Have you ever been looking for something in the top results of Google and been taken to a spammy site? Do you have competitors that aren’t adhering to the Webmaster Guidelines? If so, Google wants you to do something about it. Stephanie, from the Google Search Quality team in Dublin, says that if you report spam from your webmaster account, Google will look at the report and if it’s legit, they’ll take action.
Of course there will be a fair amount of people who are thinking about reporting all of their competitors and then they’ll show up #1, but that is exactly why Google has you report spam from your webmaster account so that they can track who you are just in case you abuse the priviledge. And then guess who they’ll consider as spammy?
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In celebration of their 10 year anniversary, Yahoo is going to offer unlimited email storage. This should be taking place within the next month I believe. Sounds like a great plan. Some of you may be asking, “How are they going to offer unlimited storage?” If you think about it, I can’t even fill up my Gmail accounts so far and I get a lot of mail. I’m guessing they are banking on the fact that most people are like me. I only hope that there aren’t too many people who abuse the unlimited factor. Anyway, it’s still pretty awesome.
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MSN or Live (whatever you want) recently announced that they are disabling any advanced link search commands due to “mass automated usage.” This means you can’t use the link:[your website], linkdomain:, inurl: or any of the other advanced link funcionality at MSN anymore. It sounds like they are going to try and make it so that any manual queries can still be made, but for now everyone is being punished.
Hopefully MSN solves this problem fairly soon because it’s a tool we use frequently and I believe that by disabling this tool, MSN is only going to lose more users of thier search engine. Way to go MSN or Live (or whatever)!
Something I didn’t realize about quality score that I just recently stumbled across in the Google Adwords Help Center was this and I quote (speaking about the factors that are considered in the quality score): “These factors include performance variables like keyword clickthrough rate (CTR), ad text relevance, overall historical keyword performance with Google, and even the user experience on the landing page or site associated with an ad.”
That last part got me. I wonder just what Google is looking for there. Do they track the amount of time spent on the page? And if so, does more time or less time give you a better score? You would think more time, but some people create landing pages for their ads where the sole purpose of the page is to get them to click off the page to go to another page on the same website (such as a checkout page). These pages shouldn’t be penalized for doing exactly what they are designed to do.
Maybe Google doesn’t track time spent on the page, but what else could they track?
Google is taking another big step in their advertising. They are now testing something called cost per action which will only charge advertisers for actions visitors perform on their site such as registering, downloading something, making a purchase etc.
There are many who belive that CPA will take CPC and Cost per Impression out of existance, but I’m not one of them…at least not yet. I think CPA is a brilliant move and it will appeal to many advertisers out there who are looking for this end result, but I also think that there will still be a large market for CPC. There are some types of websites that are only looking for traffic. Their sites don’t necessarily have or need a call to action.
It will be very interesting to see where this goes. I hope to be involved in the testing.
For those of you who believe that scraping other site’s content and putting it on your site will help you rank well in the search engines, this post is for you. A recent post by Kaspar on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog says that scraping content from other websites in an attempt to dupe the search engines is against Google’s webmaster guidelines and will get you penalized once your site is found - which usually doesn’t take too long.
Does this mean that if you’re scraping a small amount of relevant content that you will be penalized once the search engines find you? Not necessarily. Having scraped content that is relevant to your page and site is not a problem as long as there is unique content on the page as well. The search engines do pretty well at differentiating between a site that is attempting to fool the search engines with scraped content, and a site that has a bit of scraped content that is relevant to the users of that page. Just make sure you have other high quality content that is useful to your visitors.
Google recently acquired Gapminder’s Trendalyzer software which is a display technology that gives you visual representations of trends of various data. It seems like a pretty neat tool. It is very interesting to see the growth in the last 50 years of India and China in many areas. They are definitely headed in the direction of being economic global dominators. I’m not sure where Google will decide to use this technology — most likely it will be used in analytics and possibly another webmaster tool — but I’m sure they’ll find a great place for it.
There was a good post on SearchEngineWatch today called, “Can you Automate Link Development?” that will probably pique some interest in some of you out there. Sadly, reading it may also be a little discouraging to those who were hoping the answer to this question was yes. The jest of the article is that it is very difficult to automate link development. Finding high quality and highly relevant links is a difficult and time consuming process that must be done by hand. However, there are parts of this process that you can automate such as finding the back links of your competitors. There are programs out there that do this for you, but you still have to go through the links and see which ones are relevant to your particular industry and then see if there is any way you can get a link from that site to yours. Oftentimes your competitors will have backlinks from other sites that they own which would eliminate the possibility of getting a link to your site from there. Bottom Line: Be wary of anyone who suggests that they can automate this process for you. There are many companies out there who will claim to be able to do so, but the kind of links they are getting for you are not the kind of links you are looking for or the kind of links that will give you any good long term rankings in the search engines.
Google announced yesterday that they will be anonymizing the data they receive from searches after a period of 18-24 months. Right now, they are able to track all search data right back to the very IP address that it came from. They will still have that data for two years, but after that, they will disassociate the searches with IP addresses etc so that they will no longer be able to track which search came from where.
I’m sure that one of the reasons Google is doing this is because of the terrible AOL slip up that happened not too long ago. For those who didn’t hear about this, an employee in AOL leaked search information that allowed the public to track the information back to the individuals who performed the search. Obviously this was a terrible privacy breech and scared a lot of people out of using search. I’m sure there are other reasons as well, but I believe Google is taking these measures to safeguard themselves against such a disaster.
Search Engine Watch had a recent post about how long it takes a new site to rank in the search engines. Of course, there are hundreds of factors that come into play here that were not mentioned or taken into consideration, but what I did like about the post were the comments on the general ranking trends that the search engines follow. Here’s what Eric Enge had to say:
“…Yahoo and MSN are much faster to accept what their crawler finds (in terms of content and links) at face value. Google is much slower to do so. This is consistent with the general industry belief that Google puts more weight on temporal factors, and needs to build trust in a site before giving it higher rankings.
The speculation about why Google does this is to reduce its susceptibility to SPAM. A side affect of this, however, is that it may not always carry the most authoritative content, particularly when that content is new.”
For the majority (I would say 95%) of our clients, this general trend is true. MSN usually picks up on new sites and site optimization changes first, then Yahoo comes around shortly thereafter with lower rankings and finally Google comes through, but it’s usually a much longer waiting time between Google and Yahoo than it is between the first two.
A great example of this would be my site. I’m showing up in MSN for 9 out of 10 keywords that I searched on (I only checked the first 10 pages). In Yahoo, I’m only showing up for 4 out of those same 10 keywords and in Google I’m only showing up for 3. My rankings will change as time goes on, but it almost always follows this general trend.