Why I Am Removing Google Authorship
Some of you may remember that “The Google Cache” began as a protest site years ago. At that time (as I still do today), I believed that Google’s default behavior of “caching” all pages on the Internet was unethical. While most people just confused “indexing” with “caching”, a few people agreed that what Google was doing was at face value a massive copyright violation. It is one thing to index the web and make it searchable, it is a different thing to make a cached version of that page available. One is a card catalogue, the other is a copy. Nevertheless, I eventually pulled down the protest site and put up the blog as you now know it. **See Update at Bottom for New Stats and Evidence** Well, today I am starting...
The First Rule of the SEOpocalypse
An incredible amount of discussion erupted over the last few weekends after Matt Cutts left these choice words at SXSW. What about the people optimizing really hard and doing a lot of SEO. We don’t normally pre-announce changes but there is something we are working in the last few months and hope to release it in the next months or few weeks. We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great site. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect. We have...
How to Buy 1,178,857 Links… The Google Way.
Google’s stance on incentivized links is fairly clear, and it has been for quite some time: If you provide incentives to another website in order to acquire that link, you should require that it be nofollowed. If not, your site can be penalized. This came to a headway recently as popular SEO writer Aaron Wall uncovered a sponsored post program run by Google. While the sponsored post campaign did not ask for links at all, Matt Cutts and the spam team decided to take action against Google Chrome in order to squash any concern that there may be double standards for Google Chrome. While many of us were shocked that a non-incentivized link associated with an incentivized ad campaign could result in a penalty, what is perhaps more shocking is the glaringly...
How Many of Your Visitors Are Logged In to Google?
With Google’s announcement that logged in users will now be, by default, passed through SSL causing you to lose valuable keyword tracking data, you may be wondering how to find out how many users actually are logged in. While the change was in response to legitimate informational leakage concerns, it has left many in the webmaster community concerned with the impact it may have on our ability to track simple, non-private information such as the keyword which generated the search (more info here from our Analytics team). We have been looking at this number on one particular site for quite a while. In this case, we looked at 135,000 unique visitors from Google to a site over a period of 3 months. As you can see in the graph below, we are able to chart the...
Detecting “Undetectable” Link Networks
I have been growing more and more concerned lately as clients have been coming to us with propositions from link builders who claim to have an “undetectable” link network. Over time, link network operators have become more and more sophisticated at creating more prolific and difficult-to-detect networks. The process, while straightforward, always seems to be the same. Acquire Dropped or Pre-Release Domains with Existing PageRank and Strong Link Profiles Host Domains on Different Class-C IP addresses Put up unique content with links Unfortunately, this creates a pattern that is difficult to detect for even moderately trained SEOs who lack the technical skills to analyze the myriad factors that Google has at its disposal. Subsequently, a human looking...
A Simple Solution to the Non WWW, WWW Question
One of the most shocking things a webmaster learns upon entering the world of SEO is that they need to choose between either the WWW version or non-WWW version of their URL. As annoying as it is, not doing so can create huge duplicate content and PageRank dispersion issues that hamper your rankings. However, what we rarely discuss is how to choose which of the two to use. The answer is fairly simple. Determine which version has the most inbound, external links across all its pages and then use that as the canonical version of your domain. If the sum of all the mozRank of links pointing to your http://domain.com/* version of your site is greater than the http://www.domain.com/* version, then you should choose the non-WWW. Well, here is a simple tool that does just...
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