JLH Design Blog

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.

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)

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.

If you are a regular reader of Google’s Matt Cutts’ blog you’ll notice that there are more than a few regulars that think of it as their personal soap box. Some are even a little borderline insane.

Enter the Web 2.0. Download and install this quick and easy Firefox add-on and those annoying commenters are no more! You can sort through all the fluff in one click to see just what Matt has said, show/hide individual comments, or even block users.

While you are at it sidle on over and Sphinn the article I found this on.

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?

Matt Cutts now has a new sentence at the bottom of his blog posts,

Got a webmaster-related question or suggestion that is not directly related to the topic of this entry? Instead of posting it here, your best bet is our official Google forum linked from http://www.google.com/webmasters/

I initially had mixed feelings on this and even concerns but I am now coming around to this being a good sign of things to come.

My number one concern was the fact that the group is basically self-running with little to no official interaction. Oh sure, once a week* or less someone comes on in and answers a question, but as a percentage of user participation that number is really down lately, despite Adam’s threat* that more people at Google were interested in helping out. Google’s webmaster’s central already funnels too many people looking for answers with too few people actually answering that I don’t know how much more load the system can handle. We know that they’ve hired at least one great new employee to work in webmaster relations, but he was also the #1 question answerer* so that void will need to be filled some how.

On a positive note this does signal at least that Matt is acknowledging that the Webmaster Help Group is THE OFFICIAL help group. Despite his belief that everyone that is a webmaster lives in California , hopefully funneling people towards it will help increase it’s visibility. I do find it odd that he would link to webmaster central* with instruction on finding the link and not the group* itself.

I am only grasping at straws and possibly living on false hope, but with Matt Cutts officially endorsing THE OFFICIAL webmaster help group I am taking this is a sign that they are going to work on consolidating all of the information put out there in a more central location. This subject was discussed at length in a thread* started by Susan Moskwa (of blue badge fame), sorry www.searchenginewebsitelandforumMOZroundtable.com. With all of the discussion by Googlers about things “being a scalable solution” you’d think they’d want to approach webmaster support in the same manner. Having ‘X’ amount of Googlers posting answers in ‘Y’ arenas really waters down the message that should be being served up in THE OFFICIAL help group, regardless of your geographic location and whether or not you can get free tickets to stand in a room with a search engineer.

* over 2900 (10 of which were even helpful to someone) posts of free content on which to serve your ads by me* and nary a link or acknowledgement and nofollowing all your own links get’s you nofollowed in my book.

Back on July 25th I took exception to Matt Cutts calling out a spammer by noting that the same technique of keyword stuffing was still working just fine and not banned for several other related sites.

A check today reveals that those sites are indeed gone now.  Was it algorithmically done or a hand job?  I’ll never know, but at least now the index is cleaned of it.

 Link to original post

Google doesn’t even trust its own sites anymore and feels they need to nofollow the links to them. Why…

1. Are they bad neighborhoods?
2. Are they paid links?
3. Are they spam pages?
4. Are they unmoderated user comments?

The screen shot above is from the Google Webmaster Help Group* home page. (Be careful following that link it contains a lot of questionable links on it to some possibly bad pages that Google cannot vouch for.)

The proliferation of the misuse of Nofollow has been called a plague before but I am starting to consider it an epidemic, which needs some severe attention NOW.

Come on Matt Cutts, send a company wide email explaining the proper use of Nofollow. While you are at it, how about a blog post so the rest of the world understands it as well.

* If they can’t trust their linking partners, either can I.

As all good Cuttlets should do, I submitted my spam report to Google pointing out a site that was blatantly selling links and millions of sites that have bought these links. As proof I offer a partial screen shot of the acknowledgement.

Read the rest of this entry »

I think it was Ben Franklin who once said:

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results

In the Google Webmaster Help Group we’ve been pleading for quite a while for them to make changes, here are two most recent examples, though there are many much older.

Here

And Here

Well, I’m going to stop my insane behavior and we’ll wait and see if they do improve the groups atmosphere. I’m not going to completely abandon the group, I’ll still help pull some honest folks out of the dulldrums (mostly behind the scenes) and I’ll throw in a post or two but until I see a sign that its going to improve, I’m chagning my patterns.

My Biggest Gripes are:

1. No way to cull the immense amount of daily repeat questions such as, “why doesn’t link: work?”, “where did my PageRank go?”, “How can I remove a page from Google?”
2. No method to sticky or at least keep official googler answers in one organized spot.
3. No method to dispel completely wrong statement.
4. No full time moderation or even moderator comments, for heaven’s sake all lesser webmastering forums at least have some volunteer’s that have been bestowed the name of moderator to at least add some sort of credence to their definitive statements.
5. Official googler involvement is dwindling to unacceptable proportions when you consider the vast resources a company like Google has when compared to the other forums. You would think they could afford one full time person to moderate, answer the simple repetitive questions, and of course step in and answer the tough questions.
6. And finally no charter with any teeth in it. “Where did my site go?” , “Am I banned?”, or “How can I contact Google?” will never be answered officially and should not be allowed to clutter up the boards.

Many other much more valuable suggestions have been made by much more valuable long time posters who are equally unappreciated as the free customer service support mechanism, and I suggest you feel free to read them.

Meanwhile, me and a few well intentioned others will continue our progress at the Google Webmaster’s FAQ site, and as always look forward to continued contributions from others.

In other news, Matt Cutts finally broke the veil of secrecy and gave us all some timely information that we could use. Contrary to his speculation, though the A-list SEO bloggers** didn’t pick up on the trend, it was noticed by several people in the Webmaster Help Group.

**Now Aaron has been referred to as an A-list SEO Blogger

All right, I probably won’t ever be able to say this again so I will now…I OUT RANK MATT CUTTS IN THE GOOGLE RESULTS.

All right, it’s not for the most competitive term in the world, nor is it something really targeted often. After viewing some server stats I found this rather surprising referral from google for, Maile Ohye. Last week I did a post commending the Google team on their increased web presence, and I’m going to update that as soon as the January figures are in, I think they’ll look even better with the latest surge. In that post I mentioned Maile Ohye as being one of the contributers.

Well, I’m going to bask in all the glory that is out ranking Matt (for now), and save the screen shot for posterity.

Google has taken great leaps forward in communicating to the webmaster how their site is viewed by google, but now is also taking feedback on how they would like it to be seen.

While there has been no evidence at all provided to show that adding a sitemap will actually help a website. They now have the option to help fix conicalization issues to set the prefered domain with or without the www (or dub-dub-dub)