JLH Design

There are currently 3 responses to “Updated Webmaster Guidelines”

Why not let me know what you think by adding your own comment! All the cool kids are doing it.

1. 1 On February 6th, 2007, JohnMu said:

   So what you’re saying is that Google should just hide penalties like “normal” ranking factors and not give the webmaster any clue about them? I agree that this would be a good practice for known and obvious web-spammers, but would it work for the normal webmaster as well?

   What about sites that accidentally fall into penalties for things which they do not understand, hidden text which “a friend of a friend’s uncle” said would help beat a competitor “who also does it”? Would it not make sense to alert them that they’re doing something stupid, please go fix page xyz?

   I think the key here is that it makes sense to not give hard spammers any clue, but to still give honest smalltime webmasters all necessary information to improve their site. The gray zone in between is gigantic and even finding out if a webmaster belongs to one or the other extreme is sometimes - even with a manual check - hard to impossible (I know I’ve misjudged plenty of mostly honest people who were just mislead). Is there a neutral ground?

2. 2 On February 6th, 2007, JLH said:

   I thought that increased alerts in the webmaster tools was becoming the norm. I don’t know how they judge who gets the warning and who doesn’t but I’d bet it has something to do with a manual review and the “mom & pop” shop is more likely to get a warning than the viagra-adsense site.

   I’m not even sure the hard core spammers care about penalties or bans, they just scrape another site, randomize the layout and database and set up another 76sdt.stvfn89.info site and never look back.

   Another factor that maybe considered in the future is like I mentioned in an earlier post, verification of the actual owner by tying webmaster tools with analytics, adsense, etc so that they can’t hide behind the private registration of domains and proxies. I see a day in the future where any site to be indexed will need to verify identity and ownership as malware becomes more and more vicious this is a natural progression. If some identity theft victim files suit against Google et. al. for the trojan they caught by visiting a site they found in Google’s SERPS and wins, the ability to detect and notify the actual owners of the site may come to the forefront. If they tie a webmaster account to a social security number, tax ID number, national ID, bank account, etc misrepresentation now become a matter of fraud rather than violating the webmaster guidelines.

   But what do I know, I’m just an engineer!

3. 3 On February 9th, 2007, Scott W said:

   Hey man,

   Scott Weaver here. You left a comment on my blog about the AdSense Revenue Sharing system.

   I modified it so that it works exactly like this. Say you want to split profits between admins and bloggers at 50%. So the script will divide the 50% for the admins between all the admins. So if there are two admins, each one will get 25% of the total. Then the ramaining 50% will be given to the bloggers themselves.

   Blogger - 50%
   Admin 1 - 25%
   Admin 2 - 25%

   The script auto-adjusts to the percentage, too. You asked if I heavily modified it, and yes. Almost completely. So much that I might release it myself as a better version.