An Open Letter to Matt Cutts & the Google Web Spam Team
blog.loveclients.com
blog.loveclients.com
1. If Google tells us what they're doing about paid link networks, paid link networks will route around that. I bet Google loves it when paid link providers spend $10K/day on AdWords and Google instantly catches and devalues their links.
3. Yes, time-based relevancy exists. Google has lots of ways to filter this (for example, if something is "newsy," and gets lots of links from "newsy" sources, they'll put it on page one temporarily and then drop it once the news cycle ends--this also affects Suggest).
5. This is a common concern, but I've never heard of it happening.
6. Google Local. They're taking reviews into account and building their own review system.
7. Yes, click-throughs affect rankings. If the #2 ranking gets as many clicks as the #1 ranking, it'll probably be bumped up. This signal is stronger for brands (for example, if a search for "hacker news" brought up a newspaper's topic page on "hackers" ahead of news.yc, but most searchers were looking for news.yc, Google would alter the rankings.
Although I don't do a lot of SEO work, it's disappointing when it feels like I can't do techniques that other places are doing. It's not a time issue, either -- many of these paid link networks have been on my competitors systems for a decade.
What google says they do is often very different than what they actually do.
I too am tired of people trying to game the system to their financial advantage. Build a good business and serve your customers well. Stop worrying about "some other guy" who may or may not have bought a link on some high ranking web site. Wrong focus!
Almost all companies are not open about the things they consider their competitive advantage. Google likes to promote themselves as an "open" company, but notice that their openness is almost always to support strategic decisions that commoditize their complements. Their business, the way they make money, is advertising from web search. And they are just as fanatically restrictive about anything they fear jeopardizes that segment's profitability as, say, Apple is restrictive about curating the app store.
I personally know a couple who had a thriving business for several years, then lost their home one season when their google rankings went south. Nothing they could do, they were doing the same things as in the past, but that was it.
What really chaps my hide in particular is that Google doesn't allow folks to track their rankings in anywhere near the accuracy or detail that they need to effectively manage their business. Its rationalizations for doing so are incredibly silly and deceptive: Just build a good website with plenty of content and we'll take care of the rest. What patriarchal and self-serving nonsense. Is there some reason to believe that google is infallible? Or even very close to infallible? Sites continue to successfully use paid links, sites continue to steal content and outrank the sources, and etc. Knowing your site's ranking data is obviously just as important a metric as any other a business might need to help them make decisions. No one says, "Well, just create a good business with great products. You don't need to keep financial books and really watch your cash flow too carefully, it'll just take care of itself." What tosh.
The hell of it is that google is well known for its fanatical approach to decision making through data, even to the point of dumb extremes. Yet, hypocritically, they don't allow business who depend on its monopoly of web search to obtain the data they need.
The concessions they do make, like webmaster tools, are poor and ineffective and feel like they were designed more to serve google's interests than webmasters. Their web search api turns out to be incredibly restrictive. If you talk to them directly to try to arrange something, there are even more unpublished (I believe, at least I couldn't find them anywhere) and incredible restrictions making it inviable for almost anyone. Remands me of that asmartbear.com article the other day where he recommended that, if you really don't want to do something, still offer it, but at such fantastic terms for yourself that you would be glad to do it. Google offers a search api only to say they do.
A hard-hearted response would be, "well, you shouldn't build a business on such an ephemeral platform as search discovery." Really? How about we have a world where there's a little more competition so we don't have to rely on the vagaries of one company? Wouldn't it be a better world if we could rely on the stability of our search platform if we continued to use the same strategies and put in the same effort we had before?
At most you should only do it if (1) you are trying to flip to said company, or (2) you use it as part of an interim strategy and will eventually lower to proportion of that platform's importance to your profit.
Try Ginzametrics. They're a YC company and work great! (I don't work for them, just use their product)
\ Totally, before we know it they'll be doing drug testing in sports.
/sarcasm
Google Places looks like it's designed to really identify the best restaurant.
A perfect Google could show the following instead: ...Did you mean: "Chicago restaurants ordered by their number of stars in the Michelin guide", "Chicago restaurants that your friends like"
You're probably thinking - "Well what about JC Penny. They got penalized for buying links after the NYT article came out with proof of link buying". Did they get penalized? Or did those links just get devalued which resulted in a drop in rankings? Or did Google take action on them just to set an example and scare webmasters? Personally, I think the links were just devalued or JCP was given a temporary "penalty" to appease those that were calling foul. JCP has regained a lot of rankings for keywords that have the same manipulative link building patterns as what they were originally "penalized" for - look at the search results for "personalized jewelry" and you'll see JCP at #1. Look at the backlinks using OpenSiteExplorer and you'll see exactly what I'm talking about.
So what can Google do to detect "link buying" or other forms of manipulative link building? Since they can't police transactions that's out of the question. Something they can do, however, is look at the anchor text distribution of incoming links. If a website has 1000 links pointing to their site using the anchor text "my competitive keyword" and only a few other links using different anchor text, then that's a good sign there's something fishy is going on. Maybe that could signal a manual review is needed to determine if the site in question is actually relevant to the search results for that query. After all, if the searchers are happy then Google should be happy. Searchers don't know if a website is "cheating". All they know is if what they searched for is relevant to their query.
Out of curiosity: how often does this happen? It's a really common problem--hypothetically. I've heard all kinds of warnings about how people could buy links to a site and report it, slamming the site's rankings. Could.
It would be interesting to see how often this actually happens, and how Google responds.
From a usability perspective, it does make alot of sense to use that as a signal, but what about when someone is researching for something on mobile the DAY before they want to use the service?
In my opinion, if you want to get good search engine results just provide good content.
I also think that "SEO experts" are modern day snake oil salesmen and should be avoided.
Quality predicts salary like quality predicts SEO results.
"Development skill leads to success in software businesses like the ability to cook amazing waffles leads to successfully running a bed and breakfast."
(Completely off topic, but I found both lines hilarious).
And then other sites rip off your good content, and then Google notes a bunch of sites have the same content, and they penalize your site for the duplication.
They also pose a question about utilizing store times when searching from a mobile device, asking whether Google takes this into account.
Google markets itself as more than just a search engine for websites. It's attempting to be a search engine for finding out information. It's the classic "Where are my keys?" I'm surprised they haven't enabled the ability to search for "Where is my phone?" and have that show the location of your phone.
With that in mind, many of these questions become more important. After all, if you are searching for "best treatment for autism in montreal," you're not searching for "best content on autistic treatment in montreal" or "most linked to resource for autism in montreal."
They raise a real valid question.
Saying you hate SEO with a passion is like saying you hate all people who drink beer with a passion. Just because some people are alcoholics doesn't mean you can (or should) write off the entire group.