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TMZ Has Spammy URLs

Posted by Bill Sebald | Google, SEO | Thursday 11 March 2010 7:22 pm

When Corey Haim died a few days, TMZ put up a page with a pretty spammy URL:

http://www.tmz.com/2010/03/10/corey-haim-dead-died-death-lapd-overdose-corey-feldman-lost-boys-two-coreys/

Dead, died, and death? Corey Feldman? Really???

Maybe it’s an overzealous SEO or overzealous logic in the CMS, but this is pretty much straight against Google guidelines (if it were a title tag I think it would get more of a flag). But my question is, will Google penalize TMZ? They’re a pretty big property. And yes, Google has penalized – even banned – big properties before, but usually for shadier practices. Does Google’s algorithm have a way of forgiving this spam because of the popularity of TMZ? Personally I think so. But what kind of message does this send? If TMZ gets away with it, then I think other webmasters will try.

Unfair for those who follow the rules.

Be A Link Spam NARC?

Posted by Bill Sebald | Google, SEO, SEO Basics | Thursday 11 March 2010 5:46 pm

On his blog, Matt Cutts introduced a form to report websites/webmasters who are spamming with links. Link spam is pretty much anything (according to Google) from links placed by paying for them, to comment spam (where people or programs submit hundreds of random comments to blogs). The link is http://goo.gl/linkspam.

“Be sure to include the word “linkspam” (all one word, all lower-case) in the textarea (the last field in the form).”

I’m all for keeping the web clean. If Google does want link spam tripping up their algorithm, I actually think they have the right to ask for help. It’s their engine – they can do what they want. But the beauty has always been that Google was supposed to be good at figuring out their own link spam. I mean, I never worried about link farms linking to my sites. It happens! So now should I worry that Google will think it’s link spam from my site?

I guess if you have a competitor who is already killing you in the rankings, why not buy an automatic blog commenter and link spam the hell out of the blogosphere? Point the links to your competitor. Then call Google and call the competitor out as spammers. How is Google going to know it was you? Dangerous, Google.

What Pages Does Google Know About vs. What Pages Does Google Care About

Posted by Bill Sebald | Google, SEO, SEO Basics | Tuesday 26 January 2010 5:01 pm

For as long as I can remember, going to Google, Yahoo and Bing (or MSN, or Live), you could use the site operator to find out how many pages you have indexed.

Go to your engine, and type:

site:www.yoursite.com

Check out the results. Interesting to see what they give you. But the problem is, this is sort of bunk data. See, search engines don’t crawl all the pages they know about. They also don’t index all the pages they crawl. Thirdly, they don’t publish all the pages in their index with the site operator. Google once said they prefer not to display this data because it’s not really valuable to the average site owner, and not necessarily worth the processing power.

Quite arguable.

Google’s response to webmasters (and SEOs) is to give you a better, more accurate count through Webmaster Tools. But it’s not as accessible as going to Google.com and typing “site:” into the engine.

SEOmoz put out an article about using Google Analytics to get a better view of not the pages Google knows about, but the pages Google serves. Now that is actionable!

It’s a must read article. Knowing what pages serve and what pages don’t help you identify the pages that need the most attention.

Don’t have Google Analytics on your site? Hopefully you have some kind of sophisticated web analytics package that is configured to retrieve this type of page-level data. The more data you have, the less guessing you’re doing within your SEO strategies.

Google’s Breadcrumb Trail Display URL

Posted by Bill Sebald | Google | Monday 21 December 2009 5:01 pm

So I’m not sure if this made the SEO rounds (possibly I’m just too busy hiding from my Christmas shopping responsibilities), but it was news to me.  Google is playing with removing the displayed URL and replacing with a breadcrumb trail type display.

It doesn’t matter if you’re logged in or not.  It doesn’t just happen if you’re ranked in the top position (like sitelinks).  Honestly, it seems pretty random.  I haven’t figured out what triggers it, but it does seem like a useful variation of the horizontal sitelinks.  Is it better than seeing the usual display URL?  Maybe since keyworded URLs still aren’t completely prevalent yet on the web.  Function over form?

Try it – I Googled  transformers toys but it’s happening elsewhere. All the more reason to have a good site hierarchy… now it’s actually marketing for you in the search engine result pages.

Google's Breadcrumb Trail Display URL

Hello, Canonical Tag… Is This Thing On?

Posted by Bill Sebald | Google, SEO | Friday 18 December 2009 6:53 pm

Google let us know this week that the canonical tag is now functional across domains.  I think that’s a fine feature (not sure why it didn’t roll out that way the first time).  I personally don’t have any reason to control cross domain canonical issues, but I can imagine several different applications.  Maybe it’s an offering for the spammer who wants to go straight!  Nah.

But it made me want to look at the canonical tag today.  About 4-5 months ago I checked, and didn’t see an effect.  I heard online buzz that it wasn’t doing much for anyone at that point.  OK – it’s new, I’ll wait.

But now it’s been long enough.  I was prompted to check again, but alas, the canonical tag really hasn’t been proven to do anything yet again.  It’s been months (February???) since this thing was put out and touted as the end of duplicate content issues, but I haven’t seen any decrease in my indexed pages.  In fact, I’m up about 10,000 pages in Yahoo and about the same in Google (in Bing I’m up off the charts, but that’s Bing for you).  I just reviewed notes from a site with more than 30 thousand pages from 2008.  The actual site’s page count hasn’t increased or decreased drastically in a year.  This is pretty annoying.

Is it just that the site: is that inaccurate?  Or is the canonical algorithm run so infrequently that it hasn’t permiated my client’s site yet (unlikely – it’s a hugely popular commerce site, but maybe there’s just too many pages to consolidate).  It’s hard to help search engines with the duplicate content issues when things aren’t working or reported accurately.  Makes me want to recommend hash tags in URLs, expensive meta robots implementations, or other nofollow tricks.

Real Time Search From Google

Posted by Bill Sebald | Google | Tuesday 8 December 2009 4:11 pm

This is cool! Jeff Louella was able to get the real time search and posted a video of it on YouTube. Apparently it’s only available when you’re logged in, and it’s still rolling out so not everyone will get it yet (even if I sit less than 5 feet from him in the office… dammit).

Update: I finally got it, but I couldn’t get my tweets to trigger in it.  Wondering if it has some sort of Klout feature.  I also didn’t find it all that useful.  It jammed up a lot.  Was this thing ready for prime time?  Does it make it easier to SPAM Google, or did Google put the right precautions in place?

Need a New Keyword Research Trick?

Posted by Bill Sebald | Google, SEO, SEO Basics | Tuesday 12 May 2009 6:01 pm

Here’s one I use involving a Google engine operator.  I passed this over to DailySEOTip -

Use Google’s Brain To Find Keywords

I highly recommend this blog.  Ann Smarty is one of my favorite bloggers and has an amazing amount of knowledge in SEO.  It’s amazing, really.

Google Showing Longer Snippets

Posted by Bill Sebald | E-commerce, Google, SEO, SEO Basics | Thursday 26 March 2009 1:37 pm

Google loves to test new features on small segments of users without announcement. In the past we’ve seen favicons show up in natural results, we’ve seen AJAX serving results to make listings a little more dynamic, and we’ve seen a social search component that lets users customize their search engine results page. Sometimes these experiments make it into production (for example, the latter became Search Wiki), and sometimes they fall off the Google grid.

A few months ago some lucky searchers found longer snippets being returned. On 3/24, Google announced that the longer snippets was now a reality. This is great news for businesses owners.

What’s a snippet?

The snippet is the little chunk of text that shows up under a listing in the search engine result pages. It’s not much bigger than a Twitter post, but is very valuable to searchers who are looking intently for answers, entertainment, or products. If the title of the webpage catches the searchers’ attention, they will often scan the snippet to validate whether the listing is worth clicking or not. When the keywords the user searched for are present in the snippet, they get bolded – this is an added bonus and a great attention grabber. Something about the bold text just lures searchers in – often semi-consciously!

Google documentation wants this snippet to be a summary of the content on the page. They say, “We frequently prefer to display meta descriptions of pages (when available) because it gives users a clear idea of the URL’s content. This directs them to good results faster and reduces the click-and-backtrack behavior that frustrates visitors and inflates web traffic metrics.” For all of these reasons, SEOs choose to write the meta descriptions carefully, embedding the keywords and messaging searchers are looking for in 155 characters or less.

So what happens if the meta description is deemed irrelevant or unworthy by Google’s algorithm? Or, if there’s simply no meta description found? Then Google will try to post content from the web page that it deems the best summary for the search query. Once in a while they’ll even reach out to the Open Directory Project for a description. Sometimes Google succeeds, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they overlook a great existing meta description for a terrible, algorithm determined alternative. Unfortunately in those cases, there’s nothing anyone can do put wait and pray that Google changes its mind down the line (though rewriting the meta description tag can sometimes influence Google). In the end, this is entirely at Google’s discretion.

Benefits of a Longer Snippet

The mighty powers that be at Google have decided for longer keyword searches, the user will benefit from additional lines of text in the snippet. This makes perfect sense. If the query is “Best Athletic Shoe Store For Women”, a longer snippet flushed with more detail could really help a searcher find what their looking for – not to mention improve the click-through rate and conversions. When the searcher is ultimately looking to buy a pair of shoes, our job as SEOs is to make sure our pages are recognized as the most relevant match – not just by Google, but by the user as well – and ultimately satisfy the searchers needs the first time. That’s where the magic happens. That’s where the sales are made. And that’s why a longer snippet is another great tool in our arsenal.

Read more about the longer snippet on Google’s Blog.



Google Showing Longer Snippets

SEO Friendly Link Shortening Services Exist?

Posted by Bill Sebald | Google, SEO, SEO Basics | Wednesday 4 March 2009 8:59 pm

Google defines a good link as an “editorial” link; that is, a link a webmaster naturally posts to share a value with his/her readers, or to provide a recommendation. With all the new shorthand messaging services around, smaller viewing screens in smartphones, smarter analytics technologies, and the fleets of new savvy web users communicating in a whole new web-language, shortened URLs are becoming incredibly popular. You’ve seen them all over Twitter. This is a perfect example of an arena where editorial links are extremely abundant. Google should love them!

So why is it that so many don’t pass link value? Granted, many are technically built with 302 redirects, but engines have the discretion to treat a 302 redirect as a 301 redirect. Still, most SEOs would agree that they’re not seeing much – if any – SEO boost from the shortened URLs as a whole.  I can’t say I’ve definitely noticed any link love myself.  But until I did my homework, and realized there were more 301 redirect shortening services than there used to be, I may not have been using the right service anyway.  So let me show my work a little bit…

10 popular shortening services:

Before you pick a shortening service willy-nilly, maybe think about whether you’re looking for link value or not. This doesn’t guarantee Google will follow the 301 redirect that is built into some of these shortening services, but it’s the best chance you have.  The following are 10 of many.  This list was pulled out of TweetDeck, currently my favorite Twitter messaging tool.

Service SEO Friendly?
TinyURL Maybe – it’s a 301 but does not appear to pass link value (see update below)
Bit.ly Yes
budURL No
Kl.am Yes
Eweri No
Hex.io No
idek.net No
is.gd Yes
lin.cr No
SnipURL Yes
Twurl No

The shortening services usually don’t let you add keywords to the URL (though some do – TinyURL lets you add a custom alias). And yes, shortened URLs can be used for SPAMMING too, but what is natively built into Google’s SPAM filtering algorithms would surely be able to evaluate these shortened links too. One cool thing is that many of these services give you basic tracking of a shortened link via a free account registration (some of which let you kill the link to control timely promotions or temporary pages).  Definitely useful and valuable in some applications I suppose.

*** Update: 3/18/09

Oggie mentioned this link in the comments:
http://sharkseo.com/google/tinyurl-does-not-pass-value/
So after some testing, Shark SEO says TinyURL does not pass link juice despite the 301. At least anchor text relevance. Is this due to something in Google, or something triggered by the TinyURL service? I’m going to try to test this out myself, but I think I’ll stop using TinyURL as my link shortening service of choice.

SEO Friendly Link Shortening Services


Click To Read More...

Real Time Search via Twitter… on Google?

Posted by Bill Sebald | Google, SEO Basics, Social Media Optimization | Wednesday 4 March 2009 12:06 am

Oh Twitter, I love thee more than bourbon for breakfast (what?!?!).  Thanks to a cool new Greasemonkey script, I love you even more.  What is Greasemonkey?  Only the coolest Firefox plugin ever built by human hands.

I always like talking about the value of vertical and social searches.  There’s also a concept of ‘real time search‘ that I really like.  Twitter is essentially that – information is available to find immediately after it’s been posted, and the usual Google delay is history.  Is Twitter going to show the same results as our trusted friend Google?  No, certainly not.  But with thousands and thousands of Tweeters out there, you’re sure to find something pretty cutting edge for many of your queries.

So this new script for Greasemonkey creates a block for Twitter results, and I couldn’t be happier.  Best of both worlds if you ask me.  Take a look:

Pick up the script at MT-Hacks.com.

Real Time Search via Twitter… on Google?

Click To Read More...

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