JLH Design Blog

I am thinking about doing a small study of Matt Cutts’ Blog. There seems to be a point in every one of his controversial popular posts where Matt just bows out of the conversation and it devolves into bickering, unsubstantiated claims, personal attacks, and even more confusion than before the post was made. Perhaps it’s just as simple as Matt has said all he wants to say on the matter as he doesn’t throw these things out there for debate but rather information. On the other hand, maybe he just gets sick of the inane conversation and moves on to bigger and better things. In his position of leadership at Google I’m sure decisions are made daily and acted upon without endless debate, so his blog may reflect that aspect of his style. Either way I’d suggest he invest in a free wordpress plug-in that automatically closes comments after a certain time period, or just manually shuts them down when he’s no longer interested in responding. There are many examples on what started out as a good discussion decayed into a mess that only leads to more confusion. I’d like to use his blog as a point of reference for many things but often times the actual post is so polluted with unmoderated gibbish that sending someone there to read would only open up a whole new set of issues.

Just take a look at this quagmire that used to be an insightful and intelligent conversation. Perhaps there is some correlations to be drawn between the post date, Matt’s last comment, and the point when conversation has turned just plain silly. If I could put together such a relationship there may be a way to modify the CuttletBlock script to not only block regular troublemakers and lemmings but also just block out the impending noise.

Then again it’s his site and he’s free to do with as he pleases, and I’m only a reader paying nothing to view it. Maybe there is a lesson in there somewhere for people who would like to debate the moral grounds of Google’s paid link policy. Google is just a website after all, and how they choose to run it is their business.

On second thought, Matt, you can operate your site as you see fit.

Never mind.

(Intentional 70’s SNL reference just for us old geezers)

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I set out to do a little experiment on my own blog, to get the home page rank for my name(s) without actually using them on the page.

This isn’t really an unknown secret in the SEO community but something that seems to elude a lot of webmasters. The concept is even covered well in Google’s own help documentation.

This sure wasn’t a concentrated effort or something I checked even weekly, but I kept my eye on it, and inspired its improvement every once and a while. I was inspired by Google Blogoscoped where profiles link to Google’s #1 result for your name. Unfortunately for me a government document has occupied that space for as long as I remember. Occasionally individual posts would be there because my name is listed as the author, but on the home page was much more difficult as my name only shows up as an image.

Even harder was another pseudonym I use that is plastered all over popular very powerful sites like Sphinn, Twitter, Digital Point, and Digg.

I’m glad to see that today I noticed both are aligned correctly, which will probably fall apart as soon as some ass clown reads this and tries to mess with it. I suppose I could have just rolled out johnhoneck.com which I’ve let Godaddy make million in adsense on while it sits there parked, but that would have been too easy.

Screen shots saved for future proof:

Perhaps it’s time to retire the JLH moniker…

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Update 11/21/07

I just got word that the English to English translate function has been disabled and it doesn’t look like it’s going to come back.

Original Post follows: 

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Just noticed today that Google won’t allow you to translate a page from English to English any more. I get a response:

Translation from English into English is not supported.

Please choose from the following:

Back to Language Tools

See original page

Is it just me, or did this happen a long time ago?

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I was under the impression that Google didn’t want a websites own search results to be crawled and listed in Google. I got this notion from both a Matt Cutts post and the official Google webmaster help group post.

Assuming this is still the case, can anyone tell me why Cooks.com has 112,000 search results indexed by Google? I wouldn’t have noticed this if they hadn’t been ranking for just about every recipe I’ve been searching for lately. The behavior is proliferated by the Recent Searches box in the left navigation column of the site.

I took the Google placebo and submitted a spam report, probably a waste of my 20 seconds.

Updated:12/5/07

Truly a waste of my time, weeks later and they still exist, here’s something for the Googlebot to suck on. Obviously some sites are more equal than others.

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In what many are calling just a warning volley across the bow of many link-selling sites Google has initiated a penalty of sorts by reducing some sites’ visual PageRank score, one such site is Search Engine Roundtable which provides us proof that their rankings and traffic have not been affected.

Clearly a reduction in PageRank for a site selling links is a signal that Google feels that they are breaking the rules as written in the webmaster guidelines. Regarding link selling they state,

Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

• Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the <a> tag
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

Which is a practice that Search Engine Roundtable is not ready to take part in as made evident by Barry Schwartz (rustybrick) in the above linked article,

On a personal note, I trust my sponsors, I value their sponsorships and I couldn’t do what I do without their financial support. Some sponsors can’t afford huge sponsorships, so they sponsor in their ways. It is what enables this site and many other sites to function and operate on a daily basis. I turn down sponsors all the time because they are simply not relevant or useful to my reader. I hand select them and for them to be on my site, means I trust them. Why nofollow someone you trust and want to thank? Is that a slap in their face? Will I have to and will they continue to sponsor? Time will tell.

So we have a site that outwardly sells links, does not want to conform to the webmaster guidelines by marking paid links in the manner in which Google desires, and has been hit with a PageRank reduction. Clearly a signal that the site could be considered not only a rule breaker but a bad neighborhood to be associated with.

In Google’s webmaster’s guidelines it clearly states,

In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

I’ve written before on the difficulties of discerning (complete with Matt Cutts’ email address!) what a bad neighborhood is even asked for clarification on the matter.

I find it quite ironic then that Google’s very own official blog links to said site which has admittedly broken the rules and publicly been admonished. ( screen shot ) Are they not taking their own advice and linking to a bad neighborhood? This is not the first time Google has talked out of both sides of their mouth. Even during this last wave of anti-link-selling assaults the largest link seller in the land has gotten off scot-free with out any sort of PageRank deduction. Matt Cutts has even come out and said that they are allowed to sell links because they review the links before they publish them and not every one makes it into the directory. If that is the standard to be followed perhaps Barry Schwartz and others like him to accept advertising dollars should just charge for the chance of being listed on his site, add an element of uncertainty to the equation. Maybe then he will get his PageRank back while making more money as he could oversell the advertisements 10 fold. To me that seems highly unethical but for some reason is the only method of linking endorsed by Google without the use of machine only readable declaration of a paid link.

If reducing one’s PageRank for selling links is really a penalty, I would expect Google to do the right thing for their own blogs ranking and not link to such terribly bad neighborhoods (t.i.c.) and will be watching the site as an indicator.

Before anyone get’s upset at me, I’m not calling Barry Schwartz a spammer or even personally think he did anything wrong. The PageRank degrading has been widely published and I am just drawing the connection between what Google says and what they do. I follow Barry on Twitter, his own Cartoon Barry, Search Engine Roundtable, and his contributions on Search Engine Land. He is considered a leader in the industry sector and I value his opinions and expertise.  There’s at least 4 links in this article to his properties that are genuine followed editorial links of endorsement, not like the link to the Yahoo! directory which is nofollowed due to their blatant breaking of the rules.

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It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to.  I’ve been reading a lot of ranting lately on Sphinn and the blogs, which got me into a ranting mood.  Let the games begin.

Even though Google has a ton of official blogs, discussion groups, webmaster guidelines, and press releases available they decide they would be best served to send Deep Throat down to the parking ramp with Danny Sullivan doing his best Carl Bernstein impression to break the news that penalties are now given to link sellers.  I can only guess they’d choose this chicken-shit cowardly approach because it has some plausible deniability if it really hit the fan.  Beyond their poor choice of using unnamed sources I have a couple other issues bugging me.

As soon as one is assimilated into the collective the first thing they teach the new drones is the gospel of “Don’t Worry About PageRank“.  You’ll see is spewed from every orifice of any Googler giving a speech, writing a blog, answering a question in a forum, or just plain pontificating from on high.  It’s the canned response for any and all questions regarding the green bar; its effect, its acquisition, its retention, its loss,  its very existence.  They are all told to say things like, “worry less about PageRank and more about creating unique and compelling content [and tools].” So if this PageRank is nothing to worry about, then why would docking some college newspaper’s PageRank be a suitable punishment?  If PageRank is no big deal and not to be worried about as much as content, why would they choose this as their punitive reaction?  Maybe one should worry about PageRank just a little bit.  You can’t have it both ways, either it’s not worth worrying about or it is worth worrying about and something we should all fear loosing.   This leads me to another thought on the matter, that it’s not punishment but rather an adjustment, more on that later.

It’s clear that to battle the evil doers that sell and purchase links some sort of punishment must be doled out.  They can’t have an outright ban on all site that sell a link, as Google would soon become a joke.  If someone is searching for Stanford’s Newspaper they’d better find it.  If not, then Google looses it’s relevancy.  Sure it wouldn’t matter much if they just destroyed some nice lady in Colorado who’s buying baby food with the money she makes from her site, but there would be plenty of high profile cases that would just make them look silly.  We as webmasters, marketers, SEO’s or just plain anyone who has any idea how the inner workings of search work have to step back from the scene for a moment.  The VAST majority of Google’s users, customers, and shareholders don’t give lick about paid links, hidden text, or cloaking.  They just know that when they search for something they expect to see it.  If Google banned Stanford for selling links and someone who wasn’t in the know was told that was the reason, the response would be a great big, “So what?  The point is that while selling links goes against Google’s webmaster guidelines, not listing the site selling the links goes against Google core principles of returning the most relevant results.

That principle has it’s limits.  In the case of a site known for fascilitating the selling of links, it’s so well known that when you use the Google tool bar to search for its name you’ll get it listed as a suggestion as soon as you type [text-l] in the field.  If you continue the query and fill the whole [text-link-ads] you will not find the site listed.  In this case, Google has decided that returning the most relevant results are not quite worth as much as punishing the offender.  So I am quite confused when that distinction is made.  Is it just academic institutions that get this exemption? Or if Matt Drudge started selling links would he too get to be listed for his name and his site?  I find it utterly priceless that Google is taking the moral high ground on this text-link-ad selling problem by not returning the site for its own name, but they are more than happy to take their money to show their ads in the results.  In this case the most relevant result is required to pay for their position.  This reminds me of a little story I read on the Stanford web site, ” For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline’s homepage when the airline’s name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.”  No, it’s not an exact comparison or even a pretty close metaphor, but the idea that the most relevant result has to pay for its position is true in both cases.   Larry and Sergey knew that was wrong way back then, oh my how their little project has strayed.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and postulate that Google cannot detect 100% of the paid links 100% of the time.  I’ve deduced this solely based on their behavior.   1) they still encourage people to tattle on their competitors and do their job for them 2) They have to manually penalize sites by removing PageRank or knocking them down a few hundred notches in the results, and 3) If my buddy calls me tonight and tells me he’ll buy me a shot and beer if I link to him tomorrow, no where in that process is Google involved.  If they were able to detect paid links there wouldn’t be a need for penalties of any kind, they would just re-rank the index as if said links didn’t exist.   The fact that Deep Throat and Danny had to have that clandestine meeting is proof enough to me that Google’s ability to detect paid links is completely flawed.  By admitting that penalties for selling links exists, they are admitting that they cannot handle them algorithmically, which as you’ve heard before just isn’t scalable.  Sure there isn’t a shortage of 3rd world countries with people willing to work for $1 a day hand checking sites, but at some point the web will become so large that even that isn’t scalable for a company with billions and billions to spend.

I don’t want to just hammer on Google, I give them a lot of credit, they still are the best option available for sending free traffic to a site that isn’t going to go viral on youtube.   Perhaps Google’s inability to detect and devalue paid links isn’t all that flawed, all paid endorsements are not irrelevant.  That is what we are after, relevancy.   If you want Bill Clinton to speak at your college’s commencement be prepared to pay him handsomely for the honor.  That does not make his speech to the leaders of tomorrow any less relevant.   To get Jeff Gordon to use your motor oil and put a little sticker on his car it’s going to cost you millions, but his endorsement would mean a lot more than the man on the street telling you what to buy.  Then again if Bill Clinton told us what oil to buy and Jeff Gordon wanted to tell us how to work in the global economy no one (should) listen to them either.  The point is that both of these men are experts in their field who demand a high amount of compensation for their limited time.  The fact that they are paid does not render their opinion any less relevant.  The same could be said of links.   If Stanford links to an academic the link should carry a lot of weight, then again if they link to britney-spears-mesothelioma-nude-lawyer.info it shouldn’t be considered an endorsement on that subject either.

In that sense the drones saying, “Don’t worry about PageRank” are right. PageRank in it’s purest form, the sum of the weighted links to a page shouldn’t be worried about.  The relevancy of the links should, be them paid endorsements or pure out-of-the-goodness-of-their-hearts editorial links.

One final note on paid links.  This includes some other webmaster guideline no-nos here as well, like hidden text.   We can all easily prove that Google’s ability to detect either a paid link or hidden text is limited.  Create a new page, buy a link see if it get’s indexed or create a page with some obscure hidden text, see if you can find it on Google.  Even if they could detect 100% of the hidden text and paid links within a month of it’s publishing, that month would be plenty of time for some people to make use of it.  With domains being pennies now adays the true black-hatter doesn’t even care if a domain is banned, penalized, or blown-up completely.  By the time that month is over they’ve moved on to hundred or a thousand other sites.  Who’s really getting caught up in this dragnet is the “honest” webmaster’s who think they are acting the way they should.  They are trying to build a site for the long-haul and really want to produce a good product but are fed so much bad information that they truly think they are doing the right thing.  It’s the center of all the anger I have with Google right now, utter lack of communication with the real webmaster.  Daily many webmasters approach the Google webmaster help group saying things like, “I’ve exchanged tons of links, bought links and yet I lost my ranking” Not because they are trying to be sneaky but because they feel that is what they SHOULD do.  They don’t read searchengineland or listen to Rand’s youtube video of the week because they are busy running their sites.  It’s the actual honest webmaster’s who don’t have the right information in front of them that are getting hurt, while the black-hats slip through the cracks only to have Google help them by removing legitimate sites by the thousands.

I want to rant about PageRank funnelling and Google’s Green attitude, but that will have to wait for another post.  I’m tired.

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Much has been said about Google’s love affair with the wikipedia and I am going to say some more.

The wikipedia apologists will point to the fact that they have garnered so many natural links that they deserve the rankings. They will also point out their extensive interlinking that helps the site boost its own rankings based on it’s own authority. This concept is foreign to me but it must be true in the world of Google*.

Imagine if you will, a new way of analyzing data developed by two bright college students in their dorm room. Their way was so revolutionary that the dream quickly (in corporate time) grew to be a multi-billion dollar company touching the lives and pocket books of everyone involved with the internet. This data analysis method IS their brand, it’s what separated them from the rest of the also rans in the great technology race. They invented it, they own the rights to it, only they know exactly how it works. Before they wrote about it, it didn’t exist. You get my point, I hope, they are THE authority on the subject. In their words it is, “The heart of our software”

Fast forward to today. If you are interested in learning about this concept which built arguably the web’s strongest performing property you would probably Google the trademarked name: PageRank.

Who would you expect to be #1 for that query? The founders and inventors of the term? The corporate web site of the trademarked name with possibly millions of links to it? I would. Apparently however, Google thinks that the wikipedia is more of an authority on what PageRank is than Google itself.

If this isn’t a serious indictment of Google’s unnatural propensity to return the wikipedia in their results, I don’t know what is.

The one thing wikipedia is good for is references of benign facts and a cursory overview, definitely not an authority on the subject, so using them for what they are good for I found this citation:

Many years ago, there lived an emperor who was quite an average fairy tale ruler, with one exception: he cared much about his clothes. One day he heard from two swindlers named Guido and Luigi Farabutto that they could make the finest suit of clothes from the most beautiful cloth. This cloth, they said, also had the special capability that it was invisible to anyone who was either stupid or not fit for his position.

Being a bit nervous about whether he himself would be able to see the cloth, the emperor first sent two of his trusted men to see it. Of course, neither would admit that they could not see the cloth and so praised it. All the townspeople had also heard of the cloth and were interested to learn how stupid their neighbors were.

The emperor then allowed himself to be dressed in the clothes for a procession through town, never admitting that he was too unfit and stupid to see what he was wearing. He was afraid that the other people would think that he was stupid.

Of course, all the townspeople wildly praised the magnificent clothes of the emperor, afraid to admit that they could not see them, until a small child said:

“But he has nothing on!”

This was whispered from person to person until everyone in the crowd was shouting that the emperor had nothing on. The emperor heard it and felt that they were correct, but held his head high and finished the procession.

Denial is not just a river in Egypt, it’s time they realize that the search results are LESS authoritative with wikipedia at the top.

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*It reminds me of a class I had sophomore year in college. I took an elective called, “The Philosophy of God.” Don’t let the name fool you, it wasn’t a religious class but rather an exploration of the human psyche’s need for defining a being higher than themselves. One afternoon’s discussion lead to the concept of the unmoved mover by Aristotle which we had to try to reconcile with the big bang. When asked to list possible problems with the big bang I of course fell back on my physics training and cited Newton’s 3rd law ( for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction) . When pressed further by the never shaved, rarely bathed, and haphazardly dressed doctorate of philosophy for a less engineering based illustration I challenged him to reach around, grab his pants around the waist, and lift himself up and fly around the room. Being the odd fella that he was, he attempted it to the amusement of the class and to further prove my point. That moment earned me my philosophical handshake, an odd moment when the professor got on bent knee at the head of the class and extended his hand for a handshake. They were given out for simple and brief explanations to complex situations. This story would not earn me such a handshake.

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Google uses the links pointing to a page to help decide what the page is all about, even so much to as return a page for a search term even if the term is not on the page.  It’s been termed the Google Bomb.

An actual Google bomb may take many well placed links to fuse, but you can fake just such a Google bomb if you’d like to  scare some unsuspecting webmasters into believing that they’ve got some bad anchor text out there.

Let’s say we’d like to pull a fast one on our favorite black hatted red crab and make him think that some people may consider him a black hatted spammer.  You could edit the cache link to include the search terms of your liking, and get a cache with the anchor text highlighted (for example).

Note that Google inserts the following copy near the bottom of the cache header, “These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: black hat spammer”

Sebastian is way too smart for this to work, but I’m sure you can have fun with it on some other sites.  As an added bonus, the page view should show up in the server stats with the search term, and excellent idea if you know someone who watches their logs religiously.

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A while back Matt Cutts pointed out the minty fresh indexing Google is now exhibiting.  Having been lucky enough to be a part of this minty freshness myself, I’ve been watching it a bit. Today I got another fine example of it.

I made a post with the semi-unique title of cuttlet-block and within a couple hours was seeing search traffic to it.   So I decided to check it out.

Using regular Google Search:

And using Google Blog Search:

Notice the difference?  The blog search has indexed the actual post, whereas the regular index is showing the main index page with the title as content on it.  Minty fresh indexing is really a misnomer in this case, it’s actually minty fresh updating of already indexed pages (the home page).  The new page isn’t actually indexed yet, but the search term does show up within hours in the index but on pages that are already regularly indexed.

Note also that the “cache” link isn’t present yet on regular index as a quick check of the cache shows and older version crawled yesterday.

What is in the cache does not necessarily equal what the page will be returned for in search results.

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Back in September me and one of my few remaining friends from the Google Webmaster Help Group had a bit of a conversation in the comments on my post Googlebot Gave Up.

Somewhere around comment #3 I posted a link to a page that I created that returns a 301 status code but doesn’t actually redirect anywhere. Forgetting my overly responsible form of dofollow blogging, the link went live without the link condom approximately 7 days after I posted the link.

Google promptly crawled that live link and to my surprise I received an error I’d never seen in Google Webmaster Tools.

The detail declares it an “empty redirect” and clicking the barley discernible question mark will lead you to this page which let’s you know that Google found a redirect on this page, but it didn’t point to anything, so the Googlebot couldn’t follow it. Make sure that all of your redirects are valid and not empty.

I’m taken aback by the fact that even though I struggled to create a page that exhibited the diseased behavior I was hoping to show it is so very common enough that Google has a default error message for it. Unbelievable.

I still believe that is not normal behavior to loose your homepage when doing a canonical redirect even if for a while, and I find it odd that Google wants to keep this “empty redirect” hidden from it’s own crawlers with the use of “noindex,nofollow” on the help page. Oh hell, perhaps they are just funneling PageRank.

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Adam Lasnik took a bold step forward recently at GWHG and opened up the forum for suggestions for Googler’s to respond to. In his own words:

We invite you to ask questions in this thread that:

• don’t deal with a specific site or sites
• are likely to be of interest to a great many webmasters around the world
• aren’t already covered in one of our recent blog posts or in our Help Center

I thought I’d take a stab at identifying some questions from every day non-professional SEO’s and web developers standpoint. This is based on my experience in GWHG and just some of the many often repeated questions we see. I was trying to be cognisant of the limitations that Googler’s must impart on themselves when offering information as we don’t want to help any spammers inadvertently. None of these are too in depth, nor all too insightful but they are FAQ that I don’t see answered (at least clearly) in their documentation. So here goes my list of subjects I think should be addressed:

1. Paid links clarification – There are two areas that need clarification with this issue. The Help Center says, ” Buying links in order to improve a site’s ranking is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results” yet we’ve heard from people like Adam Lasnik that, “the more common penalty applied in the case of linking schemes is for the link seller to have their ability to pass PageRank stripped away” By more common, I’m GUESSING that both the seller and the buyer can be penalized. However, what scares me, and probably most people is not understanding how the buyer is penalized as those are links on other sites and we’ve been told all along that other sites cannot harm your ranking. The other area that I’d like to see addressed is the Paid Directories references. Google pushes the yahoo directory in their guidelines, and Matt Cutts has defended them and give some guidelines on deciding whether or not a paid directory will be penalized or not. One of those directives centers around the review process that Yahoo uses. Is there somewhere I can apply to be granted the status us a reviewer? Is charging for links that are not nofollowed fine if you don’t accept all applications and clearly state it on the site? Is this a privilege reserved for Yahoo or can others gain this status?
2. Bad neighborhood – Not linking to a bad-neighborhood is often the advice given when evaluating a site. How are we supposed to determine what is a bad neighborhood anymore? Banned sites no longer have their PageRank gray barred, sites often have a ranking penalty applied while still showing all of their pages indexed, with the expansion of the supplemental index most sites can get almost all of their pages at least indexed. Is there any signal to look for other than a site being completely removed from the index?
3. Nofollow funneling vs. robots.txt, or both - Matt Cutts said, “The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt’ed out)” I can see how using nofollow on some of the links on a page will increase the value passed to the remaining links as the density has change, but I don’t understand the use of the robots.txt. Does this mean that if I had a page with 100 links on it and 99 of those links went to a pages that were blocked by robots.txt when the PageRank distribution is calculated the one link to a page that is not blocked would receive 100% of credit? After finding the links on a page and then visiting them and seeing a robots.txt block, does Google go back and recalculate the link juice for that page?
4. Incremental penalties - Various webmaster forums have long heated debates over minus this and minus that penalties. Could you expand on the existence of such actions where a site is just across the board demoted for everything. If it doesn’t exist it would be nice to hear that as well.
5. Homepage missing - Many, many, people have found their homepage missing yet the other pages on the site are still there. Is this an indication of anything, a bug, a hiccup, something to worry about, going to fix itself? Anything you can say on that would be great, it’s just happened too often to be coincidence.
6. Not ranking for your domain - One of the great many indicators that people use to determine if a site has suffered some sort of penalty is the “doesn’t rank for the domain name” test. Is there any validity to this? Or is it just misguided?
7. Meta tags - Could you please make a statement on which Metatags Google considers useful for it’s system?
8. No Messages - The message box in Webmaster Tools is great, though as you’ve stated you don’t notify 100% of penalties. The problem is that I don’t think its clear to people that not having a message does not mean you don’t have a penalty,the same goes for sitemap errors, robots.txt errors etc. People have flipped it to believe that a lack of a notice means that everything is fine. A post stating clarifying that would be wonderful
9. Reconsideration Request– I’ve seen it stated elsewhere but not officially the time it usually takes and the fact that multiple reconsideration requests aren’t looked on as a negative, something official would help.
10. Procedure for cross domain and in domain redirecting, is there a spamming threshold - What is the official stance on how to implement a sitewide redirect to a new domain, slowly, in chunks, all at once? The same for an in-site reconstruction. Is there an element of spam detection if someone 301’s too much?
11. Mythbusters post - I’d love to see some sort of mythbusting, official, post debunking some of the common Myths that you can.
12. Spam, paid link reporting fallacies - Once of the biggest reasons some people believe they’ve dropped down in the index is because someone has reported them as spam or as a link seller. Adam on the other hand has said in a comment before that you could report a site 40 million times and it won’t hurt their ranking (of course they could be dumped if they were indeed spamming). A statement to the point that if you are a good site, other people can’t harm you by submitting reports.
13. Bad External Links - Often people come to the group wondering if a link to them on some crap site is hurting them, I’d like to see an official statement to point to.

Like I said, nothing to in depth, just some of the more common questions and misconception that I’d like to see expounded upon.

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According to Google’s default #1 search result for [jedi mind trick]:

Jedi typically perform this ability with a wave of the hand and a verbal suggestion (for example, “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for”). If the trick is successful, the victim will reply by restating the suggestion (”These aren’t the droids we’re looking for”) and will immediately think or do whatever the Jedi suggested.

Two days of ago Google’s most famous Googler said that the DMOZ home page had disappeared due to a ill conceived 301 redirect. Today the official DMOZ blog took time out of their busy schedule of not approving competitor’s sites to clarify the situation and say that the real reason was actually:

…changing the root domain from dmoz.org to www.dmoz.org. What we all witnessed yesterday and what was reported by the great sites above was part of an index recognizing, adjusting and updating in real time. This was confirmed in discussions we had with Google…

From this exchange I can only wonder about a few possibilities:

• Google waved their hand and said, “those are real time adjusting and updating” and DMOZ obliged and responded with, “those are real time adjusting and updating”
• Matt Cutts needs to talk to his crawl team who seemingly fed him some bad information
• DMOZ actually doesn’t have the skills required to institute a proper 301 redirect
• Google fell on the sword and decided to look like fools and said that they can’t handle domain canonicalization
• If you have a site with a home page with PageRank of 9 or less (that’s only a small percentage of the web) you should reconsider instituting a 301 redirect, lest Google will loose you for a few days of recognizing and adjusting
• Minty fresh results only apply to lower PageRank blogs and not older established sites
• Google actually had a big screw up, instead of sending Adam Lasnik out to say it was a Bad Data Push, they waved their hand and buffaloed DMOZ into doing their dirty work for them
• There are screw-ups, cover-ups, and foul-ups going on here

Note to DMOZ, if you have to continually remind people that you are not dead or dying, you are dead or dying.

• Today, “DMOZ is not dying folks. We’re growing every day. Globally.”
• Two days ago, “the editor community is very much alive and thriving”

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Just in case you missed it.

John Mueller, famously known for his band of followers the Muellerites, is interviewed by Cristina on a technical and personal level.

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There’s been some rumblings lately around the fact that the DMOZ home page was removed from the index. I don’t pay too much attention to the DMOZ, but in this case it was interesting. I started to follow various threads in the webmastering/SEO community diligently as I’ve seen this “lost my homepage” behavior many times in GWHG. I even made an appeal on behalf of the unfortunate webmasters which was ignored.

Matt Cutts, the true ambassador to the webmaster, came through and answered the question, even taking time from electronic cat gadgets and their pedometers to do so.

Hey all, I dug into this a little bit with the help of a couple crawl folks. It looks like when Googlebot tried to fetch http://www.dmoz.org/, we got a 301 redirect back to http://www.dmoz.org/ . It looks like that self-loop has been going on for several days. We were last able to fetch the root page successfully on Sept. 10th, but from that point on DMOZ was returning these 301-to-itself pages, and after a few days Googlebot gave up on trying to fetch the url.

This makes sense, as Googlebot hit the page it would get a 301 response saying that the new page was the page it hit. When that information got to the normal process that handles 301s it probably just faulted out. Since no other information on a page loads after a 301 (normally) they would have to remove the page as they’d have no data for it.

Here’s the odd thing

When I first heard of this, several days ago, i visited the DMOZ site, and viewed it just fine. Depending on your browser, you can’t view a page that redirects to itself, as this example I’ve set up. Internet Explorer will just sit there and spin, Firefox will eventually give you an error message, and using an online tool will let you know that there is an error.

Pure Conjecture

Matt Cutts has been doing this a long time and probably the best at speaking around issues when he needs to (protecting secrets, towing the company line, etc) but never has there ever been any appearance of being anything less than truthful, so I will by default dispel the idea that he was giving us bad information. So how can I not see a 301 redirect, no one else mentions that the page won’t load ANYWHERE in all the discussions, but yet Googlebot sees the behavior?

1. All things considered, the simplest explanation is usually the best, perhaps the 301 redirect was briefly shown only when Googlebot happened to visit the site, but not long enough for anyone to take note of it.
2. They somehow managed to return a 301 response code, but not the redirect. This is something I tried to simulate on many platforms but could not. The browsers and tools I used all seemed to expect the redirect location and either defaulted to one or erred out. Google on the other hand doesn’t actually CRAWL anything, they just hit the page and return back with whatever it saw. I don’t know enough about how the interwebby works to really say if this is a possibility or not, it is after all pure conjecture.
3. They were cloaking their 301 only showing it to Googlebot (or other bots for that matter) and not to regular users with a browser or not from Google’s IP range.
4. Perhaps the 301 was referrer based, and when there was no referrer it showed the redirect. Googlebot, since she runs on a predetermined schedule of URLs to crawl would not show a referrer.

Any other ideas that I am too simple to see?

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David Naylor posed an interesting question, ” What would I do if I were Google?” To which I quickly and without much thought responded:

1. Stop preaching and start helping/answering questions/communicating.
2. Disable the worthless link: command.
3. Show supplemental pages in webmaster’s central
4. Update statistics every 5 years or so in webmaster’s central.
5. Give up on the nofollow disaster they’ve created and let people get back to making sites for people and not machines.

BONUS
6. Update their webmaster’s blog more than quarterly.

Adam Lasnik took some time out of his weekend to respond to my comment with his own thoughts on the subject.

Okay, JLH, I’ll bite (again :P)

> 1. Stop preaching and start helping/answering questions/communicating.

Like a Help Center in 18 languages? Dozens of Googlers at conferences around the world? Dozens of Googler Posts a month in U2U groups in multiple languages? (and counting John Mueller, we’re now talking a lot more posts :D)

> 2. Disable the worthless link: command.

Why? So competitors can’t get a sampling of your backlinks? Don’t be greedy!

> 3. Show supplemental pages in webmaster’s central

I don’t see this as likely, but I expect we’ll be offering more tools that help webmasters get at the root of issues rather than fumbling along trying to make incorrect assumptions just based upon what index a document happens to be placed in. I won’t even mention that *all* the other major search engines have gone on record as noting they have multiple distinct indexes, and yet I haven’t seem people clamoring for tags in that context.

> 4. Update statistics every 5 years or so in webmaster’s central.

I expect updates in Webmaster Tools will be more frequent.

> 5. Give up on the nofollow disaster they’ve created and let people get back to making sites for people and not machines.

Should we also give up on robots.txt, too, since that’s for machines rather than people, right? I expect nofollow will be used with increasing precision and fairness; e.g., expiring nofollows for trusted contributors.

> BONUS
> 6. Update their webmaster’s blog more than quarterly.

8 posts in the last month… and that’s not counting our German or Chinese webmaster blogs, either. Methinks you have a strange conception of quarterly ;).

I thought I’d respond here instead of Dave’s site, because, well I can take my time. Plus since he nofollows his comments like Google wants, it will show up as a one-way link to him, and that’s got to far outweigh anything I could add to his blog post.

First up, I’m not quite sure what to make of Adam’s opening volley, “Okay, JLH, I’ll bite (again :P).” The ‘I’ll bite’ implies some sort of adversarial relationship between us and ‘again’ indicates that this isn’t the first time I’ve gotten under his skin. If this is true, I’d say that’s sad, because as hard as it is to believe we are on the same team. Oh sure, people don’t fawn over my every comment, but I’d like to think I am doing as much as my limited capabilities will allow to help webmaster’s construct their sites better for Google’s sake. I’d imagine that a few of the thousands of post’s I’ve made have helped a person or two. It’s actually not easy work, the hardest part is figuring out who to try to help along and who is just a two-bit-spammer looking to get their MFA site back in the index. I’m sure after a while he thinks I am working against Google as the only thing he probably sees is the negative postings, but believe me when I my rants are in the hope of improving things, but I digress. Let’s get to his list.

1. This may be more a matter of my poor communication skills than any real conflict. If you take my original statement and add “more” to the end of it, it would have been closer to my real meaning. I don’t want to sound like I am completely dissing their efforts so far, they’ve been admirable. The new FAQ are great and the continued webmaster guidelines updates are welcome. I do take issue with Google’s (or maybe just Adam’s) assessment that the conferences attending is meant for anyone but the very very small minority of people that actually go to them. Some even have a moratorium that the information cannot be shared. Conferences are not meant or designed to be ways to disseminate information to the masses but rather to the paying attendees. Sure a few people blog about them, but really even that reaches a very small audience when compared to the millions and millions of site owners out there. When I talk about communication with webmasters, I am speaking about the real salt-of-the-earth types who own and maintain one site, their own. The professional bloggers, search engine watchers, and big-time SEO’s probably already got your ear anyway. I have noticed that Google has changed the emphasis on promoting the GWHG from being an official Google help group to a community of like minded webmasters. It will be the death of the group by the way, but that’s another story. The group averages eight to nine thousand posts a month, if Adam thinks that “dozens” of Googler responses is the only effort they need to put forth, then I am truly disappointed. I would have thought they were working on improving that, but I was mistaken, and saddened. I am trying to inspire Google to help get the word out to the other 99.9999% of site owners that don’t go to conferences or have Adam’s ear.
2. Regarding the link: command, I just think it’s a disservice to the brand and quality that Google has worked many years to develop. You, I, and Adam know why it’s been crippled but the average person (remember him/her? The one that can’t afford to go to your conferences) is looking for information on their site and know of all the links that are out there and then see that Google can’t find them. If for some reason they see the need to keep the crippled version live they should really add a disclaimer saying that it is intentionally broken, if for no other reason for brand protection. “You want to organize the worlds information, but yet from the outside you cannot even return accurate results” is the impression from the outside. I invite anyone doubting this to spend a few hours combing through the posts at the GWHG and despite being clearly mentioned in the FAQ section it is still a concern. Once again, fixing this would be to Google’s benefit, not John’s.
3. Show supplemental results or don’t show them. My concerns are not with the tag itself, as I think that caused more trouble than its worth. Again, I am looking out for the webmaster not the professional. I’d love it if people were able to diagnose crawling and ranking issues based on site architecture. The supplemental tag gave us at least some feedback, but if you’ve got plans for better tools, I’m willing to wait. I won’t even mention that the subject of the original post was what you would do if you were Google, not if you were the other search engines. Oh wait, I did mention it, oops.
4. More frequent updates would make the information their usable, right now it just satisfies curiosity at best. Thank you for the update.
5. Sure robots.txt is for machines, then again so is HTML as I have yet to see any work without one. What I was referring to was the concept of having the webmaster community being the ones to judge which links are relative or not. Not only requiring them to judge, but also penalizing for not judging correctly, in the case of paid links. If Google really thinks that the webmasters are capable of adding nofollow where appropriate and not using it were inappropriate then why don’t they start ranking pages based on the keyword meta tag then? Since they’ve got so much trust in millions of site owners knowing the correct application of the nofollow attribute then they should also trust the webmasters ability to know what his/her site is about. Google has made billions on being able to rank web pages, invest some of that into figuring out which links are good and which ones are not. AGAIN, spend a little time in GWHG looking at real sites, not just talking to the likes of Danny Sullivan and other search rockstars. There are people royally screwing up their sites with the misguided use of nofollow and I have yet to see any proactive approach to helping those people.
6. In all fairness, two of those eight blog posts were put up after my comment, and only three so far this month, and six all of August. It would be great if some of these dozens of Googlers would write down their speeches at conferences and post them online, or even if you all took turns putting out a post a day. That way it would only come around to you once every couple weeks. There are thousands of blogs devoted to Google that find plenty to write about, I’d think you all in the midst of it could think of something meaningful to say at least once a day. Then again if you are satisfied with what I would consider mediocre communications then I don’t have a chance of convincing you other wise. You can’t fix something that you don’t recognize is broken.

So there it is, my response. Harsh? yes, but if you look at it from an honest point of view I am only concerned with these issues because I think if they were addressed the quality of the index, quality of sites, and thus Google would improve. If that’s adversarial inferring bait to which Adam needs to bite, I’m sorry. Since we are not actually engaged in a discussion here, I know how writing can turn quickly from responding to something to defending yourself, I do it all the time.

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