Are they taking their old SEO vendor to court, or are they just going to let them get away with it knowing full well other businesses are none the wiser?
3,343 karma · joined April 11, 2010
These changes are clearly hurting SEOers who practice massive link building regardless of quality, too. That is a good thing.
There's a filter you've missed there - those people are only at the mercy of negative SEO when they stand in the way of an SEO practitioner and financial gain.
Interesting. Show me where in Google's guidelines Google says it outlaws affiliate marketing.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/76465?hl=en -- seems to suggest it's okay in conjunction with a site that's producing good quality content.
That is a succinct description of a zero-sum game.
* Business X gains the same amount business Y loses.
There is no additional value!
Great. that's what's supposed to happen, links accumulate naturally. (I'm deliberately ignoring the inconsistencies in your story, BTW ;-)
"Yet, I get penalized for it. It's fucking shitty"
How are you being penalised? Did you get a warning of bad links in your Google Webmaster dashboard? If not, how do you know?
Links accumulate, and some disappear over time. That's natural on the web. If Google taking out a bunch of low quality sites affects your own site, that only means the value of your site is significantly positively affected by these sites, so your site was over-ranked. Now it's placed closer to where it should be.
Being linked to by big traffic sources also brings attention from less known sources - that's quite normal.
How many sites did you try this on? One?
In your existing setup, how many competitors could you take out now before Google notices the pattern you've adopted? Take a look at the footprint:
* Site suddenly acquires a new batch of incoming links
* Same site is reported for being a recipient of a paid-for links scheme
* Reporter uses the email address of (your email address here) -- I love the dichotomy of blackhats despising/hating Google, yet reaching out over and over again pretending to be a good citizen.
How many times and variations of that can you come up with before standing out? And when the pattern emerges, Google are in a position to re-address the balance.
This switch Google has done from inaction to penalty for spammy links has changed the spamming game. No positive benefit from spamming is a good thing. Spammers can only create negative damage with their existing setup, until they out themselves by being trackable/detectable.
Directors of companies are held responsible for the decisions they made. Delegating that decision to others does not abrogate their responsibilities.
If you are in the SEO industry, please stop hiding behind this. The SEO industry have had ample time and patience to clean itself up (naming and shaming these unethical SEO consultant for starters, offering up material small businesses and mom-and-pop operators, checklists in hiring an ethical SEO practitioner, checklists of methods/practices that should be avoided. How to write up clear statements of work).
In the short term, maybe. In the long term, no. How many times can this weapon be used before it leaves a nice juicy fingerprint, or sources of negative links become over saturated.
This negative-SEO feels very much like bottom-feeding. Last scrabbling for tiny chunks of change, or an explosion of self-entitled anger, we just need to wait it out. People do stupid traceable things when they are angry.
That didn't work before. Zero weight for spammy links is gamed by spammers by spamming everything at full blast. There was no downside for them. There are better dials and switches than falling back to a known broken model.
With penalties in place spammers need to get those existing bad links removed for their own sites / or build from scratch new sites with clean link profiles (which they are doing anyway, slash and burn). Now they will need to multiply their efforts to negatively target sites above them (not just rank one site, but unrank several sites). Good luck doing that without leaving a detectable fingerprint/trace.
The history of when links are created - that will leave a clear beacon that a site has been targeted. Unless a spammer does it very slowly over the course of years. In which case, LOL.
Don't you think it would be noticeable that a site ranking well, with a clean back link profile suddenly starts attracting heaps and heaps of bad spammy links? That's a clear indication something is going on.
The better time to use negative SEO is when the spammer has already gotten ahead of his competitor. Then the influx of bad links might look like an effort to regain rankings. That would be more interesting.
The more negative SEO that happens, the more data that gives Google. Overtime, the negative SEO sources will be over-saturated, offering no benefit for either positive or negative SEO.
Driving down the positive and negative value of links makes all SEO link building efforts consequently worthless. Which in turns increases the importance of other ranking factors.
This is a natural evolution, in tiny tiny steps Google is nudging people into playing it's game - producing websites that have content. SEOers are slowly falling into line building private link networks, paying people to write content, afraid to spin/rehash existing content because it might leave a fingerprint Google can detect.
It's fascinating watching.
1.) Open homepage
2.) Click the /matches endpoint link. Json displays
3.) Click back button.
Expected: The homepage displays.
Actual: The URL changes back to the homepage URL, but the matches JSON is still displayed.
Browser: Safari 7.0.4
Saying all screen readers can run JavaScript is like saying all graphics cards can run JavaScript. Screenreaders don't run JavaScript. Screenreaders are not web browsers. A Screenreader is an audio interface on top of an operating system. It's the web browser that runs JavaScript, not the screenreader.
I know what you are attempting to convey, despite the factual incorrectness, and the way in which you describe it. But these are tougher problems to solve in a generic way - it requires expertise on the subject matter under discussion.
I took a sentence of words at their face value, recognised the incorrectness of your statement. Applied a context of accessibility to the statement, and discovered what your intended message was (which was quite different to the statement you used).
Human beings do this all the time. A computer would interpret your statement and say it is false. A human can divine the essence of the message without being blocked by an obviously false statement, a human can look past that and assess the statement in context.
I realise, as a human, your original statement is either intellectually lazy, or misinformed (perhaps you meant to say speech browser?). You either know how screen readers work and worded the statement badly. Or you have no idea how screen readers work, and don't actually realise your statement is factually incorrect.
So I can perceive the content of your statement: Screenreaders have the ability to deal with a dynamically updating DOM. That is a step forward, but minuscule in overcoming the typical accessibility problems present for screenreader users on the web.
"What specifically else is wrong?"
"What wouldn't be solved better be actually fixing what screenreaders can't see"
Your question is misleading. It assumes or implies that all serious accessibility issues can be fixed/addressed by a screenreader. Yes, it would be fantastic when every accessibility problem is thoroughly alleviated by a screenreader. But with today's technology it can't, not even in another 10 years. Many accessibility issues have to do with content gleaned indirectly or implied. It's a human trait of communication.
It's the difference between:
* "A red triangle"
* "Danger"
* "This side is up"
* "Go this way"
* "North"
The use of images is a serious accessibility barrier for blind people. It is not sufficient (or perhaps misleading) to just describe the image in isolation. An image conveys more information than the objects/concepts in the image. The meaningful content of an image can change as the context in which the image is used changes.
Perceiving contextually relevant content from an image - that is something blind people can't do because they are blind. It is also something that's awfully tough for a computer to do reliably. And it's something that a web developer can do in five minutes by authoring an appropriate text equivalent (in an alt attribute of an image).
The big accessibility issues aren't simple "let's parse the HTML, CSS and JavaScript", they come down to using context, visual cues, audio cues, spatial cues, implied meanings, intonation, cultural identification, localisation normalisation - a wide variety of human-based factors to extract the necessary contextual meaning.
Being able to extract the appropriate text-equivalents for an image is something that's trivial for a content writer to do - as the content creator. And exceedingly tough to do without a visual acuity, a visual acuity that computers are far from achieving.
And that's just one single accessibility issue: text-equivalents for images. If you fix that, you'll have the appreciation of millions of people instantly, a substantially accessibility barrier will disappear overnight. I strongly encourage you, if you think this is an easily solvable problem, to just solve it, or help the experts solve it. Seriously. Please.
Reminds me of a Better Off Ted episode resolution: http://www.tv.com/shows/better-off-ted/racial-sensitivity-12...
Why bother? in a few months it will be 5.5%. Next year it will be 1%. Why invest any time or attention to a browser whose market share is low and continue downwards into nothingness?
Do nothing. The IE8 problem will work itself out naturally. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lz9810Y7ZRw
"2) You don't count the version; you count the version and all its successors. That is, we're not catering to 8, we're catering to 8+. 8+ is at almost 35% and is still the dominant aggregate browser."
That's just a sleight-of-hand obfuscation. If 9+ is 30%, why quibble over the extra 5% (and only dropping over time) that IE8 will offer. It's a diminishing return adding an older browser to the browser support list.
"5) The web solution for this is WAI-Aria, which began in mid-2012, and became a candidate recommendation three months ago."
No, WAI-ARIA became a Recommendation in March, not a Candidate Recommendation. The distinction between the two is two independent implementations.
"8) As far as I know, no single group of disabled users reaches 1% of the user base."
* Colourblindness (8% of Caucasian Men) * Dyslexia
"9) ... Your site has no aria markup at all"
The non-presence of ARIA does not make a site inaccessible.
"12) In short, because like you, most small web authors are more comfortable writing about the problem than being part of the solution."
Unfortunately, you are presenting the opposite side of the problem. So you have a little more knowledge about accessibility issues than the OP - but not enough to pass a quick scrutiny.
Perhaps, what is needed is for you and I to stop being part of the problem of disseminating half-truths, and spend that time quietly doing our jobs properly, and showing the results of these. Invest the time to teach someone else how to build accessible websites, and encourage them to also share what they know.
In all fairness, the poster of the blogpost has a fighting chance of improving her skills. She is worth teaching, for the scales of dogma have fallen from her eyes, and she is enlightened.
What's the point of having a perceivable interface without it being usable or operable? See this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7885113 -- for accessibility tips that have no relevance to spiders/bots, but is fundamental to accessibility.
That's where this "robots are like blind/deaf people" argument falls down.
Accessibility is about removing barriers for humans, with human related disabilities. That making those changes also makes content more consumable by a spider or crawler is a positive side-effect. A great positive side-effect, but not the primary aim.
I am thankful that the ability to work around these shortcomings was in your control. (Chuck it through a readability bookmarklet, as an alternative to overriding CSS)
Spare a thought for people where the choice of whether or not to consume a piece of content is taken away from them because they are disabled, and they have no straightforward way of working around the barriers the website has placed before them.
These people don't have the choice you have, unfortunately. I wish they did.
Yet every dollar spent focused on web accessibility further improves the usability of the site for your entire audience too.
I rebuilt the Legal & General's online home insurance purchase flow. That resulted in a doubling of the number of people completing an online purchase.
http://www.w3.org/WAI/bcase/legal-and-general-case-study
There's a before/after graph in my presentation: http://isolani.co.uk/presentations/wsg/
Or, you could start with the 4 principles of Accessibility (Perceivability, Operability, Usability, Robustness) and build a working knowledge set on that.
Screenreaders are complicated pieces of software, just an hour a day is not enough, you do need to fully immerse yourself as a blind person. Do your day job for a month using a screenreader and no monitor (from turning on the computer all the way to turning it off) - that will give you adequate platform in which to appreciate the blind people you want to serve.
But that's just one disability (though a large chunk). Visual impairments isn't just blind people. It's partially sighted, low vision, photosensitivity, tunnel vision, colour blindness - each have their own accessibility characteristics. And that's just sight-related accessibility issues... I haven't even started talking about motor-related disabilities, cognition related impairments.
Seriously, WCAG took absolutely ages to write, but it will give you a better perspective of a wider range of accessibility issues than using a screenreader for an hour a day.
It's not screenreaders that are the problem, its the quality of the content (in terms of structure, perceivability, operability, usability and robustness). In short, GIGO. The garbage input is where the fix is needed, not the tool that's attempting to treat it as actual quality.
The "fix the screen readers" argument is a terribly terribly deep rabbit hole, requiring pretty much world-changing technologies: solving artificial intelligence, solving computer vision, teaching computers empathy, emotion, spatial relativity and context, cultural awareness, interpretation of imagery, spot and be able to translate visual cues... so many many deeply technical problems to solve.
In the choice between "fixing screenreaders" and web developers doing their jobs properly, the latter is a low hanging fruit in comparison. I assume teaching web developers basic skills is easier than teaching computers how to think and perceive (though, I recognise some people are beyond help). It takes a year to teach a web developer professional web development, it's been 60-odd years and they haven't seriously cracked artificial intelligence yet.
Open standards did not beat Flash. A bigger proprietary platform bully sent Flash to it's doom - Apple's iOS. Adobe's Flash was vulnerable because it had to seek Apple's blessing to be part of Apple's platform, and they were spurned.
This is the lesson of being a sharecropper - even a massive proprietary-source company, Adobe, are powerless when the platform owner enforces it's control. https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePl...
Yes, open standards win in the long run, after Apple have profited significantly from the closed approach they are taking now. At which point it's a meaningless victory.
The point of the article is, be aware you are just a sharecropper, and working on Apple's lands for as long as it's in Apple's interest. And Apple owes you nothing for all your hard efforts, it will change the environment for it's own corporate interests. And you, the developer, are mere insignificant collateral damage. Remember that Steve Jobs killed Flash. And there was nothing Adobe could do to avoid or mitigate it.
Current iOS developers have already accepted this, willingly or unknowingly. It's the new folk who are attracted by the new shiny thing, need to be aware of the consequences of working on an Apple controlled platform.
The Deep Fritz on the rating list, is that the same Deep Fritz that played Kramnik? (Notably the hardware and software version used may be different - perhaps the Deep Fritz on the rating list is weaker than the one that played Kramnik?)
And also, be careful trying to compare computer-list Elo with human-list Elo. Because participants on both lists are isolated from each other, there is a tendency for one set of ratings to be inflated/deflated compared to the other. We see this in international chess where countries that don't have regular FIDE tournaments, players either seem to be significantly stronger or significantly weaker than the prevailing norms in the bigger pool of players. South Africa, Myanmar are two such examples.
Computer software doesn't play chess. It doesn't understand positions. It has a bunch of algorithms and processes that turn a board position, tries each candidate move, turns the resulting position into some sort of number, through an evaluation function. Goes down a tree of that until either it reaches a definite conclusion, or reaches a depth where trying to go deeper takes far too much more time.
All of this is an artificial simulation of how chess is played. And it is, long-term, at the mercy of the accuracy of the evaluation function. Because right at the end of it's search-depth, it has to evaluate that position, effectively "a guess".
The most accurate way of evaluating a position is to try each move and go down a search tree of best moves until you reach a definite conclusion. But the evaluation is used because at that point it is computationally too expensive to go down the move tree any deeper. It's a fudge of brute force analysis - there isn't enough computational resources available to go any deeper, and so the computer must guess. This is the horizon effect, computers can't see past it.
That evaluation function is a human written piece of code, that takes various on-board factors: piece placement, pawn structures, strong/weak-squares, king-safety, piece activity, central control. In effect, the human is trying to program intuition into the machine. Humans don't understand intuition, let alone program a computer to do it.
Chess strength of software is determined substantially by the number and speed of CPUs, Memory capacity, and the evaluation function. The evaluation function is the weakest part of that chain, so there's considerable effort to hold off the use of the evaluation function for as long as possible.
I think only the Rybka developers spent more time trying to teach the engine how to play chess, and that proved more successful for a few years than the "more power quicker" led industry.
The evaluation function is the most difficult part of a chess engine. It is the typical AI problem. And humans can only take that so far. But how do you find a human who can comprehend how a grandmaster thinks about a chess position and determining the right move, and still be capable of emulating that process in software. At least Rybka's developers were International Masters.
Also, humans have the strength to adapt and refine - patch their own chess playing abilities. Look at Carlsen's style, it's an ever more refined Karpov style, which itself was a more refined Capablanca style. Carlsen excels in the kinds of positions computers don't manage well - deep strategical long-range plans, well executed. A lot of Carlsen's chess strength is intuition and feel, with an impeccable analysis to confirm his hypothesis. And he's one of the post-Chessbase crowd, grown up learning chess with computers. That is an opponent a computer should fear, if it could ever comprehend the notion.
So yes, in terms of chess playing strength, humans still play chess better than computers.
It's fantastic to see it take on the best commercial engines toe-to-toe and come out on top.
These ratings are computer ratings, and because they are playing very much isolates (computers vs other computers), without enough external human encounters, the ratings are consistent within the computer sphere, but not really like-for-like with human rating lists.
A lot has happened since Deep Blue - that was just a 6 game match, which really only proved that machines can play near a grandmaster level, but without nerves. And at times that is good enough to beat a world champion in match conditions, because the human is more susceptible to the psychological events.
Since Deeper Blue we've seen the emergence of chess engines on personal computers (rather than racks and racks of RS6000 mid-range servers), so Chess Genius, Fritz, Shredder, Junior, Rybka, Houdini and now Stockfish pushing chess engines ahead.
The Chess Genius - Junior levels show chess engines capable of matching grandmasters at blitz/active-play speeds, but still struggling at slower time controls.
Rybka onwards show a computer engine where elite grandmasters are seriously challenged.
Chess hasn't been solved. Just watching Magnus Carlsen's play shows we are expanding chess knowledge incrementally one game at a time. Yes, progress has slowed down, but the incremental improvement are still there.
Chess technique is refined to such a super high degree, but still far short of "solving chess". Perhaps this current generation can beat grandmasters when psychological factors are minimised, it's hard to tell.
It's certainly not as clear cut as a Porsche vs Usain Bolt over 100 meters.
Computers don't play like humans, and they are consistent in their weaknesses as well as their strengths. As players are more exposed to playing against various chess programs, they learn what positions computers are not so good at (long-range strategical themes, beyond the typical move horizon). A local optimisation, of sorts.
So players start adopting an anti-computer style of play, which requires a different mind set to pull off. That in turn affects their natural style of play.
So I argue the opposite, for preparing for top-flight tournaments, players probably avoid / severely limit playing against chess engines, to avoid this natural anti-computer bias to their play.
Sure, the engines are good for checking variations and analysis, as an assistant. But not as a leader, nor as an opponent.
Yes, tactical lines do require more knowledge of concrete lines, because they are complicated to work out over the board. But at that point the memorisation should be a "summary shortcut" of your understanding or assessment of the position.
If it were about memorisation, what happens when both players reach the end of their memorised lines? If it's not mate, or one player being substantially better off (in which case, why did the other player memorise that line too), how do you proceed from there?
And that's where knowing an opening comes to the fore, the important part of the opening isn't the moves themselves, but how the game opens up to the middle-game. Understanding the types and structure of the middle-game that's derived from the opening is a far more valuable investment of time. For instance, knowing how to play with and against an isolated d-pawn - a significant number of opening variations lead to these kind of structures. Hedgehog structures, static double-pawn structures, backward pawns, outposts on an open file.
Knowing how to play a position is long term more valuable than memorising a routine of moves. Understanding over rote-repetition.
Granted, some positions are predominantly tactical, and those you need to calculate - either at the board, or before hand. Memorisation is a poor substitute for actual experience.
One of my proudest over-the-board achievements was understanding how to exploit the positional drawbacks of the Black side of a Stonewall Dutch. And beating a player 600-700 Elo stronger than me because I understood the White knight manoeuvre from f3-e5-d3, before exposing Black's backward e6-pawn by opening the centre with the f3 + e4 pawn advances. I spent a week trying to understand one model game of that opening, white's plan was logical, and the strategic aim of exposing the backward e6 pawn easy to understand and attempt.
The missing factor is that FIDE took control of the World Championship title in 1946, and implemented a regular cycle of Zonal tournaments, Interzonal tournaments, candidates tournaments to determine a challenger to the existing Word Champion starting in 1949/1950. (The candidates tournament was changed to candidates matches after 1963 - see Bobby Fischer's complaint "The Russians have fixed World Chess": http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1... )
Before the war, major chess tournaments were sponsored by wealthy chess patrons. FIDE represented amateur chess players, I think their crowning achievement was their nomination of the Max Euwe (who described himself as an amateur, he was a full-time teacher) as Alekhine's challenger in 1935 (and consequently beat Alekhine and became the 6th World Champion). FIDE had no hold over top-level chess. (Edit: FIDE also suggested Bogolyubov as Alekhine's challenger, twice. In all cases FIDE could not force Alekhine to accept, but Alekhine did accept to these challenges - possibly for financial necessity)
FIDE's World Championship cycles from 1949 onwards greatly increased the number of chess tournaments titled players could participate in, globally. Particularly the Zonal and Interzonal tournaments, brought together thousands of chess players regularly in - at the start - 3 year cycles.
So immediately, the number of tournaments involving titled players that adhered to FIDE rules jumped up substantially, and since the World Chess Championship cycle became the main top-tier events, other chess events naturally standardised on FIDE rules, and gave rise to hundreds of FIDE-rules tournaments.
So yes, the removing of the short-draw avoidance rule, in the context of a massive and new qualification cycle for the World Championship title gave rise to the side effect of shorter games.
Before the war, in patron sponsored top-level chess tournaments, each tournament had it's own set of playing rules. They were generally the same, a modification here and there based on previous tournament experiences of sponsors and influential players. There wasn't a consistent set of rules (until FIDE in 1946). For instance, in the Nottingham 1936 tournament book by Alekhine, he writes that they dropped the no-short-draw rules because it was becoming more evident players were circumventing that rule anyway, so it wasn't stopping non-competitive games from happening.
And the World Championship matches were predominantly decided by the current title holder, and mostly about whether it was financially worthwhile to the title holder to risk his title on a match with a sponsored challenger.
In turn, I wonder whether the tailing off of that in 1970 was the introduction of the Elo rating system and the Fischer-effect leading to the professionalisation, financial viability and the commercialisation of chess?
Maybe a rating system infused more competitiveness into tournaments, more professional application from the players.
Also, the tailing off of game length happened right when Fischer returned to the qualification cycle, where his spectacular series of results culminated in winning the World Championship in 1972 against Spassky in Reykjavik, starting the fracturing of the Russian hegemony of World chess.
Fischer also pushed for chess professionalism from a commercial/financial point of view. More money started to flow into chess because of Fischer and his financial demands / quality expectations. Perhaps that started the conversion of chess from a state-run Russian-owned speciality to a commercial/sponsored prestigious tournaments (e.g. Montreal 1979, San Antonio 1972, Milan 1975). And in conjunction with a rating system, compelled players to be more motivated towards playing for the full point, to improve their international standings, to improve the quality of tournament invitations, leading to more financial stability.
Somewhere between the Russian dominance of the World Chess Championship, up to Spassky losing to Fischer in 1972, and the multi-million dollar Kasparov-Kasparov matches from 1985 onwards, elite chess became a financially enriching career path for more and more players. 1970 may have predicated that, and the gradual rise of the length of games a side-effect of money being pumped into chess and initially the Fischer-effect.