shows their approach is working; Google is even a dictionary-listed verb these days.
A Microsoft research paper shows where the company sees an alternative to a site that in the estimation of many already owns the search market. Through looking at "user behavior data," Microsoft's researchers suggested they have a more reliable way of assessing a particular page's importance.
Microsoft's China-based researchers claim to have this figured out. But it will need data that goes beyond click-throughs to measure adequately.
That brings up an interesting idea: how much access will people, both visitors and site publishers, be willing to give Microsoft to make for a better search experience? Microsoft probably has the ability to utilize its own resources, like the Windows Live Toolbar, to help grab such data.
Not everyone will use a toolbar with their browser, of course, and Microsoft doesn't want to be in the position of trying to push it on people, lest they run afoul of their antitrust minders at the Justice Department.
Google's PageRank succeeds partially due to its invisibility. The typical Internet user simply doesn't see a crawler's work behind the scenes, and computers can accurately count those inbound links in short order. BrowseRank may be the next great advance in search, but if it relies on active participation beyond a link spider's actions, it may not get the critical mass of data it will need to succeed.
Users of the Google Toolbar will see updated PageRank values for websites become available over the next few days.
Google's noteworthy engineer Matt Cutts stirred up the SEO world with a little note on his blog. The always-sparkling discussion of PageRank and its secret sauce got a nudge from Cutts with his announcement.
"I’m expecting that also in the next few days that we’ll be expiring some older penalties on websites," he said. "I figured the SEO industry could use something to discuss, so I thought I’d give people a heads-up about the toolbar PageRanks."
Naturally, this little bombshell pulled in plenty of attention from the search engine optimization community. Comments flowed in, with Cutts responding to a handful. In one example, he noted the Toolbar PageRanks tend to update about every three to four months.
One commenter questioned whether or not anyone except site publishers actually bother having PageRank enabled in their Toolbar. Cutts said it was more than the commenter suspected.
"The last time I checked, many many more users turned on the PageRank display than there are site owners. The PageRank display is actually a popular feature, as it turns out," he replied.
It sounds like, on a superficial level, people who use the Google Toolbar don't mind looking to see how popular a site may be, even if they don't fully understand what PageRank. Quite frankly, we're astonished the Wikipedia entry on PageRank isn't required reading in schools these days (we kid, folks).
Recently a lot of people have been asking me questions about article marketing: what is it and how does it work?
Article marketing is the act of writing short articles, generally 1,000 words or less, and getting them published on the Web or in ezines. Generally you don't get paid for these articles, but the ROI is that you get links from the article to your Web site. Since incoming links from relevant Web pages helps your search engine visibility, this is a good thing.
First step is to write good quality articles, targeted at your best customers, with keyword rich titles that should do well on relevant searches at Google and the other search engines. You should also craft a good "resource box" which is sort of like an extended byline. You can include links to your site and calls-to-action. It's best to use a call-to-action that's relevant to the article you just wrote.
Next step is to get them published throughout the Web.
You can look for sites that publish articles that target your audience. This can be time consuming, but rewarding if you do it right. One good article in the right Web site can bring you loads of new traffic.
You can also use an article distribution company like iSnare or eZine Articles that will distribute your article (for a small fee) to hundreds or thousands of Web site editors. That can greatly expand your reach, although many of these sites don't have much PageRank, and thus won't give you a lot of link juice.
I wrote an article a while back on article marketing called Search Engine Success Through Article Marketing that still holds up. Check it out, then get writing!
Matt Cutts told Mike McDonald of WebProNews about something new from Google: the search advertising company opened a little help center on the topic of nofollows and links.
Google began advocating the nofollow attribute as a way for webmasters to tell Google's crawlers not to count a given link toward the PageRank of the site pointed to by the link. This attribute would help webmasters avoid the sting of being punished over paid links, which Google dislikes due to the way they can "game" the search rankings.
Webmasters had questions about nofollow, the answers to which ended up flung across the Internet. Blogger Li Evans asked Google in February why that situation hadn't been cleared up by collecting all the answers in one place.
As Google's well-known webspam fighter Matt Cutts told WebProNews how Google finally addressed the situation. They opened up the NoFollow Help Center within the webmaster help pages to help clarify the topic.
As Google explains, nofollow helps manage issues like comment spam, crawl prioritization, and the touchy issue of paid links. Watch Matt Cutts go over this attention-getting topic only on WebProVideo:
For a while now webmasters have fretted over why all of the pages of their website are not indexed. As usual there doesn't seem to be any definite answer. But some things are definite, if not automatic, and some things seem like pretty darn good guesses.
So, we scoured the forums, blogs, and Google's own guidelines for increasing the number of pages Google indexes, and came up with our (and the community's) best guesses. The running consensus is that a webmaster shouldn't expect to get all of their pages crawled and indexed, but there are ways to increase the number.
PageRank
It depends a lot on PageRank. The higher your PageRank the more pages that will be indexed. PageRank isn't a blanket number for all your pages. Each page has its own PageRank. A high PageRank gives the Googlebot more of a reason to return. Matt Cutts confirms, too, that a higher PageRank means a deeper crawl.
Links
Give the Googlebot something to follow. Links (especially deep links) from a high PageRank site are golden as the trust is already established.
Internal links can help, too. Link to important pages from your homepage. On content pages link to relevant content on other pages.
Sitemap
A lot of buzz around this one. Some report that a clear, well-structured Sitemap helped get all of their pages indexed. Google's Webmaster guidelines recommends submitting a Sitemap file, too:
· Tell us all about your pages by submitting a Sitemap file; help us learn which pages are most important to you and how often those pages change.
That page has other advice for improving crawlability, like fixing violations and validating robots.txt.
Some recommend having a Sitemap for every category or section of a site.
Speed
A recent O'Reilly report indicated that page load time and the ease with which the Googlebot can crawl a page may affect how many pages are indexed. The logic is that the faster the Googlebot can crawl, the greater number of pages that can be indexed.
This could involve simplifying the structures and/or navigation of the site. The spiders have difficulty with Flash and Ajax. A text version should be added in those instances.
Google's crawl caching proxy
Matt Cutts provides diagrams of how Google's crawl caching proxy at his blog. This was part of the Big Daddy update to make the engine faster. Any one of three indexes may crawl a site and send the information to a remote server, which is accessed by the remaining indexes (like the blog index or the AdSense index) instead of the bots for those indexes physically visiting your site. They will all use the mirror instead.
Verify
Verify the site with Google using the Webmaster tools.
Content, content, content
Make sure content is original. If a verbatim copy of another page, the Googlebot may skip it. Update frequently. This will keep the content fresh. Pages with an older timestamp might be viewed as static, outdated, or already indexed.
Staggered launch
Launching a huge number of pages at once could send off spam signals. In one forum, it is suggested that a webmaster launch a maximum of 5,000 pages per week.
Size matters
If you want tens of millions of pages indexed, your site will probably have to be on an Amazon.com or Microsoft.com level.
Know how your site is found, and tell Google
Find the top queries that lead to your site and remember that anchor text helps in links. Use Google's tools to see which of your pages are indexed, and if there are violations of some kind. Specify your preferred domain so Google knows what to index
When the original
PageRank algorithm was conceived, it was built around the a
mathematical formalization called
random walk or RW.
Considering a normal surfer to be a random walker, it was assumed that an
individual would browse the Internet and randomly visit one of the pages
followed by more pages through the hyperlinks on each of the landing pages. When
the process ends the visitor would have surfed all the pages.
Out of all the pages, the most visited pages would get the highest rank as they
are the ones with the maximum number of incoming links.
The problems arise because a normal surfer doesn't follow the random walk formulation, hence the assumptions of the PageRank might not apply to a surfer in the real world.
There has been an intriguing post written by Bill Slawski which highlights, how the assumptions of the PageRank are flawed and how the recent patent for the "User-sensitive pagerank" addresses some of the assumptions of the original PageRank.
The flaws highlighted center around some of the assumptions made by the PageRank.
All the links are created equal: The problem here is that the surfers just don't hit on hyperlinks at random, we read the hyperlink, mentally calculate it's value and then click on it. If this is so the How come all the links are equal?
Bored Surfers Go to Random Pages: True, that we sometimes get bored with a page and move on to another. But, the next page is not chosen at random, rather it's carefully chosen.
Bored Surfers Only Go to Trusted Pages: While it's true that bored surfers don't go to random pages, rather think and then move on, but the page they choose might not necessarily be a trusted one.
Pages Change and Lose Value at Same Rates: The pages can lose value during their lifetime but can they at the same rate. There are a myriad factors governing each pages' popularity and each one changes in value differently.
PageRank Calculations are reliable: This assumption talks about the 'blocked' PageRank," however the patents application suggests that these aggregations are not perfect.
The User-sensitive pagerank patent application would include various aspects of user behavior to calculate a better PageRank. These aspects pertain to Link Weight; Likelihood of Randomly Leaving to a New Page and Satisfaction with Found Pages.
This patent again underscores the need to design websites which intrigue the visitors to spend a longer time at the website and explore it. However, other aspects such as the usability is important too. There have been many discussions about the PageRank and many people seem to think that there is a need to replace the PageRank with something superior, it seems that we have it already.
An update to the Google Directory has webmasters puzzling over an apparent discrepancy in PageRank scores.
For months, the speculation surrounded an apparent decrease in PageRank scores on Google's Toolbar. It seemed the decrease in rank was connected to penalties associated with buying and selling links that passed on PageRank, a practice Google not-so-quietly condemned last autumn.
But what was more confusing was that though the toolbar scores were dropping, the actual search rankings looked to be unaffected. Google appears to have updated its Directory on January 8 along with PageRank scores that are significantly higher than listed on the toolbar.
Observers say the Google Directory update seems to be pulled directly from DMOZ, the open directory project. As a result, Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable joins others in discrepancy reports:
"…it seems like the Toolbar PageRank of this site is a PageRank of 4. But if you look at the most recent Google Directory update, this site appears to be a PageRank of 7."
There are few theories posted about why this is occurring, Andy Beard explains how this could be problematic for advertisers looking to assess the true value of a website:
"It seems Google used their real dataset for PageRank for the Google Directory export, forgetting that they are telling their millions of users lies on their toolbar with manual penalties, which until now had no visible proof.
"Google have the right to do whatever they like with their search engine, but
this is another major demonstration of how Google are manipulating public and
advertiser opinion."
I know a segment of my readers are sick to death with anything to do with Google PageRank updates, and I haven't even bothered mentioning the most recent update up until now… there wasn't really anything newsworthy in it.
I just spotted a story on Sphinn that will likely get deleted because it is all in Russian - the Google Directory has apparently been updated from DMOZ data from 08/01/2008 (European date notation)
That wouldn't be significant other than Google lists pagerank alongside the listings in their version of DMOZ
I have highlighted a few sites that as far as I am aware still have a manual PageRank penalty for what Google might consider selling PageRank Passing Links, including this one.
If you look carefully you will notice that the values shown in the Google Directory are considerably higher than those shown on the Google Toolbar.
It seems Google used their real dataset for PageRank for the Google Directory export, forgetting that they are telling their millions of users lies on their toolbar with manual penalties, which until now had no visible proof.
Google have the right to do whatever they like with their search engine, but this is another major demonstration of how Google are manipulating public and advertiser opinion. They still state that the toolbar PageRank displayed is:-
Wondering whether a new website is worth your time? Use the Toolbar's PageRank™ display to tell you how Google assesses the importance of the page you're viewing.
It seems my listing which was previously as a PR5 has moved up a number of places, so there is a good chance I am now on the bottom of the PR6 sites listed.
Lets be clear, even though I am most likely a PR6 site, I am
not selling PageRank when I write reviews, they are editorial links.
·
Google Not Following its Own Paid Link Rules
One of the more entertaining aspects of the entire paid links debate is Google is pretty quick to dole out the punishment, even though in many cases they haven’t taken the time to get their own house in order.
We’ve discussed the links to Golfballs.com on the Google checkout blog multiple times. At this point it pretty obvious Google has done some sort of manual adjustment as the page clearly isn’t passing any link juice. Why Google has chosen this route instead of any of the methods outlined in their webmaster guidelines remains something of a mystery.
We’ve also been assured that none of the links on these Google mini pages are influencing the algo or ranking in any way. Again curiously they’ve chosen not to implement any of the solutions spelled out in the webmaster guidelines.
Here’s a new one I stumbled across last week a list of Google Partners who have implemented Google Checkout all sitting on a nice PR8 page with straight links.
I’m sure someone from Google will be along shortly to tell us these links have been taken care of algorithmically and are not passing any juice or influencing the rankings in any way. Fine I’ll believe them.
However what I’d really like to know is why isn’t Google following their own recommendations and implementation suggestions for nofollows, redirects, and robots.txt. Should all 5000+ of my readers file spam reports that Google is selling text links? Could we reasonably expect that page to be banned from the index (please oh please that would so make my day).
How can Google the company who is attempting to dictate how the web should
structured expect everyone else to comply with their guidelines when they are
doing miserable job of following those same guidelines themselves? If that isn’t
the pot calling the kettle black I don’t know what is …
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) poses a deadly threat to people, especially hospital patients. One effort to track infections in a facility would utilize Google's PageRank algorithm to do so.
Once upon a time, a couple of Stanford Ph.D candidates wrote a paper called "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine." They discussed a concept called PageRank, which formed the core of Google and started a journey that led to a company with a market cap of $205 billion as of today.
Though there are a lot of secret factors involved in ranking search results today, anyone who wants to study PageRank can do so. It even has an entry on Wikipedia these days.
For researchers at Bradford University in the UK, PageRank may be the key to tracking the paths MRSA takes through a facility. New Scientist said a mathematician involved in the research thinks PageRank can rank the routes superbugs take from place to place:
"Our new model is based very much on the way Google has achieved number one status among search engines," (mathematician Simon Shepherd) explains. "When [Google's] spiders crawl the web they build up a connectivity matrix of links between pages."
"Obviously nurses move among patients and that can spread infection, but they also touch light switches and lots of other surfaces too," he says., "If you observe a network of all those interactions you can build a matrix of which nodes in the network are in contact with which other nodes."
Once they have that matrix, steps can be taken to attack those nodes and reduce their superbug-carrying capabilities. Eventually, Shepherd wants to produce a software tool for other hospital managers to use to make similar assessments of their facilities and possible superbug transmission.
The Guardian newspaper have today written an article titled
Is Google a Grinch or a good guy?, which asks many UK SEO's (myself
included) for their views on the recent Google paid link debate.
In my opinion the
Google AdWords landing page quality score and
PageRank paid link updates were definitely necessary and will only
help to improve the relevancy and quality of both organic and sponsored Google
listings. But perhaps the timing of the updates are questionable, the Google
AdWords change in particular caused many advertisers a major loss in profits
just before the Christmas period with many campaigns unable to stay
cost-effective due to large increases in minimum bids.
The major issue I feel is that while Google have the right to prevent MFA (Made
For AdSense) websites and paid listing directories from clearly profiting
through their algorithm and PageRank indicator, they also catch some of the
people who are not intentionally doing so. The roll-out of these changes takes
time to perfect and in many cases the more selective paid "review" directories
will be penalised initially, as could AdWords advertisers using Google AdSense
as a secondary source of income, and with Christmas around the corner it's
probably not the best time of the year to be facing these sort of problems.
I'd be interested in hearing comments from anyone else regarding these issues,
should Google consider it's timing of updates more carefully? Can the short-term
issues affecting websites within Google's guidelines be prevented in the first
place? If they delay necessary improvements will this harm the algorithm? Is
there actually a good time to apply these updates anyway?
Google continues to beat the drum about passing PageRank through paid links as Matt Cutts weighed in on the topic with another request that webmasters use the 'nofollow' attribute for them. Though plenty of places in the Northern Hemisphere shiver in chilly temperatures, webmasters will continue radiating heat after the latest double-barreled barrage from Google's loquacious engineer. Paid links have a long history of annoying Google due to the way they can affect organic rankings.
This has been the year of living dangerously for webmasters who engage in pushing PageRank through paid links. Google's crackdown on sites using these links without a 'nofollow' tacked onto them means more websites will see the dreaded reduction in their PageRank as punishment.
Matt wrote about this at the Google Webmaster Central blog and his personal site. A couple of essential points he made will stand out for webmasters:
Q: Is Google trying to tell webmasters how to run their own site?
A: No. We're giving advice to webmasters who want to do well in Google. As I said in this video from my keynote discussion in June 2007, webmasters are welcome to make their sites however they like, but Google in turn reserves the right to protect the quality and relevance of our index. To the best of our knowledge, all the major search engines have adopted similar positions.
Q: Is Google trying to crack down on other forms of advertisements used to drive traffic?
A: No, not at all. Our webmaster guidelines clearly state that you can use links as means to get targeted traffic. In fact, in the presentation I did in August 2007, I specifically called out several examples of non-Google advertising that are completely within our guidelines. We just want disclosure to search engines of paid links so that the paid links won't affect search engines.
Several webmaster comments posted to the Webmaster Central blog took issue with the paid links stance, with some complaining of being penalized without cause. One commenter named Jason said one blog he has received the PR 0 hit, and has never bought or sold a link.
"What about sites that received the penalty by mistake?" he asked. "I'm hesitant to submit a re-inclusion request because it requires admission of wrongdoing. Is there any way of asking for a review that doesn't require falsely stating that we've gone against the webmaster guidelines?"
In response, Matt suggested the drop could have been a result of canonicalization issues, and that PageRank does tend to fluctuate. As far as the language of the reinclusion request to which Jason objected, Matt had this to say:
I don't want to force people to claim that they've violated our guidelines in doing a reconsideration request. I believe that we've already softened our language on that form once and that we added the option to say "something happened on this domain before I got to it."
But your feedback is something that I've heard before, and I'll try to have someone at Google look at what we can do to remove that concern. If you have suggestions for language or the best way to do it, I'm open to whatever you want to propose.
Google isn't worried about whether someone's site gets noticed in the search results or not. The other major search engines have similar views. To them, paid links skew what searchers see, and not always to the searcher's benefit.
Matt's example of this on his blog shows how a query for the very serious topic of cancer-fighting radiosurgery brings up useless and misleading results when paid links pass PageRank.
"If you stumbled across these entries on the web, you might not know whether someone got paid for writing these posts. In the same way that a regular surfer would want disclosure to know if a post were paid, all the major search engines also want to make sure that paid posts are adequately disclosed to search engines as well," Matt said.
Use paid links without identifying them, and Google will penalize the site. It's a cause and effect that enrages webmasters who want to rate well in the world's dominant search engine. Many are going to feel this is part of a ploy to drive them to buy ads on Google to get noticed.
That is a side effect of Google's attack on less than useful content. One can see why webmasters will feel this way. Google is a business, not a public utility, even if it seems otherwise to Internet users. They make the rules for their SERPs, as the other engines do, and playing on their site means following them, or going to the bottom of the list.
I am going to attempt to debunk almost every Wordpress SEO "Expert" article ever written, and in some respects this article even debunks some of the things I have written in the past.
This article does not reference Google Toolbar PageRank in any way
First of all you are going to need to do a little homework.
The Eric Enge interview with Matt Cutts was truly exceptional and revealed a number of gotchas that for some reason continue to be circulated.
Key takeaways
Matt Cutts: … Now, robots.txt says you are not allowed to crawl a page, and Google therefore does not crawl pages that are forbidden in robots.txt. However, they can accrue PageRank, and they can be returned in our search results.
Matt Cutts: … So, with robots.txt for good reasons we've shown the reference even if we can't crawl it, whereas if we crawl a page and find a Meta tag that says NoIndex, we won't even return that page. For better or for worse that's the decision that we've made. I believe Yahoo and Microsoft might handle NoIndex slightly differently which is little unfortunate, but everybody gets to choose how they want to handle different tags.
Eric Enge: Can a NoIndex page accumulate PageRank?
Matt Cutts: A NoIndex page can accumulate PageRank, because the links are still followed outwards from a NoIndex page.
Eric Enge: So, it can accumulate and pass PageRank.
Matt Cutts: Right, and it will still accumulate PageRank, but it won't be showing in our Index. So, I wouldn't make a NoIndex page that itself is a dead end. You can make a NoIndex page that has links to lots of other pages.
For example you might want to have a master Sitemap page and for whatever reason NoIndex that, but then have links to all your sub Sitemaps.
I have just provided a couple of highlights, I am not attempting to replace a
need for visiting the site I am citing. This is something I hate seeing, when
people take other people's content and repurpose it, thus making the original
article worthless.
There are a few other gotchas in there,
I suggest you read it 2 or 3 times
to really understand what was said, and what wasn't said.
One of the best descriptions of dangling links is on the Webworkshop site, though they are assuming that links are totally taken out of the equation based on what they quote from the PageRank paper.
"Dangling links are simply links that point to any page with no outgoing links. They affect the model because it is not clear where their weight should be distributed, and there are a large number of them. Often these dangling links are simply pages that we have not downloaded yet……….Because dangling links do not affect the ranking of any other page directly, we simply remove them from the system until all the PageRanks are calculated. After all the PageRanks are calculated they can be added back in without affecting things significantly." - extract from the original PageRank paper by Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page.
Alternate interpretation
This is just an aside, as the amount of juice lost to dangling pages currently is hard to determine, and could be handled differently
They are assuming that if page A links to 6 other pages, 5 of them being dangling links, then the website will be treated as only having 2 pages until the end of the calculation.
Whilst I haven't delved into the maths (and probably couldn't through lack of information and lack of knowledge), it also seems to me that at the time the pages are taken out of the cyclic calculation, a percentage of the link value can still be taken with them.
Thus though the site for cyclic calculations will be just 2 pages, the link from A to B might only transfer 1/6 of the juice on each cycle.
At the time the original paper was written, Google only had a small proportion
of the web indexed due to hardware and operating system restraints.
In modern times they have a lot more indexed, thus a more complex way of
handling dangling pages could be possible.
More food for thought, a link to a page that is considered supplemental could be treated as a full link or as a link to a dangling page, or some other variant.
Even more food for thought, a site with multiple interlinked pages with no external links at all could be looked on as a "dangling site".
Ultimately what is important is that dangling pages are a juice leak, though it is difficult to determine exactly how much
I have actually seen this on a few sites:-
§ Reciprocal Link Directory Removed
§ Link to web designer removed
§ Nofollow added to legal papers that are looked on as being unimportant
Such a website is now out of the iteration club, it is a dangling page as it is no longer voting on other pages.
I mentioned that this catches me out as well.
A while ago I wrote an article about linking to Technorati being a problem. It might still be true, but the amount of juice lost through such links might also be lower than I thought, due to Technorati using meta nofollow on every page. Technorati tag pages are themselves dangling pages with no external links.
Wikipedia and Digg on the other hand are not dangling pages. They still have external links to other sites, and thus any links to them are part of iterative calculations.
I would still say it is best to have tags pointing to your own domain tag pages, and to use nofollow on links to Wikipedia and Digg, though with Digg I suggest that is only on links to submission pages which contain no content.
Stumbleupon is also tricky - there are no external links from individual pages, but there is extensive internal linking.
With Digg and Stumbleupon, profiles rank extremely well, so you can use them for reputation management even if you get no juice direct from the profile.
I think I was the first to describe Wikipedia as a black hole of link equity, explained why you should nofollow Wikipedia extensively, and was one of the first to promote Ken's Nofollow Wikipedia plugin.
You would have thought in 10 months they would have come up with an alternative to using nofollow on all those out-bound links.
They do however link out to a few trusted sites without nofollow, from just a few pages. I suppose Google does still allow them to be part of their iterative calculations.
This isn't 100% something I can fix. I have suggested people use robots.txt on certain sites knowing it wasn't the perfect solution.
You might notice on this site I don't use an extensive robots.txt, and the design of my site structure is deliberate, but then at the same time I use nofollow with lots of custom theme modifications, and should use it a lot more.
Eventually I will come up with solutions to make things a little easier.
Using Robots.txt and Meta Noindex, Follow as a cure for duplicate content is a SEO bodge job or SEO bandaid. It may offer some benefits depending on how dangling pages are being handled, but is certainly not an ideal solution due to the amount of leaks that typically remain or dangling pages that are created.
From Apple to Microsoft to Google, there is hot news written. Below are some of the more interesting articles involving eBusiness and search today.
Another obvious patent gets paid off by Apple. Apple has agreed to pay Burst a $10 million payment for infringing on its 1990 streaming video technology patent.
Singapore officials have a smash rap video hit on YouTube.
It has been views over 80,000 times over the last five days alone. It goes to
show that it is much easier to get famous than rich with web video.
There is a growing concern over so-called in-text ads according to an article in BusinessWeek. These are the ads where words in articles are double underlined and mousing over them causes a temporary pop-up. The problem is that these ads are not part of the intended editorial context of the journalist writing the article. Personally, I think these ads are highly annoying and distract from reading the article. You won't find them here at WebProNews anytime soon.
The looming advertising recession could actually increase targeted Internet ad spending. When sales are down advertisers want to get the biggest bang for their buck and that means more search and niche Internet ad buys.
New features are coming to Microsoft's IM according to a leaked report. Features include a SPIM reporting feature that helps users fight IM based phishing and spam.
A post by Rand Fishkin's father outlines why the original Google PageRank forumla is flawed. It is an insightful piece with lots of diagrams too!
PageRank zero became the big number for blogs participating in Izea's PayPerPost program; Google's move to drop the rankings of those blogs drew a harsh rebuke from Izea's CEO. Ted Murphy has been a lightning rod for criticism ever since the unveiling of PayPerPost, an ad system where bloggers are paid to write about an advertiser. Murphy's company, now called Izea, fought back against early complaints about non-disclosure by instituting a disclosure policy.
Compared to what happened recently, that brouhaha looks like a minnow compared to what the big fish in the search industry did to PPP bloggers. Murphy blogged that Google had tweaked the PageRank of a number of those bloggers, dropping them to PR 0.
When it comes to finding blogs on Google, PageRank is one of a number of factors used to qualify the authoritativeness, and therefore the placement, of a site or blog in Google's search results. Higher PR sites tend to rank well, which means people are more likely to find them and visit.
"Once again Google has proved that PR has little to do with blog traffic, influence or relevance and everything to defending their monopolistic stranglehold on search and online advertising," Murphy said in his post.
He suggested services like PPP and similar competitors offering revenue to bloggers all have a common denominator: they aren't Google AdSense. Google's content network of AdSense participants extends the reach of its AdWords ad platform.
Despite the ominous drop in PageRank, it has been suggested that the blogs victimized by the change have not suffered a loss in traffic, according to Tony Hung. "My take on things is that Google wants to make an example out of Izea," he wrote.
Traffic may not be impacted today, but the effects of the dramatic lowering of PageRank may be evident in the months to follow. As the dominant search engine, Google drives traffic to websites, and the higher they place in search results, the better the chance a site will receive a visit.
If the PageRank drop knocks blogs out of places where they had been ranking well in search, we expect that traffic will fall as well, and we will hear about this again.
I have been receiving emails and comments about yet another PageRank downturn for multiple sites.
Andrew Ooi has compiled a short list of Malaysian sites, many were as much as a PR5 previously, and currently show a PageRank of zero (a white bar)
Examples include:-
Colleen's Simple Kind of Life and 5xmom
The numbers seem to be stable across multiple data centers
There doesn't seen to be any change in prominent Search Marketing sites such as Search Engine Round Table and Search Engine Journal, and other popular bloggers such as Emom and Yaro still seem to have their degraded but still "head above water" rankings.
Meanwhile Matt Cutts is playing around with $200 PCs and the negative views of the blogosphere regarding Google.
Google have had more than a month to change the description of PageRank on their website.
I haven't seen any change to Search Engine Rankings and there is still no way to request reconsideration without admitting guilt.
The Webmaster Help Center also doesn't give an option to report that you think Google is making a mistake in their manual evaluation.
How do I request reconsideration of my site?
If your site has previously violated our webmaster guidelines, and you've made changes to it so that it now meets our guidelines, you can ask Google to reconsider your site for inclusion in the index.
In addition, if you recently purchased a domain that you think may have violated our guidelines before you owned it, you can use the reconsideration request form to let us know that you recently acquired the site and that it now adheres to the guidelines.
To request reconsideration of your site:
1. Sign in to Google webmaster tools. The webmaster tools Dashboard opens.
2. Under Tools, click Request reconsideration and follow the steps.
Google do now call this reconsideration, not just reinclusion, and Matt notes that you can still be in the index even though you have a penalty, which he updated November 4th 2007
I did find something cool though which I hadn't seen before, maybe I missed it being reported, or didn't pay much notice.
I am still being crawled frequently and there are some interesting spikes. It is a pity that the graph doesn't line up with the scale.
From January people using PayPerPost will be able to use SocialSpark.
SocialSpark Alpha screenshots do still have PageRank listed, and that will likely be removed totally unless Google change their stance.
I still don't sell PageRank, but traffic hasn't changed, if anything it has increased as I write more content that people want to read and link to, and it even brings in some search traffic.
Google is making huge mistakes with these updates. I know many people receiving penalties sell links, and I am not trying to defend them.
When you get someone like regular reader Rob, a real expert in SEO, who based on the links he receives should be a comfortable PR4, or possibly a PR5, currently a PR0, because he wrote one paid review using nofollow on the links.
Then you get
affiliate marketers like Vlad who may have written a couple of high
quality reviews, and sold some advertising.
At the same time he also is an affiliate with some affiliate services which
offer SEO friendly "clean links" for their merchants.
For a website owner they are still links from which they will be making money,
though the money from affiliate marketing is variable - the links still affect
search engines, as do many other affiliate links which feature 301 redirects.
Now whilst Aaron's issues might be appeased as a result of the recent interchange with Matt, that is really just the tip of the iceberg. Aaron hasn't been lynched.
To finish I am just going to steal the words of Michael VanDeMar which he posted as a comment on Matt's Reporting On Paid Links post.
Honestly, Matt… and if your legal team won’t let you answer this, then I understand, but if you are allowed to answer then I (and I’m sure others) would really, really like to know… as the G algo stands now, exactly how much off balance would you say it is due to the insidious act of buying and selling text link ads? How many man hours have you spent combating this crime against humanity, and at what cost? And is it seriously skewing the results that much, that all the efforts spent on it were, and continue to be, justified? Is the algo that fragile?
The other main reason that I disagree with this idea is that you think (or appear to be implying, anyways) that Paid Link === No Human Review. This not the case 9 times out of 10. You should know that.
An official statement finally from Izea (PayPerPost) on their blog regarding Google PageRank Updates.
We now know from some of our friends inside of Google (thanks "bob") that they are now looking for phrases such as PPP, PayPerPost,ReviewMe, Payu2blog, etc. in the text of your post. For that reason I would suggest refraining from using any type of this text in the body of your posts, sponsored or not. When you disclose thank the sponsor, not PPP.
I would like to thank Ted (CEO of Izea) for having the courage to say something about this in public, something it seems Google so far have not managed to do, and rarely do so on an official company blog.
Lisa Stewart of
Bigfoot Web Marketing also has an excellent writeup of the
decision process on the PayPerPost boards that ultimately led to Ted
Murphy making a statement.
Since the first real information came out about Izea's (PayPerPost) new SocialSpark service, that is in testing but will formerly launch in January my excitement has been a little tempered.
As I wrote in my initial preview of SocialSpark, there will be new metrics for gauging the authority and influence of a blog, to help determine advertising spend, not only based upon traffic and demographics, but also on past performance with CPM and CPC data also being made available.
With SocialSpark, any required links will be nofollow, though there is an option for editorial links without a nofollow.
All the negotiation about a particular campaign will be 100% transparent, thus there will be an audit trail to prove that an advertiser didn't require specific linking, and that audit trail will be open for public, or search engine approval.
There will be full disclosure within each post, with a link though to that 100% transparent audit trail, far exceeding any stipulations or recommendation from either the FTC or WOMMA.
Advertisers will no longer be able to require a positive tone, everything will be neutral, bloggers can write what they want, but that may affect click-through rates and return on investment.
Based upon this, everything seems at least on the surface to be everything a search engine would want to see and encourage.
At least not without some cooperation from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask.
Other than the 100% transparency, a lot of this has really been available using the PayPerPost Direct system introduced by Izea 6 months ago.
Whilst on the surface the form for PayPerPost Direct suggests that advertisers were able to make specific requests for the tone, and specify linking, PayPerPost direct also provided a negotiation interface.
In many ways you can look on the initial order process as being purely suggestions, and the real final negotiated terms were often vastly different to any initial enquiry.
That was certainly the case for every review I wrote, yet I still received a PageRank penalty
In some cases I even finished the negotiation process, but just didn't have time for a full review, so declined or gave a quick link for free.
But I have still received a penalty to my Google Toolbar PageRank, either -1 or possibly -2
A totally open system, with absolute disclosure and a full audit trail is the ideal scenario for internet users, and the search engines really have to make a choice, embrace the openness, or everything IS GOING TO GO UNDERGROUND.
You will notice on the following exclusive screenshots that PageRank is still being displayed on the new interface, and Ted tells me that a final decision as to whether Alexa and PageRank will remain is still to be made.
If it does remain, I would hope they are looked at as the least important statistic, those used to find new publishers who haven't been using the SocialRank code on their site for long enough to generate reliable statistics.
Both search engines and bloggers have difficult choices to make in the coming months.
The PayPerPost MarketPlace represents 11,000+ Advertisers and 85,000+ Bloggers, and I am sure that is set to increase.
It is noticeable that only a fraction of even PayPerPost bloggers have actually received some kind of penalty, and those are typically ones who were prominent in the PayPerPost Direct marketplace.
The funny or sad thing is that there has been a lot of collateral damage. As an
example take
Rob's situation. To my knowledge he has never written a review for
PayPerPost, yet is listed in the marketplace, mainly just to check out the
system.
As far as I can see, and I have been reading his blog since he had just 3
subscribers, he also doesn't sell links, hell he doesn't even link to his own
niche sites from his blog.
Rob's PageRank took a -2 penalty purely from association
There are plenty of sites that are selling PageRank pasing 125×125 advertising spots that have slipped under the radar, yet sites such as SERoundTable and Search Engine Journal have been quite obviously targeted.
I know sites where Matt Cutts is a frequent visitor, and has even read paid
reviews which have not had a penalty to their Google Toolbar PageRank applied.
The reviews were not "under the radar" but written by an authority in the topic
being discussed.
There are many very prominent sites who every week, or every month blatantly
thank their sponsors in what amounts to a post just full of PageRank passing
links with no other content.
At one time these pages contained at least an introductory paragraph for each
one, but often you will just see 8 or 10 links with no other content.
Isn't it easier for search engines to encourage good practice that is
accountable, than to punish sites indiscriminately or based on some level of
personal bias.
Without doubt there is bias and
double standards in penalties that so far have been applied, and this is not a
purely automatic process.
To finish here are a couple more exclusive screenshots to wet your appetite, featuring some of the statistics available in the new interface, and what appears to be a search result
Paid links proved the PageRank undoing for search professionals as well as for prominent sites like The Washington Post, but only recently did Google confess to doing this.
The flaming wreckage of Google's update took down several sites a couple of PageRank notches. Though it looked like an intentional change, that hadn't been confirmed.
Until now, that is. Search Engine Journal heard from Matt Cutts about the update, which has had numerous online industry pros in a tizzy. Said Matt:
The partial update to visible PageRank that went out a few days ago was primarily regarding PageRank selling and the forward links of sites. So paid links that pass PageRank would affect our opinion of a site.
Going forward, I expect that Google will be looking at additional sites that appear to be buying or selling PageRank.
The PageRank plunge has been painfully obvious to people like Andy Beard and Darren Rowse. It puts an image of an old joke about morale in our minds: "the beatings will continue until morale improves."
As for PageRank improving, there aren't any instructions about that. But paid links won't be in the equation, it seems.
After Google's little message to the link-selling public last week, there seems
to be a consensus: It was more of a warning shot than actual penalty, as traffic
was not affected; and it is a reminder to diversify.
It's also a stark reminder of Google's power. Like it or not, Google can
strong-arm you into doing what they want you to do, if you need a presence in
the search engine results pages. If not, then – if you don't need Google – you
should be running a seminar called "Life Without Google."
For most everybody else, the warning shot was nigh on bursting your eardrums.
Once the din was done, webmasters – especially those of marketing sites – looked
around to find everything except
their toolbar PageRank still in tact. It was sound and fury signifying,
well, something.
The most obvious thing it signified was that your toolbar PageRank is virtually
meaningless, and is probably why Google slapped it. It's an attention-getter
without causing any direct harm. Reports from around the blogosphere have
reported no affect on traffic afterward.
But what if – if nobody listens to the warning – Google did start taking out
these same marketing sites with paid links and cross-linking schemes? Would they
crash out of existence? Is Google that powerful?
Search Engine Guide's
Robert Clough, whose site dropped from PR 7 to PR 4 over the past
month, hasn't decided how much he needs Google.
Are we willing to risk losing the traffic Google sends simply because we don't buy into this crazy notion? Will we nofollow every paid link just because Google demands it? At this point, I don't know. It's a decision that will be made based on what is best for, and with the input of, our readers, advertisers, contributors and employees.
A tough call indeed. But Debra Mastaler at Search Engine Land suggests it's time to stop sucking at the Google teet and diversify, so that, if you want to be truly independent, you can create a world without them.
You've heard the line: it takes seven impressions before a user takes action? It's even harder on the web where a person can click away and reach a competitor in seconds. It's not always possible to find and advertise on all the sites your buying public visit. Since many people report assigning credibility to sites they see both on and offline, it's a good idea to start looking for offline advertising venues.
Google isn't the only site on the Internet and it's time we stop treating it as such. Start looking for online sources within the traditional and web2.0 areas, experiment with all until your find the right mix.
Either the Google PageRank in your toolbar is officially meaningless, or Google
just sent another message to link sellers. Once again, Google isn't talking and
we're left to speculate.
As we covered yesterday, two dozen prominent online marketing blogs and
mainstream news sites like the WashingtonPost and Forbes.com saw their toolbar
PageRank drop between two and four places.
The only commonality among the sites appeared to be that they either sold links
or were part of a network of sites with internal linking structures. The
immediate response was fear that traffic would plummet. However, as noted by
many traffic remained the same, or in at least one case, increased.
Barry Scwartz at SERoundtable saw a two percent increase in traffic
following a 3-point PageRank drop, from PR 7 to PR 4. The lack of real impact
has produced the theory that the PR hit was more of a Google head fake. If the
search engine company meant business, these sites would have dropped in the
organic search results or would have been delisted altogether.
Following that train of thought away from conspiracy theories that Google was
penalizing sites and blogs that are often critical of company, Schwartz comes up
with quite the level-headed conclusion:
If Google delisted all of those sites, then that would hurt their relevancy on some queries. With Google, they want to deliver the best possible results. How can they do that and also send a message to link sellers and link buyers? The safest method is to take this route and lower their PageRank. Link buyers, although not recommended, look at PageRank as a measurement for buying links. Google lowering the PageRank of some of these sites should make it harder for some of those sites to sell links.
Robert Scoble has his own, somewhat less controversial theory, from a post entitled "Google PageRank is Dead and Has Been For Some Time":
[B]loggers were showing up too high in searches anyway. In comparing to my friends we got lots of traffic from Google that we didn’t deserve. The problem is that traffic isn’t good anyway. Put it this way, let’s say I showed up high in a search for Saturn Cars (since I’ve written about them). Most people wouldn’t have found much value in that post and even if they did they wouldn’t have stuck around to be a regular reader.
So whether the PageRank update was a message or a relevancy tweak remains a bit of mystery, but these two theories are as good as any.