JLH Design

I’ve been touting the virtues of Google’s Webmaster Help Group for some time now, real people with real sites get valuable help daily. Google has put forth some guidelines for using the group but I thought I’d amend them with some of my personal opinions. If you want to get as much out of the help group as possible the following ideas gripes (in no particular order) will help you to help us help you.

Read the FAQ - Google likes to hide the FAQ and group charter by only linking to it ten times [yes 10!] on the home page so they are sometimes tough to notice, but it’s really helpful if you read the frequently asked questions as since they are frequently asked that means that frequently you will find your answer right there. I’ve highlighted the links in the thumbnail as they are pretty well hidden on the page.

Apparently 10 links isn’t always enough so here’s ELEVEN.

1. Group info, FAQs, and posting tips - please read
2. Group info, FAQs, and posting tips - please read
3. Group info, FAQs, and posting tips - please read
4. Group info, FAQs, and posting tips - please read
5. Group info, FAQs, and posting tips - please read
6. Group info, FAQs, and posting tips - please read
7. Group info, FAQs, and posting tips - please read
8. Group info, FAQs, and posting tips - please read
9. Group info, FAQs, and posting tips - please read
10. Group info, FAQs, and posting tips - please read
11. Group info, FAQs, and posting tips - please read

Post Site Name - this is stated in the in the group charter:

Please include all relevant details in your post, including your site URL, any error messages you see, etc.
Also, make sure to use descriptive subject lines for your posts. All of this will enable other group members to help you more quickly and it will also enable us to troubleshoot issues internally.

I cannot emphasize this enough. This is a practical place where real sites are looked at if you’d like to practice theoretical webmastering or SEO then I’d head over to Webmaster World where you can talk about “totally-white-hat-hand-written-red-widgets-authority-sites” all day and night. The regulars in the webmaster help group have looked at thousands of sites and are aware of most trends in sites’ performance problems in Google. Most can be deciphered in a few minutes but others take a lot of digging, which requires the site be physically examined.

If you are worried about the site being found in the search results on Groups there are a couple things you can do. The easiest is to post the URL in your profile, those don’t get indexed. The 2nd method is to obfuscate it a bit by breaking the link (don’t use http:// or www before it). The regulars in the group are quite willing to work with you as well, so stating that you don’t want links to the site placed within the thread will usually keep everyone in line.

Be patient - The help group is manned mostly by volunteers. Paid employees of Google do lurk the group and occasionally post but not nearly as much as the volunteers. If you’ve come expecting an answer in 10 minutes, well, it’s not that kind of party. Bumping threads is frowned upon and most likely will get the post ignored more than moved up. Also remember that this is an international forum with people from all corners of the earth posting, so while it may be 2:00 pm in your neck of the woods the foremost expert on subject may be in bed. Giving it at least a 24 hour cycle.

Spare us the Tales of Woe - We’ve seen it all, lost homes, laying off employees, starving babies, turning off the heat, etc. Granted your site is important to you, just like our sites are important to us. Trying to rally the troops by telling a sob story about how Google has ruined your marriage is not going to win the hearts and minds of the people who have devoted thousands of hours working to support Googles search quality.

Be prepared to back it up with facts - “I’ve been penalized”  or I’ve got the “-30/-950/-50/+6/Duplicate Content Penalty” may fly in some forums but as I said earlier GWHG is a practical place, we need real life examples. Explain how you came to the conclusion, what evidence you have, and what trends you see. “I’ve lost all my rankings” doesn’t help anyone help you as we don’t know what you used to rank for.

Be specific - Asking, “How can I improve my site in Google” isn’t going to get much response, it’s not the free SEO forum, but rather the Google Webmaster Help Group. Ask specific questions with regards to Google and you are likely receive some very specific answers.

Don’t start multiple threads - The regulars will be quick to point out that you are asking the same question over and over, thus souring other regulars from even bothering with your question.

Engage in discussion - Please come back and let us all know if you headed the advice, if it worked, didn’t work, or you just ignored it. Asking follow up questions to the follow ups is likely to get you more information, and threads with larger numbers of responses definitely get more attention.

Include History - So much of what happens in Google is not what you did yesterday but what you did three months ago, so if you recently bought the domain and 301 redirected it 7 times, changed hosts,  got rid of the malware downloads in hidden links, and removed the 17,000 hidden words before asking for assistance it would be good to bring that up.

There isn’t a way to contact Google - Again covered in the FAQ that nobody reads, but this is the simple truth.  There is not an email address for you to discuss why your site doesn’t rank for your keyword.

More than likely we are all you are going to get - Ranting and raving and demanding a 100% accurate answer from Larry Page is likely not to get you anywhere and even less likely to get an answer from 2nd or 3rd in command like Susan or JohnMu.

Be Honest - Nothing makes people angry quite as much as finding out we were deceived.  If you own a few hundred spam sites all interlinked and pointing to the cash cow that just took a tumble in the rankings you may want to mention that this isn’t your first rodeo, as someone will likely figure that out and the response will be a lot more brutal than if you pointed it out in the beginning.

Look for the Magic Phrase - Find the Easter Egg in the FAQs, more likely to attract Googlers.

Be polite, respectful, and keep it clean - While the group is pretty good at brutal honesty, brutality is not tolerated at any level.  Google’s response is swift and decisive and the regulars will swoop in and quickly surround abusive posters.

I need help from you programming geniuses out there. I’d love to use the New DoFollow Plugin but it doesn’t work in the latest version of wordpress. In the comments section the nofollow/follow link does not appear. Anyone have any luck getting it to work?

I’m not linking to them until they answer emails or comments….ironic isn’t it?

The Googlers were kind enough to give us some Frequently Asked Questions documentation in the Google Webmaster Help Group. Unfortunately you could not also call them the Frequently Read Questions as every new poster seems to miss the 7 or so links pointing to them when they write their first question. Annoying in the least and distracting from the real conversation that is trying to take place. We can all respond with the canned, “Read the FAQ”, response but even then people tend to not see the right stuff.

Using Google Notebook I’ve compiled a list of the FAQs with the question, answer, and the link. If you use the Google Notebook Firefox Extension all of the notes are sitting right down in the right side of your browser ready to cut-n-paste. [If only they could work drag-n-drop in! hint. hint.]

The contents of the notes are viewable here. However to receive the true value of the system I will need to add you as a collaborator so that you can have the notes available in your own Google Notebook application. Leave a comment here with your gmail address as the email address or send me a note in my contact form and I’ll add you. Once added you can add notes of your own so the whole community can benefit.

Based on a post I read by Graywolf titled Hey Network Solutions Sniffing Domain Searches By Chance I thought I’d check it out myself.

So I headed over to Network Solutions and entered “jlhstesttoseeifyouregister.com” [JLH's test to see if you register]. Waited about 2 minutes.

Then I visited the name in my browser, to see a parked page. Checking the whois data, you can see that it was indeed registered by Network Solutions. Heck even Aboutus.org has a page up already proudly serving Adsense, so their is a Google slant to this.

So bottom line is that if you are using Network Solutions to check for available domains, if you don’t buy it instantly they’ll double the price of the domain and sell it to you later at $19.95. Why anyone would pay $9.95 or more for a new domain is way beyond me as there are always plenty of cheaper options willing to pay Google Adwords for a click .

Now, I must wonder if Network Solutions has to at least pay the icann registration fee on these. If so, why wouldn’t somebody set up a script to check millions of goblety-gook domain names at Network Solutions? I’m just saying…

Today we were graced with another Googler joining in and contributing to the webmaster help group. I’ve updated my mostly accurate page listing all of the Google Employees posting on GWHG. Since it’s inception literally a dozen or so people have looked at it (t.i.c).

From Mariya’s initial post we learn:

yet another Googler from the Search Quality Team happy to join the discussion on webmastering here. My own web experience goes back to the late 90s when frames and animated gifs were all the rage and I cut my teeth making fan sites for my favourite bands on GeoCities. Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to work on a number of more serious and complex projects for large corporate sites.

I am originally from Bulgaria - a land famous for roses, yoghurt, football (misnamed stateside as soccer (-: ), and recently, sumo wrestlers. Outside of Google, I enjoy sports, such as Wikipedia surfing and football watching, and on the more active side, mountain hiking and volleyball. I have a linguistics background, and grammar books are right at the top of my reading list with novels and blogs. I love learning new languages and I speak a few, so you may see me chatting with webmasters in the German or Russian groups, for instance.

I am really excited to be part of the group and look forward to learning a lot and hopefully adding to the helpful voices in an already lively discussion.

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

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

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

Adam Lasnik started a contest to predict when Webado would go over 10,000 posts in the Google Webmaster Help Group. The following is the calendar tracking her progress and contestant’s entries.

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.

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.

Recently Sebastian, a regular commenter on my Blog, moved his own blog from a blogspot.com domain to his own hosted and owned domain. Not wanting to have dozens (45 to be exact) comments linking to a domain that no longer exists I set out to update my blog.

Using the wordpress commenting interface was going to be quite painful to repeat the action 45 times, so I sought out a more scalable solution.

I went into my phpMyAdmin for the blog and found the table for comments, wp_comments. I checked out the form of the text string in that just to make sure I knew what syntax it was expecting, turns out its the full URL with the http:// included.

With that knowledge I was ready to set up my SQL query. We need to set-up the query in the form:

UPDATE the_table_name SET the_table_field = REPLACE(the_table_field,”string_to_find”,”string_to_replace”);

For this particular query the form looked like:

UPDATE wp_comments SET comment_author_url =

REPLACE(comment_author_url,"http://sebastianx.blogspot.com/","http://sebastians-pamphlets.com/");

I clicked “GO” and got this delightful response, “Affected rows: 45 (Query took 0.0061 sec)”

Now on to find any other references in regular posts and pages.

You should link to him as well at http://sebastians-pamphlets.com/

A guy walks into the doctors office and says, “Doc, it hurts when I do this.” Raising his arm over his head. The doctor takes a discerning look and says, “Don’t do that.”

Since the BigDaddy infrastructure update, through last year, and till now Google has been not only improving the supplemental index to not only be fresher but to be more comprehensive.

Matt Cutts has said, “We parse pages and index pages differently when they are in the supplemental index.” With the continued improvements to the supplemental index the difference between it and the regular index has faded so much in fact that Google has announced that they will remove the familiar green tagging.

The distinction between the main and the supplemental index is therefore continuing to narrow. Given all the progress that we’ve been able to make so far, and thinking ahead to future improvements, we’ve decided to stop labeling these URLs as “Supplemental Results.” Of course, you will continue to benefit from Google’s supplemental index being deeper and fresher.

This should free up webmasters to work on the few metrics that actually matter, traffic, conversion, and visitor satisfaction.

Congratulations to Google on finally dumping the supplemental tag and I hope you continue the house cleaning and remove the utterly useless link: operator.

I’m in the midst of a complete review of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines which got me thinking about something. Most search engine spamming techniques start out as useful methods of building a site, but when overused go past some invisible threshold into the domain of spamming.

Meta Keywords used to be a way to indicate what the site was about, now it’s pretty much dismissed. Over use of keywords in your content is now keyword stuffing. We’re encouraged to get sites to link to ours but don’t pay or exchange for those links. Clearly any method that is used as an indicator of quality will be abused and eventually fall into the spam category.

This leads me to wonder when the over-use or misuse of nofollow will be seen as a signal of spam. Nofollow wasn’t developed as a tool to help a site rank or even as an indicator of quality, but rather as a help to search engines that couldn’t figure out what was garbage links in blog comments, unattended forums, or guestbooks. With the proliferation of the supplemental results being based solely on PageRank flow through a site, the use of nofollow has increased for internal link management. The original PageRank idea was based on the fact that academic papers on certain subjects that have the most references to them about said subject tend to be authorities. So let’s say you have an established site that claims to be an authority on just about every noun in the English language and they can’t control it’s content any more than they can control their links so they nofollow all of them, the site will soon become the automatic authority on all subjects.  The millions of sites that the wiki uses as it’s sources are now not seen as a source, but rather it itself is seen as the authority.

I haven’t tested it myself, but you know I will.  Is there a bump available for a site to all of a sudden disavow itself from all it’s external links?  Doing so would turn naturally occurring reciprocal links into one-way links to the nofollow abuser?

The nofollow was introduced so that search engines were not being influenced by the works of disingenuous spammers.  But is not the nofollowing of millions, perhaps billions, or otherwise genuine links also influencing the search results in a negative way?   A site like wikipedia with it’s  3.2 million pages in Google’s index definitely has affected the search results, in a negative way.  Perhaps the use of nofollow on such a site has helped curb the attacks by spammers on the wiki, but thats not Google’s problem, and it shouldn’t be mine either.

Sites that artificially link out with all nofollowed links, should be seen for what they are. Spam.  Amazingly some sites that don’t have any external links still rank in Google.  Odd from a company that built its fortune on the concept of linking.

So come on Google when will nofollow abuse be added to the guidelines? Better yet, when will the abusers be punished?