JLH Design Blog

From Google’s own Webmaster Help Center:

A site’s URL structure should be as simple as possible. Consider organizing your content so that URLs are constructed logically and in a manner that is most intelligible to humans (when possible, readable words rather than long ID numbers). For example, if you’re searching for information about aviation, a URL like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation will help you decide whether to click that link. A URL like http://www.example.com/index.php?id_sezione=360&sid=3a5ebc944f41daa6f849f730f1, is much less appealing to users.

This can be found on Google’s UN-friendly URL:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=76329&t

I think Nelson captured it best when he said:

.

Google has penalized some sites for buying links and others for selling links. Personal blogs with no revenue stream have their rankings stripped while large brands carry on selling and buying links.

Why?

From the Navy Safety Center:

Start with a cage containing five monkeys. Inside the cage, hang a banana on a string and place a set of stairs under it. Before long, a monkey will go to the stairs and start to climb towards the banana. As soon as he touches the stairs, all of the other monkeys are sprayed with cold water. After a while, another monkey makes an attempt with the same result, and all the other monkeys are sprayed with cold water. Pretty soon the monkeys will try to prevent it.

Now, put away the cold water. Remove one monkey from the cage and replace it with a new one. The new monkey sees the banana and wants to climb the stairs. To his surprise and horror, all the other monkeys attack him. After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs he will be attacked.

Next, remove another of the original five monkeys and replace it with a new one. The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked. The previous newcomer takes part in the punishment with enthusiasm! Likewise, replace a third original monkey with a new one, then a fourth, then the fifth.

Every time the newest monkey takes to the stairs, he is attacked. Most of the monkeys that are beating him have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs or why they are participating in the beating of the newest monkey. After replacing all the original monkeys, none of the remaining monkeys have ever been sprayed with cold water. Nevertheless, no monkey ever again approaches the stairs to try for the banana.

Why not? Because as far as they know, that’s the way it’s always been done around there.

They don’t have to punish all the link buyers, not even the big ones, just get enough people talking about it and the rest will follow. If I were looking for monkeys I’d find the most vocal ones perhaps those involved in online forums, social media, and discussion groups. You wouldn’t want to waste your time going after trusted newspapers that sell links for $195 a year, specially when they offer:

Your search engine rankings will also improve by receiving a link on our sites!

While you’ll be less dependent on people having to search for your site, your search engine rankings will be improved for those that do.

“PageRank interprets a link from Page A (our sites) to Page B (your site) as a vote for Page B by Page A. PageRank then assesses a page’s importance by the number of votes it receives. PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value.” – Google Support site

“The best way to ensure that Google finds your site is to have pages on other relevant sites to link to yours.” – Google Support site

~Hat tip to Wingnut for the Monkey Quote, the link seller outing was my own doing.

I promise no more RickRolling, and apologize to the 100+ people yesterday that were redirected…this is real.

The Google Webmaster Chat was a huge success as reported in many prominent places such as Search Engine Roundtable.

The online chat involved several multi-media avenues in which to communicate between the many Googlers who participated in the meeting and the 200+ webmasters.

1. A free-for-all chat room type interface, the transcript of which can be read here. [PDF]
2. A question and answer section where webmasters posted questions and Googlers answered, the transcript is located here. [PDF]
3. Webmasters called in, or were called, to listen into the presentation by a dozen or so Googlers in conference call with Googlers in Mountain View, Kirkland, and Zurich. The audio recording of that section was saved in this Brasil SEO site.

My Portuguese skills are little rusty don’t exist, but according to the Google Translation it appears as the author is recommending you download the files, which I did. To help save his bandwidth I’ve mirrored the files here, be sure to link to the original source in your own discussion.

Audio Chat Part 1 (mp3)

Audio Chat Part 2 (mp3)

Audio Chat Part 3 (mp3)

Note: The much debated PageRank sculpting discussion starts right at the beginning of part 3.

A transcribed version of the audio portion can be found here.

I wante to patent the term MLSGB Penalty which is the My Link Scheme Got Busted Penalty..

The penalty presents itself as a sitewide deranking and no amount of on-page optimization or writing of reconsideration requests will fix it.

The problem is that your site which has built its reputation on crappy free directory listings, link exchanges, and automated text link purchases has been busted. Google has figured it out and systematically devalued the majority of your links. After all of those crap links are filtered what’s left is not much and the rankings you used to enjoy will not be found again until you can build your link profile back up to the level you were getting credit for, this time with real links. The MLSGB Penalty tends to be doled out in sectors by devaluing crap links in clusters.

Symptoms of this are:

• Reconsideration requests go unanswered no matter if you’ve removed other offending schemes.
• Sitewide PageRank drops
• Same number of pages indexed but long-tail results are way down
• Reduction in crawl rate
• Ability to get new pages indexed is reduced
• Not ranking for your own domain name
• Interlinked domains suffer the same consequences
• Seen in common sectors
• Decrease is sudden, if not over night
• Google’s site:, link:, and data in webmaster tools stays the same
• No warning or letter from Google

Basically what we have here is that the site was ranking falsely before based on an improper link profile, now that the link profile has been updated the symptoms above appear. You can’t be reconsidered because in order to restore the rankings they’d have to give you credit for the links, which isn’t going to happen. The one key anecdotal piece evidence here is a drop in ranking for the domain name, which generally returns eventually. Google has indicated that a drop in ranking for a domain name is a sign of penalty, however if it returns eventually I believe it points to another cause. Most worthless link directories link to sites with the domain name as the anchor text, which is quite unnatural in today’s linking. It may have been all the rave back in 1996 when people actually did build link lists for humans but not anymore, even news services use keyword anchor text to help add to the story. When Google has figured out that a majority of your links came from directories and link exchanges and removes the credit, the domain ranking suffers because a key indicator, anchor text, has been removed. Eventually relevancy will win over and the site will rank again for the domain. Just like a newly launched site will skyrocket to the top with a few good links because Google wants to keep its index fresh with the latest trends, the same goes for the reverse. When a site looses a large percentage of links all of a sudden it follows that it should also be reduced in rank. These behaviors happen naturally in the wild, a new site splashes onto the scene and goes viral in days, or an old site shuts its doors or gets involved in a scandal causing people to no longer link to it. Aggressive false link building mimics that natural quick link growth actual popular sites enjoy catapulting it to the top, but even more aggressive filtering by Google also mimics a drop in popularity.

How can you recover? Surely not through the same methods that got the site into this mess to begin with. More aggressive link building in crap directories and link exchanges on ‘links.html’ pages surely won’t help and may even aggravate the situation with another round of deranking. Reconsideration Requests will go unanswered as there is nothing to reconsider just a low linked site ranking where it should. The only answer is to build links naturally at a pace the site deserves and if the content is so poor that it won’t get links no matter who you show it to, it may be time to start over.

I have no insight whether or not this is manual or automated but I tend to think its manual as the quickness of the onset of the penalty suggests. An automated method would slowly remove such links as they are found, whereas a manual review of a sites link profile would tend to be quick and a one-time event. I think this penalty may have other aberrations such as “going supplemental”, “the minus (insert number of the day here) penalty”, or even some of the recent uproar over paid links.

I don’t want to give the impression that I believe the bad links to the site are actually harming anything, just that they used to count for something and no longer do. So before you go out and sign up your competitor for a million bestlittlewebsitedirectoryintheworld.com links remember that they may enjoy that unnatural bump for a while, and with the extra traffic actually get a few real links.

The Google Webmaster Help Group which I participate in has been inundated with spam lately from a certain spammer looking to push the 2008 Peking Olympic Games Souvenirs.

As seen below”

You will notice that the group’s CMS nofollows all links in a post which would make you wonder, “why would someone go to so much effort to bother spamming the groups?”

The answer is: Because it works. Well. Very well.

More and more people have been complaining lately that after discussing their site in GWHG that the thread will outrank their own site. Of course some of the sites discussed in the group are indeed penalized and just about anything will outrank it, but it has been noted the groups are getting more visible in the SERPS lately. The fact is that Groups material is indexed quickly and ranks quite well, irregardless regardless of content or value. Another aspect working for the Google Groups Spammer is the fact that Google has the groups in many languages all on their own TLD, in essence replicating their spam on many more URLs than just the one they planted it on.

The spammer may not be getting any link love from the Google Groups spam pointing to 200836.com but for his keyword phrase, “Peking 2008 Olympic Games”, he’s doing remarkably well in Google.

In the first 100 results Google Groups spam occupies 23 positions (screenshot). To be fair to Google, they aren’t the only target of this spammer as some Yahoo! groups and other forums are also spammed, for a total of 40 of the top results (screenshot). By any standard 40% of a search result being spam drops is not good.

With this Minty Fresh Spamdexing the spammers no longer have to worry about the links they generate but rather use the forums themselves as doorways to their spam site, which by the way is indexed.

Google’s Webmaster Help used to say:

What can I do if I’m afraid my competitor is harming my ranking in Google?

There’s almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. If you’re concerned about another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster of the site in question.

Located at: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34449&topic=8524

That page now offers up a 404.

I noticed this a couple weeks ago and have been watching it, but it appears to be permanent. It’s possible that they just moved it renamed URLs, so I did some searching for keywords in the old help topic:

1. Harming
2. Harm
3. Competitor

None of those searches return anything that resembles the old statement.I haven’t heard anything official on this and am quite nervous about speculating that it’s a de facto way of acknowledging that a competitor can indeed harm you, for example buying tons of spammy paid links and reporting the site. Just because a speed limit sign was there last week and isn’t now doesn’t mean that you can go as fast as you’d like.

I find it kind of odd…

Update:  Hat tip to Barry Schwartz for pointing out that the statement is still available here. ( Screenshot )

There are million of various theories out there about how to find out if your site is penalized by Google. I thought I’d recap what Google officially says, and by officially I mean on their domain and bearing their brand. Their help system is a bit scattered so I may have missed some.

1. Verify that your site ranks for your domain name (reference)

Do a Google search for www.[yourdomain].com. If your site doesn’t appear in the results, or if it ranks poorly in the results, this is a sign that your site may be penalized for violations of the webmaster guidelines.

Brian White of Google notes that inside Google the nomenclature with the brackets used above indicates what is actually typed in the search box. So when they say to search for www.[yourdomain].com, they actually mean that you would search for yourdomain and not include the www, com, or the surrounding dots.

2. Message Center (reference 1, reference 2)

If we find certain problems with your site - for example, malware - we’ll let you know via the Message Center

we launched Message Center in our webmaster console, which allows us to send messages to verified site owners.

3. PageRank of Zero (reference 1, reference 2)

Google believes the site violates our Webmaster Quality Guidelines.

4. Removed from the index (reference 1 , reference 2 , there are more but you get the point)

If a site has been penalized, it may no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google’s partner sites.

and

if our review indicated that you engaged in deceptive practices and your site has been removed from our search results

5. Noted on your Summary Page (reference)

Your page has been blocked from our index because it does not meet the quality standards necessary to assign accurate PageRank. We cannot comment on the individual reasons your page was removed. However, certain actions such as cloaking, writing text in such a way that it can be seen by search engines but not by users, or setting up pages/links with the sole purpose of fooling search engines may result in permanent removal from our index.

Note: Emails from Google were stopped in August 2007 due to spoofers and scammers.

I’ve seen quite a few people in Google’s webmaster help group ask how to verify their site for webmaster tools when using a Googlepages website. I took a cursory look and couldn’t find any online documentation so I tried it myself. The procedure I used is outlined below with screen shots. There may be a better way out there, but I know this one works.

1. First sign into Webmaster Tools and go to the dashboard where you will see a box to add your site. Type in your googlepages sites name here, just mysite.googlepages.com, with no ‘/home’ or any other subfolders or file names.

2. You’ll then be prompted with a link as the next step to verify your site, click that.

3. They will then ask you for a method to verify with a pull down that says, “choose verification method…” You’ll want to select the “Upload HTML File” Method.

4. After you’ve chosen your method, the next screen will show you a file name. This is the file you will need to create to upload to your Googlepages site. I just highlighted the file name, opened up my text editor application (in my case its notepad), then picked ’save as’, when prompted for the name I pasted the file name that Google gave me, and hit save. The file can be blank like that, as Google is only going to look for its existence, not what’s in it.

5. In another tab or another browser session open up your Googlepages account, and under your site manager, to the right you’ll see a box appropriately name “uploaded stuff.” Select the link [upload] (if you have files there already) or select the ‘browse’ button. You’ll then need to browse to the location of the file you saved in the previous step.

6. The final step is to go back to your Webmaster Tools account and click the ‘verify’ button. The response should be almost instant where you will see the verified screen. Now go and enjoy all the benefits that being a verified owner of a site offers you.

John Mueller of Google has officially stated to not worry about keywords meta tags:

Don’t bother with keyword meta tags. They are a relic and best left ignored. Why not spend your time writing more unique and compelling content for your users or improving the features on your site.

Let’s finally put this issue to bed and move on from here.

Thank you John.

For information on exactly what Meta Tags Google uses and how, here is a fine piece of documentation to read.

The one’s they list are:

<meta name="description" content="A description of the page" />
<title>The Title of the Page</title> **
<meta name="robots" content="..., ..." />
<meta name="googlebot" content="..., ..." />
<meta name="google" value="notranslate" />
<meta name="verify-v1" content="..." />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="...; charset=..." />
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="...;url=..." />

** Yes, I know it’s not a meta tag.

UPDATE 2/1/08:

The original subdomain is now gone from the results, but more have been created and they’ve yet to fix that hole. Barry Schwartz noticed the thread as well and added his own take.

Take a look at the 25,000 plus pages and the one specifically mentioned in the Groups thread. You must have javascript turned off to view the spammy pages and have it turned on to be redirected to the target of the spam.

Saved Screenshot

Not that this is the first time a Google domain has hosted spam, but this appears like a systematic hack rather than the work of millions of uncoordinated efforts.

I filled out a spam report in webmaster tools, we’ll see how long it hangs around. After cleaning up their site I suggest Larry and Sergey visit this page to learn how to file a reconsideration request.

I’m no stranger to Google’s reconsideration request. I’ve helped dozens if not hundreds of people scour their sites, identify possible violations, implement changes, and compose the reconsideration request. I don’t do this as a professional cause but as an extension of my efforts in helping webmasters in Google’s Webmaster Help Group. Perhaps its because I choose the sites I want to work with and only cater to the ones that I believe are acting in ignorance rather than more devious intentions, but my success rate is quite high. There’s never been a case I couldn’t solve, then again this is probably due to my selective choices and not my mad Google skills. Either way, I know of what I speak.

Which brings me to an interesting situation that I was alerted of in twitter, saw in Sphinn, and then saw unfold on Dazzlin Donna’s take on SEO news, tips and theories SEO Scoop Blog. If you take the time to read Donna’s post you’ll see that she was caught up in the paid links dragnet and lost some of her visible PageRank. After a while she decided to demonetize her blog and set it up to comply with Google’s guidelines regarding paid links. She’s not Yahoo! so her time and opinion in choosing which sites to review are not worthy of being compensated for if they contain an active link (Google’s opinion, not mine).  After cleaning up the site she submitted a reconsideration request to Google.  Time passed and yet her PageRank penalty persisted.  Five weeks passed and she has finally found some resolution, though not through Google’s reconsideration request, but through the only solution that will actually work.

From my outsiders point of view and without any inside knowledge, the situation unfolded like this.

1. Sometime in late December a reconsideration request was filed.
2. Five weeks passed…
3. Donna posts her plight to her blog
4. A twitter is sent out.
5. The post is Sphunn.
6. 20 people sphunn it.
7. The Sphinn goes hot 2 hours later.
8. Matt Cutts comments on her blog, scolding her for her non-scalable method of approaching the situation, but offers to help.
9. Matt offers to look into another commenter’s site.
10. Matt says that her disclosure policy could be the problem.
11. Donna changes her policy and responds that she did so.
12. Matt emails the Google employee charged with reviewing Donna’s request.  Apparently there is another post that is still passing PageRank that was paid for.
13. Donna fixes the post and comments that she did so.
14. Matt points out another violation.
15. Donna fixes that violation.
16. Matt praises his team and says that they will get to it soon.

I would not have thought of how obtuse this whole process was had it not been for Matt saying, “In general you want to go with the reconsideration request approach rather than invoking me (that’s not scalable :)”  [my emphasis] Obviously this process is not scalable at all.  Here we have someone who’s worked on fixing her site, made some substantial changes, submitted a request for review, and apparently missed some things.  What she missed was exactly the same problem that she already admitted guilt to in the reconsideration request, but rather than offering any help Google files the request in the circular file and ignores the problem.

Since the majority of site owners don’t know Matt Cutts, know how to use social sites to get attention to their blog, don’t have blogs for that matter, and if they did probably wouldn’t get Matt to write six comments on their blog and send an email on their behalf, this is not a scalable solution.

A scalable solution would be the following:

1. Site owner fixes site and submits a reconsideration request.
2. Google reviews the site and finds some outstanding violations.
3. Google sends a message back in the site owners  webmaster’s tools message center saying, “We have received and reviewed your request for consideration.  Unfortunately at this time we are unable to act on your request due to continued possible violations of our Webmaster Guidelines.  Please feel free to review the Webmaster’s Guidelines, make any changes that you find appropriate and resubmit your reconsideration request”
4. Site owner digs deeper and sends in request.
5. Google responds with another note, “We have received and reviewed your request for consideration.  It appears that your site is now within our guidelines.”

Notice that I didn’t even say that Google had to specifically say what violation they had.  I didn’t even specify whether or not a penalty has ever existed or has been lifted.  What I did do is “COMMUNICATE“.   Letting the site owner at least know that they are being heard.  Google’s response can be an automated one with only two possibilities. I’m sure their is a radio button somewhere on a computer somewhere that a Google employee is clicking when they review a reconsideration request.  It wouldn’t be too much to program one of two auto-responses depending on the status of that button.  That would be a scalable solution.

Their communication efforts in the help groups and their webmasters blog have been quite admirable lately, but there still is a disjoint between your average webmasters and those who know how to get to Matt Cutts, and that is just not right.  Not right at all.  I’ve heard many people say and write that one thing you should look for on an SEO’s resume is whether or not they know any search engine engineers, this situation just adds  that, and that is just not right.  Not right at all.

Having Matt Cutts be the voice of Google out there writing on his own blog,  commenting on people’s sites, and occasionally penning something on the official webmaster’s blog is great and wonderful for the community that watches that sort of thing.  I just believe that those people are a small subset of the actual webmaster population and the majority should not be at a disadvantage because they don’t subscribe to the right feeds.

Today I’ve been inundated with “Best of 2007” SEO, SEM, and Search blogs and sites lists. Amazingly the only mention Google got was for their Webmaster Central Blog, a quality one at that, but there is so much more information out there that Google offers us lowly webmasters. One of the best kept secrets in the webmastering and SEO community is the Google Webmaster Help Group which is part of Google’s thriving and growing Google Webmaster Center. Unlike some much lesser but more popular forums site specific help is available and almost required to get the most information. The discussion on the group is not a matter of theoretical discussion but actual practical application. Almost daily (sometimes more, sometimes less) you will see input from actual Google employees and not mere speculation on all aspects of webmasters’ concerns and Google. Google employees can be easily spotted in the discussion by the little blue by their name.

With that being said, most people don’t have enough time to religiously follow the discussion group for the most important nuggets of knowledge and I could not find a central location that catalogued their contributions. The following is a list of the Googlers that regularly post on the help group, a link to their profile so you can find their latest posts. I’m sorry if I missed anyone, If I did please let me know.

• Adam Lasnik
• Amanda Camp
• Andrey Stroilov
• Berghausen “Bergy”
• Evan T
• Google Employee
• Jessica W.
• John Mueller
• Jonathan Simon
• Maile Ohye
• Mariya
• Matt Cutts
• Matt D
• Nathan Johns
• Nelson
• Patrick
• Rebecca
• Reid
• Riona MacNamara
• Sahala
• Susan Moskwa
• Thu Tu
• Vanessa Fox
• Wysz

I’ve always subscribed to the theory that links are part of the content.  In other words a page gets also judged on the quality and topic of the pages it links to.  It follows from the academic realm where Google was born, a paper with no references isn’t going to be taken seriously, and neither should a web page.  Obviously linking to the #1 result for the term you are targeting is also going to help them, but the trick has always been to link out to highly authoritative sites for terms that surround the keyword targeting.

Anyway, I may be right and I may be wrong, assuming I am right for a brief moment, would a rel=”nofollow” link still count as content to help you rank?

As anecdotal evidence we could use the wikipedia which isn’t an authority on any subject but does use copious amounts of nofollow links to actual authorities, and usually outranks them.

Thoughts, anyone? Bueller, Bueller? Is this thing on?

I found an interview with Matt Cutts on Sphinn that I found quite revealing. Normally these types of interviews are very bland and boring where the interviewer gets to build up some sort of street-cred by getting a big name search rock star to talk, and the interviewee gets to spew the normal company spin. This one was a bit different, at least in the fact that I took from it some pearls that can be used in forums to dispel frequently addressed concerns.

Leaving the obligatory social interaction out of it, the highlights of the interview as I see fit are as follows:

1. Syndicating Content - When syndicating content to be published on multiple sources be sure to include a link within the content to the original source of the content. This will help transfer PageRank the syndicated content may get from external links to the original source. When Google is deciding what story to return in the results when there are many copies they apparently, ” a lot of the times it helps to know which one came first; which one has higher PageRank” On the other side of the story, if you are stealing syndicating content and want it to rank higher than the original then don’t include a link to the original source and get more PageRank to yours than theirs.
2. Supplemental Results - There are a couple of undocumented methods for finding your supplemental page count still working. At least one data center is now actually searching the supplemental black hole for 100% of it’s queries, with, “hopefully at more in the future”
3. Link Quality - “a link is a link, is a link; wherever that link’s worth is, that is the worth that we give it” .edu links do not count more than a .com link based on any specific weighting in the ranking algorithm. It just happens that many .edu links are naturally better than your average easy to get .com link. Additionally social bookmarking links follow the same guidelines and are not devalued based on their social network status, if they are weak they are weak on their own, without any help from a calculation.
4. Link Count - The old adage of 100 links per page is a bit outdated and a good example is DHTML throwout menus when many links could be seen on one page. Matt notes that a page with 5000 links would have it’s PageRank so diluted when it came to distribution that the links wouldn’t pass much. The question I think wasn’t answered here was in regards to the DHTML menu structure is that navigation like that tends to be site wide and Google is quite good at determining what part of pages is the template or site wide stuff, vs the actual content. My question would then be is PageRank flow just a simple division of PageRank by link count, or does more weighting go to the actual page content and less to sitewide navigation. Obviously a page with 1000 links (like a sitemap) isn’t user friendly as the designer should have provided a logical tree for the user to find the information, rather than have to read 1000 links and figure it out for them selves. Bottom line is that 100 links per page isn’t a hard and fast number, but keeping it reasonable still applies.
5. NOFOLLOW passing anchor text - In it’s early days there were some rare, and bug-like, instances where the anchor text of a nofollowed link was used in the search results. Those bugs have been killed. Right now, “At least for Google, we have taken a very clear stance that those links are not even used for discovery; they are not used for PageRank; they are not used for anchor text in any way. Anybody can go and do various experiments to verify that.”
6. Predatory Link Buying - Buying links for your competitor in hopes of hurting them is more than likely going to help them as Google is most attacking the link sellers. Kind of goes without saying, but I bring it up only because the original Webmaster Guidelines on the issue only addressed buyers and not sellers.

There’s a lot more in the interview.