JLH Design

This was found today on the Google Webmaster Help Group. A site which is selling it’s SEO services is banned/removed from Google’s indexed. When pushed the poster admits that he doesn’t really know any SEO and is just “outsourcing” the services. Apparently he’s got a few of these sites or at least has scraped some, all with the fine keyword stuffed bottom navigation (classic), clip art images, no external links, you name it.

I don’t want to out the guy as he’s got plenty of troubles all ready, but this is just classic. From the FAQ of the site:

Why is [site name] not ranked high on the search engines?

[site name] web site is intentionally not optimized for search engines because our services are for companies needing high traffic exposure and awareness. The less traffic we receive the better because we focus on qualified and selected clients that will actually benefit from High Rank optimization.

You just can’t make this stuff up.

For the month of October in Google Webmaster Help Group Susan Moskwa has really picked up the pace and helped webmasters at a clip I haven’t seen ever before.  She’s got over 60 posts already this month (though those numbers may be Google Groups Buggy) .  It’s very encouraging to see as world traveler and Susan’s fellow Googler John Mueller pointed out earlier that their participation was less than stellar in September.  (and people thought I was a paranoid nut! It’s nice to see some numbers to back up my concerns)

I haven’t really noticed any other appreciable increases from Googler’s other than perhaps Wysz who is up to 17 posts this month.   JohnMu is getting up to speed and posting more frequently.  Unfortunately for us, the small time webmaster, it will always be a net loss with the assimilation of John into the Google collective as he will never be able to help as many as before.  I get the feeling that Adam Lasnik has moved on to other projects within the Google organisation as his contributions publicly have feathered off to nearly nothing.

Their Popular Picks series was largely ignored by the blogging crowd because they don’t get to increase their reader numbers and ad revenue by pointing out official comments by Googlers.  The search engine bloggers are all about getting the big Googler scoop and that  will not change until Google starts to release important information through the official channels and not through some hidden back door unattributed anonymous Googler quotes on A-Lister blogs.  As a whole however the answers were excellent and very helpful, I have personally used the pages as references dozens if not hundreds of times since they were introduced.  Thankfully, Wysz added a link to the series in their FAQ section, including a very rare appearance by search engine rock star Matt Cutts.

The official Webmaster Blog is still averaging just about a post a week so no real development there at all to speak of.

All-in-all I’d say they are improving their communication lead mostly by the efforts of Susan Moskwa who has appeared to take the lead in this over-due effort.  If this continues, I may have to consider rejoining the group, with the one caveat that I will not do the job that an overly successful corporation should do with their own people.  Helping webmasters with site reviews and opinions should be left to the mere mortal members of the group however Googlers should be accountable for minding the store when it come to official declarations, clarifications on their cryptic guidelines, and those most annoying and benign too frequently asked questions.

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.

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.

Today in my Google Webmaster Help Group highlights I am going to pick a thread from each sub-group to emphasise.

Crawling, Indexing, and ranking:

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Google Webmaster Tools:

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Sitemap Protocol:

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Suggestions & Feature Requests - webmaster-related only please:

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Random Chit-Chat:

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It’s like driving up onto a car accident, you wonder if you should call 911 or if a dozen other people already have. I’ve got to assume that someone is trying to get the hamster back on the wheel by now. I just hope they didn’t crash the mother board on the Google Groups server, because parts for Commodore 64s aren’t that easy to come by any more.

Before I get started on the subject at hand, I’d like to point out a new commenter on this blog, Susan M, of Google fame. I appreciate her time and insight. I’m not an A-list-party-with-googlers-all-the-time kind of blogger, but you will see that the people who regularly comment here are all very much more intelligent than me, a theory which is only backed up with your presence.

There are two quite interesting threads in GWHG right now. One has gotten a significant amount of blog airplay because Adam Lasnik made a pretty revealing comment**. [as an aside I have to volunteer that I responded** to it somewhat negatively as the banned site is no more in violation of Google quality guidelines than other very popular sites. Popularity, as we all know from going to high school, is not an indication of quality.] The one Adam is involved in was about an obvious MFA (made for adsense) site** that has been banned, the second site that hasn’t gotten any Googler play is a MFA (made for affiliates) site**, which is possibly under penalty.

I don’t have the answers for the two sites involved, but I did make a few observations while viewing them. If Google is working on cleaning up it’s index by removing sites of lower perceived value I applaud them, there is a lot of junk out there. A lot of junk that they created of course as a secondary effect of adsense. If they really want to make an indent of the junk I’d like to point out two sites that provide very little in the way of valuable content. The wiki is mostly information pulled together from other sites, and about.com is just a giant made for adsense trap taking advantage of subdomain spamming techniques. Spam doesn’t just mean using hidden text and links but also useless sites, a much more subjective assessment tha’s probably as not as easy to mechanize.

MFA (Made for Adsense)

These sites have no real purpose but to generate clicks on adsense ads. The designers put together content that will attract high paying ads (the ads you get are contextual). Part of the TOS (terms of service) of Adsense is that you are not allowed to encourage clicks or even draw undue attention to the ads. The revenue model for being a successful adsense publisher is that you need people clicking on those ads, you don’t get paid by them viewing your site. The best way to get the ads clicked is to design the site to be less fulfilling than the ads. In order to make any money on adsense you need to design the site to be good enough to generate some traffic, but be bad enough so that the viewer doesn’t get what they came for and will go looking further, hopefully through the ad. If you write the worlds most definitive article on digital cameras, answering all the users possible questions perfectly, they won’t click your digital camera ads, why would they?. If you write a vague article mentioning digital cameras enough to get some search traffic, but crappy enough that they won’t get any real answers, they are more than likely to click your ad looking for satisfaction. It’s an unfortunate fact about contextual ad publishing, the best sites as far as content don’t do well, the garbage ones do.

MFA (made for affiliates)

The model for building an affiliate site is different than getting paid for clicks. You only get paid when someone follows your affiliate link and then purchases an item. Contrary to adsense you encourage people to click the ads or follow the links. Unlike adsense you don’t get paid just for them clicking the ad, they need to purchase something, you need to close the sale to get the pay out. In affiliate driven sites, the job of the content is to inspire you the visitor to go somewhere else and purchase an item. Poor affiliate sites that are not successful may generate traffic, may generate clicks, but don’t close on the sale. The best affiliate sites give the consumer enough information to make an educated purchase decision. Affiliate marketing pretty much encourages good writing and research. The poor ones usually just copy content and republish it, those types of operations require millions of page views to be at all successful. Writing the same digital camera information site monetized by affiliate sales would require your visitors from search engines be VERY satisfied with the information they received, so satisfied in fact that they are willing to go and buy the item.

The motivation for publishing both types of sites of course is renumeration, but the methods needed to be successful in either one inspire entirely different content creation styles. I back Google up in their quest to clean up the worst MFA (adsense) sites as long as they get rid of the worst but very popular crap as well. I’d also hope they continue their assault on copied or scraped affiliate sites, we don’t need another site in the world publishing Amazon’s write up for some SEO Books. On the other hand, if I am looking for some lawn care products I hope I find a site like that one, which provides a 3rd party point of view on many related products. It’s information I cannot find on Amazon’s site.

(Like the adsense and affiliate link drops? Ironic isn’t it?)

** Sorry for the nofollow, but I don’t link to places that have a policy of not linking out. Add me to the what we are reading blogroll (or any google domain for that matter) and I’ll be sure to remove all of the nofollows.

pfingo wonders:

When i click on the cache, i get a google error.

And Webado sharply notes.

Disable javascript and then go and visit your homepage at http:// www . pfingo . com/

You will see a blank page but viewing the source code you will see this: [code]

This is 404 page (not found) , so this is all that a robot will see.

For your human visitors you have the javascript redirection which is totally useless for robots.

Google is not a person. She doesn’t view your website with firefox or internet explorer, which also means when crawling your site your java script is not going to be executed. If you use that script to redirect your visitor, google is not going to see it.

When designing your site you must not only consider how it looks in many browsers but how it works with features like Java and Flash turned off. Not all people, including Google, browse with these features on. Using allows you to download add-ons to disable javascript, view as IE, turn off images, highlight external links, etc.

A thread was started on July 3, 2007 by the owner of a site who believes that Google has stopped indexing his/her site because:

About three weeks ago I turn[ed] a cookies feature on which would help to prevent abuse of the site. I believe this also cause all bots to stop crawling the site.

Google does mention that the use of cookies could be problematic, specially if it’s required to properly see the site.

Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site

Had the cookies caused a problem it could have been diagnosed by using the Lynx browser.

That’s not why I am pointing out this thread.

Googler MattD steps in and points out some “old” pages of the site that contain a significant amount of hidden text (click link to view the hidden text). Noteworthy in this discussion is the fact that MattD went beyond normal protocol and provided site specific information. The danger of doing this is that everyone may expect this sort of person treatment, which isn’t feasible and is the wrong assumption, but it also is a great milestone and example that should be held up as model for others to learn from. From this example I drew the following opinions.

1. It’s good to have an idea of what you may have done to get in trouble, but don’t let that idea get in the way of other possibilities. Often having multiple people look at the site will get you differing views that you the owner who is often too close to the site and wouldn’t see as a problem.
2. We don’t know how MattD knew what the site was in trouble for, was it a manual review or a signal in some of their wonder tools? Either way they know. Remember Susan mentioned that a review of your site will probably include a deeper look at it’s over-all practices.
3. When submitting your reconsideration request you must be forthright and include ALL discretions, even the old ones specially the old ones. More than likely a ban or penalty is not from what you did last night but from a while ago, a review of the entire site is in order along with a recount of all the changes.
4. It is entirely possible that the site and or pages ranking was affected by the hidden text, after reconsideration the site may not regain its original position since that effect is now gone.
5. If you are penalized its because Google has decided that you were attempting to fool the search algorithm. If when you submit a reconsideration request that is incomplete and doesn’t include all problems, that could also be considered an attempt to deceive, though Adam Lasnik has said multiple reconsideration requests are not seen as a signal to be held against you. I wouldn’t assume that filing a 2nd or 3rd request would be aggregated with the previous one, more than likely a different person is reviewing it. If I were to submit an additional request with more information I’d include the previous statements as well
6. This is always a problem with a 3rd party looking at a site. We are not always given all of the information available, access to all of the sites pages on the server, or knowledge of what was done before. We only see the state the site is in now and without a context in which to put that in. Google on the other hand is the king of data storage and can contrast and compare multiple various previous incarnations.

…I am a poor boy too, pa rum pum pum pum. I have no gift to bring, pa rum pum pum pum. That’s fit to give the King…

My displeasure with Google’s handling of the Webmasters Help Group is well known, and I am weary from trying to influence change, so weary in fact that I’ve been pretty much reduced to occasional lurking with a random post or two. There are others though, much more disciplined and forgiving than I am. For these people still holding on to the dream, I commend them, and though I am poor in resources and cannot thank them financially, I would like to offer them a link drop, for whatever that is worth.

So congrats to the following for trying to keep at least some signal in the noise filled shell of its former great self Google Webmasters Help Group.

Webado - Web Hosting and Design in Canada

Cass-Hacks - Powerful XHTML DHTML presentation and accessibility tools

Phil Payne - Website rescue, redesign and maintenance

Dockarl - BlixKrieg Wordpress Theme

JohnMu - Search Engine Tools

Sebastian - Links, Links, Links…

Red Cardinal - Search Engine Optimisation Ireland

Who did I miss?

Since Adam posted that more Googlers soon to be ignoring the Google Webmaster Help Group where should us regulars send people for answers from Google?

Is it seoroundtable blog comments, webmasterworld where they strain to figure out what sites people are talking about, maybe Matt Cutts blog where the real estate industry goes to complain about fraudulent link exchanges, or do we have to fork over ass-loads of money to sit in on secret sessions?

Now that threadwatch is dying it may be time for someone to start a googlerwatch site, as we cannot count on them bothering with the official channels any more. We tried to set up a not-for-profit site chronicling what Googlers were saying in the Official Help Group, but they stopped talking, and the heck if I’m going to funnel visitors to ad filled A-list blogs.

I need a new forum to hang my hat in. I’ve enjoyed the Google Webmaster Help Group for quite a while now, but it’s loosing its focus. The place has been inundated with retards trolls, and left for dead by Google*. No longer is it the wonderful place it once was that had insightful official information. That official information is now pretty much exclusively fed through non-official A-list SEO bloggers now or at their conferences around the bar.

I really enjoy the search engine standards discussion the most, so I’m trying to find a new active forum. I figure if Google isn’t going to be answering any more question officially I might as well make my contributions somewhere where some who needs the money is gaining from it. I get the feeling that Google is busy counting their money and not looking to improve their webmaster relations or be bothered with supporting us little people.

I’ve tried Digital Point and WebmasterWorld. WMW has a higher quality of posters, but you can’t discuss real world issues there so their search engine forums are worthless. Digital point will allow spirited discussion, but there are WAY too many idiotic questions that the intelligent stuff get’s hard to find. Been lurking about cre8asiteforums but the volume is so low its hard to get a discussion going, maybe after I get to know some of the players it will improve.

Any other suggestions? If you’ve got a favorite please post a comment so they at least get a link, and perhaps a new contributer (me). I love helping people and learning, not arguing and reading lies, so moderation is a must.

* I was putting together my final statistics of the group, but I got depressed and sad, so I scrapped it. Not only is Googler participation nil, but the once strong regulars are backing away. It’s hard not to when hourly the same trolls spew their lies unattested.

Who will be our next Minister of Disinformation?

You?

I may be going out on a limb here, but I would think that anyone familiar enough with the concept of getting their website listed on Google and having such an interest that they’d seek out help in that manner would understand the use of the Google as a search resource.

But surprisingly, when someone stubmles their way into Google’s Webmaster Help Group they loose all abilities to search the thousands and thousands of questions that were asked and answered before them.

If Google gave me a nickle for every time someone asked when their PageRank would update or why link: doesn’t show all of their links, I’d be flying along side Larry and Sergey in my  767 / space shuttle / flying electric car or whatever else I could afford then.

Okay, onto the point of this post.  I wanted to upload the following picture, so I could point out to newbies that Google has developed this new SEARCH technology, and where it is.  I could have FTP’d it, but opening up wordpress is easier, and now I’ve got something to point them to.

The Data

No Aaron, it’s not just me. The stats back up my claims as well, but thanks for having the guts to publicly bring it to everyone’s attention.

Google employees have been offering less and less information and help in the Webmasters Help Group. The decrease has been dramatic in the last month or so. From a high of 4.5 posts per day in February down to a new low of less than 1.0 post a day this month. Adam Lasnik has fallen off the map completely the last month, with Vanessa’s departure a bit sooner than that.

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