search engines

Matt Cutts confirms: we return(ed) random Pagerank data

Marketing Fan — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 17:46:57 +0200

I’m here at the SMX Advanced in Seattle, and there’s def a coverage of the show on many blogs out there, but I guess this little juicy nugget of information might be missing on most of them.

Last night in the “You & A” session Matt Cutts responded to Jay Young talking about building an “Archive of pagerank data” and giggled when he confirmed that they already take care of people querying the PR data too much or too heavily.

In fact he confirmed that years ago already they started to return stupid random data based on some signature they found in the guy’s query signature. He added, that TODAY, they of course are a lot smarter in making sure people don’t overdo the pagerank queries.

For me this is a clear confirmation that they have implemented some (obviously needed) measures to

detect bot type patterns in the PR queries – i.e. if more than 50 pages from a domain are requested within 2 minutes, it must be a bot, mustn’t it
implement kind of “quotas” for PR queries (I had clients using Aarons SEO toolbar seeing only white or gray anymore)

return random or white/grey PR data based on above findings

This again is a clear argument (as Adam Audette said as well in his great presentation) that PR cannot and SHALL NOT be used as a basis for decisions like

PR sculpting / siloing (how do you know what you’re doing if you get crap data input?)

link building – or removing built or paid links based on PR changes

Interesting sessions here btw… but more even more important and interesting private talks ! well worth the travel!

Top Google Ranking value (german version)

Marketing Fan — Tue, 27 May 2008 12:12:01 +0200

Last week we published a german version of the Google Ranking Value document by Aaron Wall titled Was ist ein Top Google Ranking wert?

Thanks to Aaron for providing this quality-document with a lot of great pointers and suggestions.

Google Update Dewey

Marketing Fan — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 18:52:23 +0200

Google somewhat confirmed an algo update,

and I can confirm this myselves…

Google changed the way the return results for some queries.

Google changed the way they filter results for some queries.

Google changed the SERPs for some queries.

Seeing some clients rocket up the SERPs … good thing, eh?

Have a good weekend!

Google Bowling via Proxy

Marketing Fan — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 20:00:22 +0200

So with SES San Jose just around the corner, Dan Thies put up a great post detailling all the headaches that a website owner could get when looking at his serps a bit closer or with the right tools to do so …

Dan calls this “Google Proxy Hacking”, but frankly, we are not hacking any of Google’s proxies – so I’m talking about Google Bowling via Proxy Sites – related to the older black hat term “Google Bowling” for buying too many / bad links for competitor sites to knock them off the serps. Yes, it IS possible to knock a competitor site off the SERPs, altought Google says= there is ~~nothing~~ almost nothing a competitor can do to harm you (yeah, right – the Google folks weakened this message some months ago, because the “nothing” was plain wrong – and they knew it).

If you read thru Dan’s post you might get headaches just like this guy from all those details and the partly wrong promises for a cure for it with two solutions that BOTH address only the outdated part of the problem.

So I though I have to illustrate to you what’s going on and how Google Bowling via Proxies actually looks like

The above results are returned if you search for the unique phrase

which is was only found on my company site cemper.com … (ok – now it’s also found on this marketingfan.com

blog and on marketingfan.at as soon as we translate it)

But WTH is Proxy Dust ???

As you can see this unique phrase which should id if my page is healthy does not show my own site but “one of those PITA sites”: run by a guy called Matt Twine from the UK (if that IS his real name…)

and as you can image the url http://www.proxydust.com/index.php?q=aHR0cDovL3d3dy5jZW1wZXIuY29t has an EXACT copy of my company site’s home page there…

Did I hear Spam Report? yadda yadda – don’t bother – the Googlers don’t seem to care, because I submitted that 2 weeks ago…

But it get’s worse

Now clicking that “filter=0” to reveal all search results we see this HUGE list of pages – cemper.com coming second…. as a filtered result right after that proxy site used for google bowling…

[... pages cut out here … ]

But also we have a couple more scumbags stealing my content and trying to hijack my site…

In fact only the ProxyDust copy wins big time over CEMPER.COM because … believe it or not…

that fricking domain registered in January 2007 got a Wikipedia backlink

And my site does not.

I currently think that’s the main reason why Google chose them over my own site – which is from 2000, not heavily SEOed, but I bet a handful more trusted than this Mark “Thief” Twine’s site.

Well, it might well be that Mark has NO CLUE about what he does, but all those ads plastered around my site indicate different.

In fact it appears the whole strategy of running those proxy sites is to earn money from the ads placed on other’s content and cashing in on their work…

What we (legit webmasters) can do…

Frankly, I love Dan’s general post as an introduction to this post, because I would have hated to explain it in all length as he did. ~~But what he points out as “solutions” are somewhat old school methods to identify bots that pretend to be Google, Yahoo or MSNbot….~~

Dan’s post ALSO contains the 2nd method for sending ALL visitors a “noindex, nofollow” that do NOT

1) Identify as spiders

2) Pass a “valid IP address” test

Pretty cool – I think that might work – and will test this ASAP, in addition to my own method of blocking those scumbags.

What about you?

Has YOUR site been hijacked? Do you know?

How you could know? Just follow Jim’s post to find if a page is in supplemental … but actually make sure you look at the results closely… because what you might find is that somebody is stealing your content….

You should do that for EVERY PAGE of your site – best case – if you got the right tools for it…. but it costs a lot of resources either way – by hand or by machine tool.

Let me know about YOUR hijack experiences !

(and I’m sure people should talk about this at the SES in San Jose , however I fear they won’t too much…)

Update: You could of course get around the initial problem of having too less trust in Google by getting real juicy authority links using MSN’s linkfromdomain command by effectively even letting your competitor link indirect to you ... obviously you still want to make sure you get only the juicy pages and not spend your time with dead meat.

Why Removed Supplemental Index Labels are good for my business

Marketing Fan — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 12:50:18 +0200

Earlier this week Google has removed the “supplemental index” labels from the SERPs, and as with every major poops from Google the whole SEO scene freaked out on this!

Me too – because I have to thank Google for giving me – and my clients a new competitive advantage.

Why do I thank Google for removing interesting signals?

Well, until last week every wannabeo-seo and his mother could see (in the SERPs, see grandfathered sample below)

if a page had a problem with ranking…

There have been huge posts by Jim , Halfdeck and Halfdeck again and a lot more on what/why/where supplementals are. Even I posted about Supplemental Hell and one PayPerPost link buying penalty bringing pages into the to supplemental index.

Today however…

People need to put more effort into detecting if a page has problem due to being in the supplemental index.

That means a certain (large) amount of SEOs just won’t be able to do this in their everyday job.

Halfdeck has his own Supplemenal Detector which is a fancy JAVA application that is in fact a “pagerank emulator” – ~~and all pages below a certain threshold are marked as supplemental. I encourage you to download this data scraper, and I’m sure it works nicely – but haven’t tried it.~~

After playing with Halfdeck’s Pagerank emulator I must say that it’s a great way to simulate how the “link juice” flows thru your site and where you are actually wasting precious link juice (i.e. on useless stats pages). Halfdeck even implemented a “backlink emulator” where you can judge on the effects of an additional PRx link to any page you like… pretty cool tool – it just lacks TBPR live queries, but I hope he can add that in the next version.

But, in fact I never cared much about the TOTAL number of supplementals, but always if a single page is in supplemental. Why that?

Well, I guess Link Ninja Master Jim Boykin knows why – it’s because you don’t want to get links on pages in the supplemental index because they won’t get crawled as often.

Jim’s recent explanation on finding if a page is in supplemental pretty well details how to detect if a page is “healthy” at all – i.e. ranks for obscure terms.

If a page does not even rank for an obscure terms on it, you don’t need a link there.

So you ask again, why is this cool for your business?

Because the way to check if a page is worthy to spend time to get a link on it has just become a bit harder. You will need more work, time, effort, unless you automate it. Just as we do here.

And this is the perfect situation to use an “internal tool” (as many SEOs have) as a competitie advantage to get more and better links in a shorter time… heck – some link builders might spend another couple clicks on each page to find out if it qualifies for hunting for link.

We Don’t :-)

In fact we already see the “Supplemental Index” on top of our brower toolbar bar when we visit a page.

In fact we already see the “Supplemental Index” label as it used to be printed for ALL google users in the past, nicely embedded in the SERPs.

And in fact Google has bought itself now 10-20 more Google queries per SERP page my Link Arbeiter team screens when looking for links – plus we are inflating the pageloads of all those sites we screen by one…

Do you think that hurts Google? Nah – enough resources.

Do you think it hurts me? Nah – just got a bunch more proxy IPs to make up for the bigger Google scraping load.

Do you think it will hurt the SEO scene building links? Well …

I would assume a huge bunch of people won’t even notice a difference – after all even SEOmoz de-classified 70% of SEO companies for not knowing the SEO basic

Furthermore a couple of smaller equipped companies will struggle as they will need to do more a lot more work (as per Jim’s description) to get the same results…. and I mean – A LOT MORE.

Now this moves the benefits to larger scale companies (as Google is) that DO have an intact SEO infrastructure for their daily SEO work.

But the small scale link builders will first have to build that infrastructure, browser plugins and knowledge to make visible what Google has just taken from the public.

Thanks Google !

Page-Rank, Trust-Rank, boom !

Marketing Fan — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 02:13:36 +0200

Obivously the google ranking algorithms changed last week wednesday (the 4th of july holiday update towards more trust… (dave’s speaking about Thursday in his great article)

Dave Davies wrote:

A fairly common belief has been that PageRank would be or is being replaced by TrustRank and Google would not give us a green bar to gague a site’s trust on (good call Google). With this in mind one of two things has happened; either Google has decided the TrustRank is irrelevant and so is PageRank and decided to scrap both (unlikely) or they have shifted the weight from PageRank to TrustRank to some degree and are just now sorting out the issues with their TrustRank calculations (more likely).

I can just confirm this and have seen a move towards trust vs. page rank…

What puzzles me at the same time is his observation that low-quality, unrelated links seem to work well AS WELL .. that’s just the opposite… hmmm. I haven’t seen that result.. tought a lot of related links STILL help.

This algo update definitaly weighted AGE and TRUST even stronger than before.

That’s it… ending here, cause I’m just a “blog blogger” and not one of those authority article bloggers as Michael put it… and be it as Aaron said that you can put more value into real articles published – I don’t have the time to write those great ones…

I’m just putting my 2c in here – that’s it.

take it or leave it.

MSN/Live product managers on crack

Marketing Fan — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 10:45:18 +0200

Just this morning I realized that it’s merely a half year ago that MSN search introduced all sorts of fancy search operators … just to shut down ALL of the advanced link search operators (inluding the link: command) down over night.

Today you at least get a normal search screen with no results,

but I remember that they had a “blank page” as result for WEEKS when you used those “forbidden” operators

I realize products change, and so do operators.

But this product line armageddon – first to talk big about cool new features and then break everything over night just made me think

I remember MSNdude bragging last summer about their “HUGE” infrastructure and all the shit they are able to do with it that Google and Yahoo cannot… LOL

I bet somebody found that the shared dipped some cents, so they sold some search server machines to generate fake-profits …

What’s going on those minds?

Yahoo dropped the results counter on backlink command

Marketing Fan — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 21:30:05 +0200

Dammit, it seems Yahoo has dropped the results counter on backlink command… that means there is no way to count the no. of backlinks for a given site anymore… Google started years ago, and after MSN breaking their backlink tool some time ago, now the last Search Engine chimed in to break SEO related queries this only applies to complex queries like "linkdomain:oracle.com site:.edu" anyone else seeing that crazy purple Yahoo logo above?

Ooops… it’s gone again… back to the old scheme…

but wait… this is AJAX/Javascriptish…. I see the numbers in opera :-) too good to be true?

Yahoo does not let me use Site Explorer !

root — Wed, 23 May 2007 21:01:10 +0200

Just when I wanted to do a simple site command I got this stupid splash screen

Obviously the Yahoo Geo-IP redirect does not take into account, that there’s not Austria specific Site-Explorer version… or is there?

Site Explorer does not work with Yahoo’s .at. prefix for Austria: Yahoo Site Explorer does not work with their .at. prefix for Austria … Yahoo fix your scripts!

Yahoo! wake up and fix your scripts!

PS: the german text says “ Yahoo Austria – Site Explorer beta! to be released soon” – well, I just wanted to look at an Austrian domain.

PPS: now you might smell why some 2004 search engine spam tactics still work in Yahoo 2007 … LOL – lack of engineers, Google hired all the PhDs )

Google Cache Crazy or SITE: command broken by intention

Marketing Fan — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 17:14:02 +0100

during the whole weekend and especially in the last 24 hours I got a lot of reports and saw myself, that the Google Cache server seem to be really updating from scratch, or that Google has maybe just broken the SITE: command, as they did with the link: command years ago…

However when querying the different data centers cache servers especially with the site: command for all kinds of sites you get crazy results.

I’ve seen cache: working, but site: not,

seen info: working, but cache: not

seen inurl: working, but site: not and vice versa

First I thought there’s a major reindexing going on,

but then I compared those site: command results with

the actualy cache dates returned for any site I just came across (it’s a small unimportant PR3 blog)

and there’s no common pattern when comparing cache dates to the site index count as you can see there are low counts for Dec 6 (4 pages to 147 pages) as well as high counts (950) ... same for Dec 8 going from 538 to 1060

DC: 66.102.1.44	idx:4	cache:6 Dec
DC: 64.233.171.18	idx:97	cache:6 Dec
DC: 64.233.179.19	idx:97	cache:6 Dec
DC: 66.249.83.19	idx:97	cache:6 Dec
DC: 72.14.219.99	idx:97	cache:6 Dec
DC: 64.233.161.18	idx:98	cache:6 Dec
DC: 64.233.187.19	idx:98	cache:6 Dec
DC: 209.85.143.18	idx:99	cache:6 Dec
DC: 64.233.189.44	idx:99	cache:6 Dec
DC: 66.249.89.19	idx:99	cache:6 Dec
DC: 72.14.235.99	idx:99	cache:6 Dec
DC: 64.233.185.19	idx:145	cache:6 Dec
DC: 216.239.51.19	idx:147	cache:6 Dec
DC: 64.233.169.19	idx:147	cache:6 Dec
DC: 66.249.81.18	idx:533	cache:6 Dec
DC: 209.85.129.18	idx:538	cache:8 Dec
DC: 209.85.135.17	idx:538	cache:8 Dec
DC: 216.239.59.17	idx:538	cache:8 Dec
DC: 64.233.183.17	idx:538	cache:8 Dec
DC: 66.102.11.99	idx:538	cache:8 Dec
DC: 66.102.9.18	idx:538	cache:8 Dec
DC: 66.249.85.19	idx:538	cache:8 Dec
DC: 66.249.91.18	idx:538	cache:8 Dec
DC: 66.249.93.19	idx:538	cache:8 Dec
DC: 72.14.215.19	idx:538	cache:8 Dec
DC: 72.14.217.99	idx:538	cache:8 Dec
DC: 72.14.221.99	idx:538	cache:8 Dec
DC: 216.239.37.19	idx:949	cache:6 Dec
DC: 216.239.39.19	idx:949	cache:6 Dec
DC: 72.14.209.99	idx:949	cache:6 Dec
DC: 72.14.211.99	idx:949	cache:6 Dec
DC: 72.14.247.18	idx:949	cache:6 Dec
DC: 216.239.53.19	idx:950	cache:6 Dec
DC: 216.239.57.17	idx:950	cache:6 Dec
DC: 64.233.163.19	idx:950	cache:8 Dec
DC: 64.233.167.18	idx:950	cache:8 Dec
DC: 66.102.7.18	idx:950	cache:6 Dec
DC: 72.14.207.99	idx:950	cache:8 Dec
DC: 72.14.223.99	idx:950	cache:8 Dec
DC: 72.14.253.99	idx:950	cache:6 Dec
DC: 72.14.255.17	idx:950	cache:6 Dec
DC: 72.14.203.99	idx:1,060	cache:8 Dec
DC: 72.14.205.99	idx:1,060	cache:8 Dec

Hmmm – who cares about a PR3 blog I hear you say…

doing the same for database vendor oracle.com brings results from 987 pages to 194,000 pages, which is a huge difference as well

Those datacenters showing especially low counts seem to be affect by what was refered to recently as bad data push in the rollout of new data or binary versions of Google, which seems to have taken place yesterday Sunday Dec 10

For example these 2 DC are showing those low counts on several checks I made

64.233.179.19
72.14.219.99

on the other hand, a site that was recently launched is indexed there fully, having all the pages in the site command, while other datacenters do not…

are these two the two leading DCs ???

Does it matter? NO

Time to freak out? NO

Anything else to do? NO – get a cup of coffee and relax.

Let’s just wait for some days and

I’m sure Google will settle down, just as usual.

Update with some links

Dec 7 sudden drop in rankings

from 2 to 102nd

actually Matt Cutts confirmed “nothing special” in the WMW thread above