feedthebot - the blog

Okay One More Blog

2007-05-17T21:56:00.000-07:00

JLH give us the gift of songs that used to be pop songs but are now SEO hits

no more bloggy

2007-05-07T23:12:00.000-07:00

This is the last post of this blog. I now am at SEOish

History of SEO using Bloom County Characters

2007-04-27T17:58:00.000-07:00

Opus, Bill the Cat, Milo (Matt Cutts) and that little cockroach take you through the Brief History of SEO

2007-04-25T08:26:00.000-07:00

Why Google has to work very hard

2007-04-17T10:44:00.000-07:00

I wrote a description where I tried to explain link schemes and the affect they have on a web site. I was pleased to see that within just a couple of days, my description was on the first page of Google results when one searches for "link schemes".

But check out what else is on that first page. Here is a website that defines link schemes as something very different...

This non-profit group in the UK has a wonderful outreach program designed to help elderly persons in the community. Here is how they define "link scheme"...

"Link schemes are community based initiatives that aim to improve the quality of life for disadvantaged, elderly or infirm people by providing a structured good neighbour service delivered by volunteers from within the local community."

See their "link scheme" page.

Just thought it was a funny example of where a search term that has one meaning to most people may have other meanings. Google works pretty good at this type of thing.

Another example is "spam". The over riding use of the word "spam" is not the luncheon meat in a can, but go to Google and search for "spam" and you will see what I mean.

Google recommends that you "avoid" link schemes, but I do not think they mean these. :)

The other reason that Google has to work hard is because of SEOmoz, who are shamelessly attempting to alter the virginal pristinity of Google's results by promoting a contest in which the words Greatest Living American are linked to a page that promotes Colbert of the Colbert repor. I am utterly opposed to this sort of nonsense so I absolutely refuse to participate in the Greatest Living American experiment. It would be way below me to promote the nonsense that can be found here
If the author of this wants to be taken seriously, I suggest using a name that doesn't have "fish" in it.

New Descriptions!

2007-02-24T16:47:00.000-08:00

Ever wonder what a "sneaky redirect" is, or just what a redirect is in the first place?

Redirects and the Google guidelines

Another commonly asked question is "what does Google mean by a 'bad neighborhood' or a 'link scheme'?"

I have made a new page that tries to answer that, in my newest description of a guideline....

Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank.

Wanna know about Badware and the Google guidelines?

Don't create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.

Thank you

2007-02-12T13:05:00.000-08:00

Hello all, I just want to say thank you to all the people out there who have been using and linking to my website feedthebot.com

Matt Cutts was kind enough to give me a mention, which was wonderful and led to over a thousand visits to my site each day for a few days. I like that.

Many people have been saying alot of great things and I appreciate them all. I will be updating my "about" page on feedthebot to let everyone know that I am often away from computers for weeks at a time ( I travel alot for my other website twizi.com )

As a result of my travel, I sometimes do not check my emails for a long time so my apologies to those I haven't responded to, I will do so soon.

How to improve Google webmaster help forum

2006-12-30T01:18:00.000-08:00

I started a thread about this in the Google webmaster help forum and so far many great ideas have been discussed by people who spend alot of time there. I want to put a summary of what people are saying up.

My suggestions in a nut shell were -

1) Google could have a consistent, active presence on the forum by Google employees. Google employees are reading this forum, they have told us this, why not have those employees comment more?

2) Get rid of the Google ads on the right hand of the screen and utilize this space for a "common questions section" or a "daily review of answers". Why show ads like "Get listed in 10,000 directories for 2.99" in a forum designed to be helpful to new webmasters?

3) My third suggestion was one that had just been mentioned by JLH in another post. Moderation. Some form of moderation would be helpful to those attempting to navigate the forum and it would lessen the people who get turned away from this forum by the personal attacks and flame wars.

4) Organize the information given in the forum in a manner that would reduce repetition and could be "tagged" for reference and computation of what people are talking about.

There has been an incredible amount of suggestions. Here are what some others have suggested (it is pretty lengthy, even in summary)...

Give Google staff the ability to pay non-Google staff for relevant question answering

We could unify the "tagging" suggested to a "bookmarking" one and make the whole enchilada searchable, shareable and public.

Those topics in which Google employees participate could be highlighted or marked differently. Then, we won't have to search all threads for official answers. Unrelated subjects to our needs may still fill a void since they may have information equivalent to the law of the land.

If moderation is agreed upon, moderating background or history can be used as a way of assessing proficiency and maturity. I add this because moderation can cut both ways and after a period of time it may lead to soft censorship, as it happens in many other forums/groups.

Offering a paid hot-line for emergencies that threaten to cripple the lives of serious people that are easily identified as non-spammers.

Case-studies, where real life problems are addressed seriously and actually solved.

More "case study" examples (and a way to access them without having to read miles of guidelines and monitor random postings and personal blogs on a continuing basis) might prove helpful in offering specific and actionable instructions based on live examples which can be relied upon as authoritative.

A Google help/reference Wiki

I personally reject moderation but in the event that it happens, wouldn't it be possible to have an odd number of mods that must agree in single majority before a post, an entire thread is deleted/edited or a poster has to be called upon his/her behaviour?

A Google representative assigned to the forum as a key responsibility. Not to take anything away from Adam, who does a great job; it just seems like he often has other fish to fry.

FAQs at the top of each section.

Moderators. Volunteers would be fine, and their powers should be limited to de-spamming and reclassifying threads to correct areas.

More sub-categories under "crawling, indexing, and ranking" as the subject is so broad that reviewing old threads is nearly impossible.

I vote for removing the ads ASAP. Google should not, IMHO, be making money off of the work of the people here - even if the income is minimal, it's the signal that matters (to me). If ads, then I would welcome a revenue sharing system for top posters.

I also would welcome moderation and I think we have some great people here who a) take the time to read through most everything and b) are cool headed enough to not get carried away. Heck, it would be great if they could even just hide the spam postings.... or the cross-postings, or ... all those unnecessary personal attacks.

Case studies would also be great -- perhaps a 1-3 for each item in the Google webmaster guidelines, if possible. Matt Cutts has done a great job in the past, but it's probably extremely hard.

If not case studies, then confirmations by Google that a poster guessed it right could also help. A simple "star"-rating from Googlers would help a lot, signaling that "this post is on the right track", even without any sort of legal inding, like "this posting is on the right track but we at Google an't be held responsible for any actions taken because of it.

We should keep in mind that these forums are very, very young. It started with Google sitemaps just about a year and a half ago and has grown into an amazing work, where normal webmasters can for the first ime ever get real insight, feedback and communication with Google bout "things". Communication like this can't be pulled out of a hat -- nobody knows how to do it best, nobody else has done it before. It's going to take a bit of time to do it even better, that's for sure -- and that's what this thread is for. Ranting and complaining is easy, but we should also take a moment and thank Vanessa and her team (and the others) for their work in getting it so far - THANKS! :-). Let's take it to the next level!

My only hope is that some form of write-once-use-many approach will prevail. Writing good "code" for correct execution by bright and creative humans is infinitely more difficult than writing good code for correct execution by dumb machines. "Getting it right" in documentation is vital, so even the newest newbie has a fair shot at success without tears. So when I say "write once", I don't mean the first draft of any topical explanation should be considered adequate. Quite the contrary. Like machine code, human instructions have to be relentlessly stress-tested -- and ruthlessly refined when they don't pass muster.

We need at least one knowledgeable "key person" who has direct access to the Google staff and can get to them on a priority basis if all else fails to resolve a question TIMELY -- something of an ombudsman, if you will.

This is a great resource. Tough items are hashed out daily and the simpler questions are usually answered with a smile. People aren't afraid to correct each other and with the open forum are open to offer proof in the way of links. Its much better than the other forums available out there.

The greatest benefit of course is the Official nature of the posts by Google employees, aka Googlers. They are posting under their name, title, and presumably being paid to do so.

Google wants you to search for your information, that's their brand, their bread and butter. They don't do much organizing at all in a static format but would rather give you your results in 0.03 seconds (side note: why the heck is that shown, does anyone care anymore? It's like a hotel advertising Color television, it was neat in 1969 but pretty useless today)

What they could do to greatly improve the experience in this group would sticky a FAQ on the top. The note to include your URL was a start, but it needs to be greatly expanded. Just getting rid of the "why doesn't google show my links, why don't I have any page rank, how do I contact google?, how do I get those additional links to my site shown? blehh" posts would help tremendously. I would also suggest in that FAQ post a link to the profile page for the official Googlers' responses.

As far as moderation goes, I'm not really for censoring except in very specific cases, and those should be reserved for the Googlers running the group:

1) Personal attacks and verbal abuse of an individual
2) Spam. It's like porn, it's hard to define, but I know it when I see it.

I however do think there is room for organization moderation by the way of merging and closing threads and relocating to the right subcategory. A simple post by a moderator saying this subject is covered in this thread XXX, please feel free to contribute to that ongoing discussion, with a link and close the thread. Perhaps add a general category where the real chaff can be shuffled to. I don't know who can do it, but maybe they could free up some micro-percentage of last quarters profits to hire a few people.

1) A long one page FAQ with user input for the questions and links that the answers point to.
2) Introduction of moderators be them paid or volunteer to merge and redirect repetitive posts.
3) A link to my sites on the homepage of google. Okay this wouldn't really help the issue at hand but I'd be jumping for joy.

I would suggest to create a topic per each website to resolve specific issues to SEO or to highlight good practices.

One thing I have wanted to do is put together a "hall-of-fame" type site for postings here (and in the official blogs) - where you can actually find the information you need and can be fairly certain that it's right. It would need a whole new navigation system, perhaps tag-based, perhaps with lots of "related entries" listed with relevance scores.

Without a sort of "best of" and "recognized by the community as being ok" collection, these forums are mostly filled with brainstorming ideas... and for brainstorming they're doing pretty good at the moment. But we need to turn all of that into real content.

Maybe, for answers provided by non-Google employees, they could implement some type of rating system like Yahoo Answers for best answer. That would alleviate possible mis-information.

Notes:

Google employees have not responded to this thread yet, but I am pretty confident they are reading it. It would be nice to know one way or the other :)

There is a great article called "How to Build a User Community, Part 1" that also has great suggestions that Google could listen to.

Google continues to provide clear and usable advice in the official Google Webmasters Central blog

2006-12-22T13:57:00.000-08:00

For the last few weeks, Google has provided some very clear and definitive information via their blog. This is a welcome thing and I applaud them. The lastest course of info is focused on the words that a webmaster uses in their website.

Maile Ohye of Google provides suggestions on how to gauge if Google is seeing what you hope they are seeing. She highlights the Google sitemap "common words" report as a means to determine how Google is seeing your site.

She has also linked to other helpful articles that have been posted previously in the Google blogs.

I will be adding Maile's article to my guideline description page on words and their importance to your website. I collect Google articles such as this one as references for my explantions of the Google webmaster guidelines.

The article can be found here - Better understanding your site

Another great post, Thanks Maile!

Note:
The author is Maile Ohye and for any of you out there who have a "Google hottie in blonde wig huggging a giant racoon" fetish you will want to see this photo

Don't doubt this deftly delivered detailed description and definition of content deemed duplicate by Google

2006-12-18T15:08:00.000-08:00

For those who think Google is tight-lipped about specifics and guidance this Google webmasters central blog article might just change their mind.

Adam Lasnik, in an official Google capacity defines what duplicate content is, how Google sees it, what to worry about and what not to worry about all in beautiful, descriptive and detailed techno-color.

He provides examples and some actual instructions on how to deal with:

Blocking appropriately to give Google an idea of which "version" of your pages should be shown.

Being consistent with your inner linking

Syndicating your content carefully - (many writers will like that this has been addressed)

The use of the preferred domain feature of webmaster tools

Minimizing boilerplate repetition - Do you have a little paragraph of text that is repeated on each of your pages? - Stop it!

Avoiding publishing what Google may see as "stubs" (pages with no real content)

The importance of understanding your CMS

Even the most nervous webmaster can read this and actually follow one of Adam's other suggestions...

"Don't worry, be happy"

The new article is called Deftly dealing with duplicate content

Notes:
In addition to being better looking than Adam, I am also able to use more "d"s in my titles.

I have added another guideline description today - Submitting your website to Google

The little guideline that couldn't

2006-12-16T22:47:00.000-08:00

"Have other relevant sites link to yours"
This the first guideline that is listed in the Google webmaster guidelines.

It is the least understood of the guidelines. The results of that lack of understanding are less accurate Google results.

Webmasters are trying to get more traffic. Reality has told many people that creating links to your site increases the placement of your website in Googles' search engine results.

Reality is very hard to argue with.

A responsible webmaster who is seeking guidance of what is good and bad according to Google goes to the Google webmaster guidelines to see.

The first thing they encounter is...

"Have other relevant sites link to yours"

I think that is a shame. What is particularly misleading about this guideline is that it is worded in such a way that leads people to believe that they should be the creators of links to their own site.

Instead of lessening link manipulation on the web, Google feeds the fire with this poorly worded guideline.

It might be better to say "have a quality presence that other relevant websites will want to link to" or "promote responsibly your website within relevant websites"

On the whole the Google webmaster guidelines are a very good source of information for those trying to build responsible lasting websites for their business or pleasure.

What a pity people are so mislead by the first one.

Notes:
Google has posted an article about link building in the Google webmaster central blog that is helpful - Building link-based Popularity

I have just added the detailed description of the guideline to feedthebot.com (where I describe each guideline for new webmasters.) - Have other relevant sites link to yours

Google gives some dirt on link popularity

2006-12-16T05:52:00.000-08:00

Stefanie Ulrike Dürr posted a great article about link popularity on the Google Webmaster Central blog. It gives some specific details about how Google sees links and link gathering.

We once had simple "good" and "bad", now we have...

"Either the meritocratic and long-term option of developing natural links or the risky and short-term option of non-earned backlinks via link spamming tactics such as buying links."

Imagine that in a song.

Remember the Dave Manson song "We just disagree"?

"There ain't no good guy... there ain't no bad guy...
There's only you and me and we just disagree"

If Google were singing this it would be...

"There ain't no meritocratic and long-term option of developing natural links guy... there ain't no risky and short-term option of non-earned backlinks via link spamming tactics such as buying links guy...
There's only you and me and we just disagree"

But while I like simplicity in songs, I love details in posts and I thank Stephanie for providing some details.

The thing she highlights very well is that link buying and reciprocal links are losing their value and will continue to lose their value.

She also mentions link baiting (probably as a ploy to get people to link to her post)

Really good informative post. Thank you Stefanie!

Stefanie Ulrike Dürr from Google helps people understand links.

What does a 1.5 million dollar whine sound like? - like a whine

2006-12-15T19:11:00.000-08:00

A post in the Google webmaster help forum was posted today concerning a client with a 1.5 million dollar ad spend in Google Adwords. It begins with...

I'm writing to you as an emergency measure. I'm the
co-founder and co-director, along with my son Pax, of Passages
Addiction Cure Center in Malibu, California. My search marketing
director spoke to you on our behalf at the SES Conference a few days
ago.

As you know, one month ago we were eliminated, without notice, from our
organic listing status on Google. We rely almost completely on Google
for our clients. To that effect, we currently purchase from Google over
$1,500,000 a year on PPC. Even when our site was ranking in the top
three, our PPC spending did not diminish. We actually invested more
into the development of original content to provide more valuable and
unique information to site visitors.

It goes on a bit but the bottom line is this.

The only contract that this person and any other person with an Adwords account has entered with Google is an agreement to place ads and has nothing to do with natural search engine results.

If your business model depends on Google natural results, then your business model depends on something you can not control.

Google is a website. When Google started they were begging people for links too. They were not fully indexed in some search engines. They had a superior product and have become a leading source of information on the web.

But they are just a website.

Does Google owe us something? No

Do I feel that persons pain? Of course I do and as I told them in the forum I think that they will get back into the index but that they should use that ad spend in other places to get them through this time.

There seems to be a feeling that Google owes us something, but the truth is we can choose not to use Google if we don't want to.

I think the person who posted this did what they should do, they submitted a re-inclusion request and posted their issue on the Google webmaster help forum.

You do not have control over the Google natural results. If your revenue model depends on them you are depending on something you have no control over.

Google needs a defrag

2006-12-15T04:45:00.000-08:00

There are so many "official Google sources" we need a search engine just to find out what they have said about something.

I used Google Co-op to create one and I called it "Ask Google"
try it

Fun searches:

Danny Sullivan
nofollow
seo

I also added two more Google webmaster guideline descriptions:
Make pages for users not search engines
Submit your website relevant directories

Updated:
Titles and ALT tags with a link to the new Google blog article from Vannesa Fox highlighting image use

Matt Cutts, we "NoFollow" what you mean

2006-12-15T03:27:00.000-08:00

Google is pretty good at sorting information on the web but they aren't so hot at sorting the information available from their own company. Matt Cutts is an engineer who works for Google. He runs a very successful, informative blog which I enjoy. I find his blog is both enlightening and enjoyable to read.

But his blog is not an official Google resource. He has told us it is not an official Google resource.

Why does Matt expect the information from his blog to be regarded as Google guidelines?

Matt Cutts left this comment on Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Land blog covering pay per post issues...

"The specific guideline for doing paid reviews or paid links is to make sure that your links don't affect search engines. You can do that via a nofollow attribute on your links, or an internal redirect which goes through a page which is robot.txt'ed out, or several other methods."

Er..., Matt, love you man, but this is not specific guidance from Google it is advice from a guy running a blog. Many people do not know of your blog. Another example of a bad place for this "specific guideline" would be the comments of another guys (Danny Sullivan) blog.

Perhaps we should go to the Google official sources to clear this all up. (this is the fun part)

Beware - there are dozens of official sources of information from Google, but fear not, I have boldly created a Google Co-op search engine so we can find anything Google says about something.... (I call it "Ask Google") It searches 25 official Google sources - Google help, Google blog, Google webmaster central blog, etc)

Let's search for "nofollow" - Will that lead us to this "specific guideline"?...

I found a help page. This is what it says...

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"How do I tell Googlebot not to crawl a single outgoing link on a page?"

Meta tags can exclude all outgoing links on a page, but you can also instruct Googlebot not to crawl individual links by adding rel="nofollow" to a hyperlink. When Google sees the attribute rel="nofollow" on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Unfortunately the "specific guidance" of the Matt Cutt comment isn't found there. Drat.

Okay I also found an official blog about "nofollow" but it was from January 2005 telling us that they were experimenting with "nofollow" as a way to combat forum spam. It mentions nothing of paid reviews or paid links.

Give me the guideline

If there is an official take on this could you please put it on an "official" Google resource?

I just do not see "The specific guideline for doing paid reviews or paid links is to make sure that your links don't affect search engines" thing mentioned anywhere in Google documentation.

Patrick Sexton