penalties

NOFOLLOW CSS Class - fake or new way to rip of link buyers?

Marketing Fan — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 12:28:09 +0200

Years after the NOFOLLOW tag was introduced as a publicly visible tag for links to be ignored

there’s a post about an internal NOFOLLOW class that only Google is able to interpret – per site.

According to this blog post Google allows you to add a NOFOLLOW Cass class to your webmaster console and tell google (in secret) that a block that might be labelled “white-navigation-links” are in fact sold links and that Google should ignore them.

Well, as of today I haven’t seen that “No Follow Class” option in any of the webmaster console accounts I manage for my own stuff and clients.

What about you?

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from all those details and the partly wrong promises for a cure for it with two solutions that BOTH address only the outdated part of the problem.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.

Remove your competitor from MSN

Marketing Fan — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 22:18:41 +0100

This nice post about removing your competitor from MSN is based on a damn stupid duplicate content detection by MSN.

In fact EVERY website that uses affiliate link parameters would be affected

e.g. if these 4 urls would be indexed by MSN (or mabye a bit more)

mysite.com/?affil=test1

mysite.com/?affil=test2

mysite.com/?affil=test3

mysite.com/?affil=test4

THEN msn could already remove your site mysite.com from the search results for a duplicate content penalty.

The post also gives some clues about how to get rid of the problem, but this largely depends on what’s going on with the GET parameters… e.g. some affiliate sofware does NOT allow removing these parameters (for obvious reasons of tracking!!)

It’s time for an algo-update for MSN and all webmasters to have a close look at their most valuable sites.

SpamRank - my interpretation

Marketing Fan — Sun, 06 Aug 2006 19:59:10 +0200

One of the papers I listed in The Top 15 SEO research papers is about SpamRank with the goal of Fully Automatic Link Spam Detection

Preparing for the SES tomorrow, I want to share my observations and interpretations of that WWW2005 paper

Goal

obviously search engines need a good and automatic way to identifying link networks and link farms – sites that are built soley for inflating page rank or a group of webmasters that join together for a link rink or a link exchange network

Method

research paper wrote:

key assumption is that

supporters of an honest page should not be overly dependent on one another, i.e. they should be spread

across sources of different quality

This means having too many high ranking sites is bad, while having only low ranking sites is bad too – emulate natural web

Quote:

as in the case of the entire Web, the PageRank distribution of an

honest set of supporters should be power law.

You want a natural linking pattern for your sites

The two key observations in detecting link farms

assumption 1 wrote:

Portions of the Web are self-similar; an honest set of supporter pages arise by independent actions of individuals and organizations that build a structure with properties similar to the entire Web. In particular, the PageRank of the supporters (ed: the linking sites) follows a power law distribution just as the case for the entire Web.

Again, you want a natural linking pattern for your sites

assumption 2 wrote:

Link spammers have a limited budget; when boosting the PageRank of a target page, “unimportant” structures are not replicated.

If you need “unimportant” structures for your site, then go for low-value links like PR0, PR1, PR2, links from uncached pages, links from new sites, hell – any link – just make sure you build a GOOD, NATURAL (again) mix

So how can I lower my SpamRank ?

These are my interpretations & recommendations only:

Get a good mix of backlinks, where the PR follows a power-principle, say a power of 3 have 3^5 = 243 PR0, 81 PR1, 27x PR2, 9 PR3, 3 PR4 and 1 PR5 … you get the idea?
THEREFORE: Don’t bother buying links on High PR pages like PR9,PR8 that sure will stick out of your link profile immediately
Look at your competitors and their backlink profiles and try to emulate that
Get links from within content (presell pages), not only sidebar, navigational or footer links
Add “useless” pages like About, Sitemap, Contact us etc to your sites

Add “useless” links to your sites – some nofollow links, some PR0, some uncached

Hell – and don’t count on every single link… make your site evolve naturally, the days where you bought 3 PR7 and got a PR6 next month are over for YEARS... (I still get questions from people who believe those 2003ish myths that are burried in some old abandoned webmaster forums and minds)

Two other algorithms are cited and I’m sure they are in development or production already

B. Wu and B. D. Davison. Identifying link farm pages.

and with 22 scientific citations and only via payables from Springs this here

H. Zhang, A. Goel, R. Govindan, K. Mason, and B. V. Roy. Making eigenvector-based reputation systems robust to collusion.

More to read on the topic of link farms and link spam detection is listed here

Yahoo’s Link Farm detection patent

Using Rank Propagation and Probabilistic Counting for Link-Based Spam Detection

Undue Influence: Eliminating the Impact of Link Plagiarism on Web Search Rankings

Sidenote: Barry and others already reported from last years’ Chicago show (I think it was Chicago) that Matt Cutts from Google was playing with

his notebook to point out rented links and links from link farms.

While it’s not clear that thes algos are in effect for all search queries, all websites, all countries or languages, it’s sure Google & Co have implemented MANY of them – as the pure calculation is pretty simple once you have the huge database of web site vectors (interlink data) as Google & Co have.

Google's new Easy-To-Read algo with Accessible Search

Marketing Fan — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 16:03:00 +0200

Google introduced a new, early-stage experiment for finding sites that are easy to read… finally it’s official that they incorporate the web-design into the search algos…

Last year google search engineers already explained that they use "VIPS technology":http://www.marketingfan.com/a/search-engines/google-engineers-on-link-value-vips-flash-duplicate-content-and-crawler-budget.php to analyze sites and it’s obviously used to value links based on their location (you want to get "links in content":http://www.presellpageman.com , do you?)

The Google Accessible Search adds a small twist to how search results are returned. the most relevant results are sorted based on the simplicity of their page layouts.

So today, when users search from the Accessible search "site":http://labs.google.com/accessible, they’ll receive results that are prioritized based on their usability. WOW... did you read THAT? search results based on usability… that’s cool!

They look at a number of "usability signals" by examining the HTML markup found on a web page.

It favors

pages with few visual distractions
pages that are likely to render well with images turned off

Interesting to read that Google Accessible Search is built on "Google Co-op’s technology":http://www.marketingfan.com/a/communities/google-coop-how-to-add-your-links-to-the-google-premium-spots.php that I just released that "realtime RSS converter":http://www.marketingfan.com/a/rss-marketing/realtime-rss-to-google-coop-converter.php for…

So this is a great new feature – and a LOT to rethink when doing search engine optimization. Takes this idea vice-versa you can think of a search result penalty if your site is designed poorly or overloaded and cluttered… way time to get some really cool web-designers, eh?

and, as you can see from the links to the Google post, it already got a lot buzz :-)

New! Google "Accessible Search"
Google Accessibility Search
Google Accessible Search
google accessible search
Google making it even easier to search
A ‘New’ Google Search – Are You a Simpleton?
Google Accessible Search
Google’s accessible search
Finding easy-to-read web content
Find easy-to-read web sites with Google Accessible Search
Google steps forward

[via Official Google Blog: Finding easy-to-read web content]: