Google’s miserable failure on Paid links

Google recently penalized lot of websites that were buying links. In this process some sites were penalized even though they don’t buy links. Google’s new algorithm that detects paid links is a miserable failure according to me. So many sites got affected and even 2 or 3 our sites got affected. We never bought links for our client sites but 2 sites were affected because it looks like the backlinks were bought. The pattern of our links are no-where the same as the paid links that others get for their sites but still we lost 5 or 10 places for some important keywords. I can understand an automated algorithm cannot be 100% accurate in detecting paid links but they should also be careful before pulling the plug. I feel more manual review should happen so that the sites affected are really buying links and not just because their backlink pattern might look similar to a site that buys links for top ranking. The worse thing here is so many sites that are buying links got away with it and the sites that never bought links got caught. I hope Google is more careful with their buying links algorithm in future.

Are embedded links in widgets ethical?

Google and other search engines have always stressed for people to get only natural links. The whole link based algorithm depends a lot on natural links. Scientists wrote link based algorithm because links are natural and more reliable. Talking about widget embedded links this has been in debate for a long time. Search engines always have mixed opinion on this.

Embedding links in widgets has been in existing from the day widgets were introduced. Statcounter.com a world famous tracking company which provides free tracking were PR 10 because of the links embedded in their counter. Seeing this people started this natural usage of links in a commercial way. People started approaching commercial counter companies to embed their links when free counters are distributed in exchange for a payment. Lots of companies got temporary benefit from it but the search engines immediately woke up to the occasion. An SEO company which did this as part of their link building strategy was completed banned from Google’s search engine. Also Google started implementing link based penalties like the -60 penalty for sites that use widgets to embed links. Even we were affected a bit but later recovered. So is this ethical? . In my opinion I feel the user should know that the link is embedded into the widget code as long as they know it its fine. But if the links are embedded without the user’s knowledge then it’s wrong. I feel search engines too have similar view. People should have the ability to embed the link or remove it or make it no-follow. If they can do it I am confident the search engines will accept it whole heartedly.

Tags: Link Building, SEO

Gmail down – Cannot access Gmail now

This is the 2nd time Gmail is down in the past 15 days. I cannot access gmail now and even my friends in India and USA cannot access gmail. I am surprised because gmail is the No.1 email provider now and i wonder why Google is not taking this serious.

It has been down now for more than 10 minutes which is a big surprise. Seeing the millions of users around the world i am surprised how much work and email time they loose. I hope Google fixes this soon. Is this some sort of ddos attack on Google?

Google

Server ErrorThe server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request.
Please try again in 30 seconds.

Google gets all the bashing but why?

From what I have seen in forums and blogs Google gets so much bashing for something they do to defend their algorithm. Why do people do that? Don’t they ever know they wouldn’t have been doing SEO for their sites to rank in Google if Google never exist?

I have been watching Google ever since I started my online Business. I have seen major Google updates for a period of over 7 years almost all the updates were aimed at protecting their algorithm and getting rid of Spam and sites that entertain aggressive search engine ranking tactics. Today Google has changed into a highly quality search engine with good results. If they were not targeting the aggressive search engine optimization people they will not be what they are today.

Hottest topic in today’s SEO world is the Google’s ability to detect and penalize paid links. Whether you buy it or sell it if you get caught by Google police you are gone. Once in a SEOmoz post Matt cuts replied to Rebecca’s post where he talks about natural links being like very strong tires and paid or other artificial links as week tubes / tires than can burst any time. It’s actually true and from what I have seen every site that got affected for links had some sort of problem with artificial links.

Personal experience

Our own site had some problem with Google rankings when we created the search engine promotion widget and got lots of backlinks without knowing we were abusing it. Then we were hit with ranking filter which prevented our site from being in top 10. Did we whine? Well know personally we were not aware that widget links can hurt a site. We were not abusing the system in any way with widgets we spent money on our widgets and the only way we get back our investment is by links. We do that for all our tools but Google never complained on it but when we redirected the links from widgets to our Homepage Google algorithm got angry with our site and reduced our rankings.

What did we do?

We never whined we made all the widget links optional no-follow, cleaned up some links to homepage, removed link to homepage and added it to the widget page directory, checked for any other potential problem with our website and submitted a re-consideration review and in 1 month we were back in rankings.

So was Google wrong with our website?

Ofcourse no even though we thought widget links when not abused will not affect rankings still we shouldn’t have linked to the homepage with keywords. It’s our mistake and Google has every right to make us regret for this mistake their own way. But Google were nice, in fact very nice after rectifying our mistake and explaining them we got back to rankings. So Google definitely want us back in their rankings. Over 4000 people use our SEO tools (http://www.searchenginegenie.com/seo-tools.htm ) and out of that almost 2000 come from search engines. Google knows that and they know our tools get lot of traffic from them and they are happy to send people because people like it.

We don’t come under link buying / selling category

We never bought a single link to our site almost all of them are links to our tools, widgets and some custom built links through articles, directories, blogging etc. We don’t buy links but still hit with a link buying / selling detection algorithm. Was Google wrong in doing this? Ofcourse no why because abusing a widget Is same like buying links. Those links are not editorially given links, people linked to us in exchange for our widget. They didn’t link to our homepage because they liked our site. We understand / I understand and when everyone in our company understands Google’s position we are all good with anything Google decides. But not everyone take it that way I see so much Google bashing out there when something Google does to protect itself and its algorithm.

Being SEO is nothing to be proud of.

Some people think SEO is something great and they are the best in the world. I’ll tell you in Google point of view most of the SEOs are very close to spammers. Not everyone but most I said, including places like SEOmoz which is popular among SEOs discuss so much link buying / selling. Even Rand fishkin is an active support of Text-link-ads and he also supports buying / selling links for ranking. If this industry supports so much text link buying / link selling for ranking purposes and Google tries to defend itself is it wrong? For most SEOs yes Google is wrong. I would call that **** ****. Without Google you would have never existed, who are you to give commands to Google? The massive improvement by Google in transparency with webmasters and Google has helped webmasters a lot. But still webmasters and SEOs want more and more. They don’t want Google to penalize link buying, selling and other sort of aggressive and abusive link building tactics. I would say better leave the SEOs to run the search engine they know how difficult it is. Even the so called Google supporters abuse the search engines when they loose rankings. If you lost your ranking see the mistake you did. Rectify your mistakes, fix them and ask Google to reconsider rather than whining that Google is useless.

Confession from a SEO.

I am in this industry for more than 7 years. Am I proud to be a SEO? No never this industry is hated by so many people including the search quality engineers themselves. I am passionate about search engines I like them, I like the miracle algorithm that works behind it, I like all the PHDs. I personally wanted to become a scientist which never happened. I want to be friends of search engineers not for SEO benefit but to admire and gain knowledge from the wonderful work they do. I sometimes wonder why I came into this SEO industry. Truth I came into SEO from my programming background only for the money involved. This industry has so much money involved than programming and web design. People will pour money if they get good business from search engines. I have seen that practically in some PPC campaigns our company handles. Some big clients spend around 100,000$ a month for PPC. Though ‘not the same case in SEO still the rewards are high. But I am always looking alternate ways because I am not the bad guy type who goes after money. I like to earn money in a way everyone appreciates. Not in a way everyone glares at you. To all the SEOs out there realize the type of work you are doing and please give respect to my loveable search engine. If Google never existed I wouldn’t be here running a Business in SEO. Love Google and appreciate everything they do whether its right or wrong. Everyone appreciates if Google does something right and everyone bashes if they do something harsh to protect their algorithm. Love Google and all its efforts.

My suggestion to all the SEOs and newbie’s (so called SEOs out there) . Google is a search engine for people it’s not for you to play with.

Is Google penetrating our secret lives?

Many of us are not aware how much we get addicted to Google and its products. I personally use Google search, Gmail, Google reader for reading my favorite blogs, Google images, Product search, Google Maps and much more Google products. Virtually you can say most of my internet experience in around Google search engine. It’s not just because I am Google addict. It’s also because SEO is my lively hood. I spend most of my time in internet and Google.
But doing all these most of us forget, Google is tracking every activity of us using cookies and other technologies. So more we use Google and its products more our privacy is invaded. I suspect a big YES. We all know Google needs to collect information from its visitors to keep its search engine going efficiently, if any of our sites use Google analytics it’s important they track down every detail possible for their Analytics users. Similarly every product has a catch for itself. Google has a reason always to spy on us for each of its products. So is this something to worry about? If someone is spying on you will be happy to let it go? Don’t you think you will get disturbed it’s true that more you use Google products more they spy at you? But it’s their duty you cannot blame them but you need to be aware that Google knows what you are doing.
The most penetrating and efficient Google spy tool is the Google Pagerank display on the Google toolbar. If you enable PageRank display on Google toolbar for each and every web page or website you visit the toolbar needs to query the Google datacenter to get its PageRank. So Google knows each and every page you are visiting. Most of us who are aware of this either turn of the PageRank display or turn off the Toolbar itself when we are surfing for personal or sensitive information. Its not just me who is concerned on Google’s penetration there are lots of discussion on blogs and forums about this issue. Most of the people conclude by saying if you are worried about privacy don’t use products that invade your privacy. That is the reason many corporate don’t allow emails like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail etc. Only corporate emails are allowed to be used. Some companies even ban search engine usage to protect privacy. I recently came across an interesting theory in a forum on Google’s privacy invasion. A user posts
“Google’s Algorithm has changed to the point where it now tracks every user by IP address, so for example if you are searching for a specific search term or browsing a website running AdSense ads, then it will log the sites you visit or terms you search for and display matching ads to you regardless of what website you visit. I think this is one of the reasons why people often see irrelevant ads on their websites. Google is refining their technique and logging all of our activity individually. I also believe Google has a way of rating the relevance of each users visit, for example Google might pay AdSense account holders for clicks based on criteria around the kinds of sites a person visits prior to arriving at their site.

I will provide a better example; A person that visits Gamespot.com and then clicks on a link to Netflix from Gamespot might result in a publisher earning .10-.20 cents for that click, however a person that has visited moviereviews.com and then went to Gamespot and then clicked the Netflix link might result in a publisher earning .20-.30 cents for the click since the chance of an actual sale is increased. “
Even he agrees it’s just a theory but it looks dangerous and little bit possible. Also you should look at the most interesting Google flu trends search.
http://www.google.org/flutrends/
Here Google will show the spread of flu in certain parts of the world monitoring the searches arising from those places for flu related keywords. This is one example what Google can do with the data it collects I am sure we can see something similar to this a lot in future.
What I am telling Google users is that be aware that you are being monitored for everything you do in Google. Even if you don’t have cookie enabled still there are lots of ways Google will collect your data. What is important is the awareness that’s required when using internet and Google.
Good Luck.

Does Google’s crawler active on one day compared to another day?

There are few people who report Google is indexing pages more on weekdays than weekends, also it seems Google’s traffic in much more in first 3 weekdays than towards weekends or Fridays.
I do agree with the traffic point its obvious that weekdays are much more popular than weekends. People tend to use computers more on weekdays especially from work places. We monitor a lot of websites and the pattern remains the same.

But for pages indexed I don’t buy the argument. If you see more pages indexed on some weekdays it could just be a coincidence. What I have seen when Google indexes pages it keeps them in its index for a long time. So when a page is indexed on say Monday it will still remain on Saturday. So the numbers should virtually remain same as of Monday. But from what I have seen, sometimes lot of crawling happens on weekends and sometimes it happens on weekdays. I don’t see much difference; I think it has to be mostly with the person who operates the crawlers.

Google’s influence on Yahoo

Those of us who were in search engine optimization for many years know once yahoo results were completely powered by Google. Google used to have almost 90% market share excluding only MSN and its powered search engines. Where are we now today do we still see any relationships with Google. We recently had a major controversy where Yahoo had a deal with Google to display adwords ads in its search results. But Microsoft was not happy with it.
First we had yahoo make a deal with Google
“Yahoo said it had agreed to let Google put search ads on its site in what it called an $800 million annual revenue opportunity that would boost cash flow by $250 million to $450 million in the first 12 months.
Yahoo’s ads and Google’s would be pitted against each other in an auction style process that could make a deal easier to pass regulatory approval.
“Yahoo is being a reseller of Google whenever it makes sense and that is likely to be a lot of the time given how much more effective Google Web search ads have proven to be,” Global Crown Capital analyst Martin Pyykkonen said.”

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN1247863820080612?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews

Then Google decided to dump yahoo and the rift began:
“The U.S. Justice Department said on Wednesday it had told Google it planned to file a lawsuit to block the deal, under which Google would have placed its more lucrative ads on Yahoo searches.
“Had the companies implemented their arrangement, Yahoo’s competition likely would have been blunted immediately with respect to the search pages that Yahoo chose to fill with ads sold by Google rather than its own ads,” the government said.
Yahoo regretted Google’s decision, saying it was “disappointed that Google has elected to withdraw from the agreement rather than defend it in court.”

Google suggest one of the find of Google i would say is ever evolving

When first Google introduced it as a beta version everyone liked it and later Google moved suggest option to Google.com regular search. One thing was lagging but. Google was not showing suggestions after we do a search on Google.com homepage. Once you navigate from the page and into results page the suggestion stops. I personally wanted suggest to work both in homepage as well as results page. Now Google has made the changes and it works in both versions now.

Similarly now Google has introduced personalized search which gets saved into web history as preferred suggestions. All the searches you previously made when logged into Google will show up first before the regular suggestions. They also now provide the ability to remove the personalized search keywords which is cool I would say.

Also direct links now appear if you are looking for a specific site. Google’s intelligent algorithm understands your motive to find a website based on your partial keyword input and will show you the correct URL of the site you might want to reach.

Google never missed out commercializing Google suggest. They also have suggestions for sponsored links after all they need to impress their share holders right?

Google webmaster tools new features:

Highlights

• One-stop Dashboard: We redesigned our dashboard to bring together data you view regularly: Links to your site, Top search queries, Sitemaps, and Crawl errors.
• More top search queries: You now have up to 100 queries to track for impressions and click through! In addition, we’ve substantially improved data quality in this area.
• Sitemap tracking for multiple users: In the past, you were unable to monitor Sitemaps submitted by other users or via mechanisms like robots.txt. Now you can track the status of Sitemaps submitted by other users in addition to yourself.
• Message subscription: To make sure you never miss an important notification, you can subscribe to Message Center notifications via e-mail. Stay up-to-date without having to log in as frequently.
• Improved menu and navigation: We reorganized our features into a more logical grouping, making them easier to find and access. More details on changes.
• Smarter help: Every page displays links to relevant Help Center articles and by the way, we’ve streamlined our Help Center and made it easier to use.
• Sites must be verified to access detailed functionality: Since we’re providing so much more data, going forward your site must be verified before you can access any features in Webmaster Tools, including features such as Sitemaps, Test Robots.txt and Generate Robots.txt which were previously available for unverified sites. If you submit Sitemaps for unverified sites, you can continue to do so using Sitemap pings or by including the Sitemap location in your robots.txt file.
• Removal of the enhanced Image Search option: We’re always iterating and improving on our services, both by adding new product attributes and removing old ones. With this release, the enhanced Image Search option is no longer a component of Webmaster Tools. The Google Image Labeler will continue to select images from sites regardless of this setting.

Webmaster tools has now many new features, when you sign into webmaster tools you will see a new home for your site with a message center, and all the sites that you have. To reach a verified site there a one stop dashboard this gives you all the highlights from the data. You can now get your favorite features easily, more navigation and trouble shoot problems can be seen, additionally you can now see more search queries for your site that appears in better than never before. You have robots.txt and URLs in access for some time. But now all tools are together at last under one tab. We already sent messages to your site to webmaster tools Inbox now you can forward those messages to people you know. We all really enjoyed redesigning webmaster tools. This is just a beginning stay tuned for more updates.

Google competitor Wolfram alpha launching this month May 2009:

The long-expected Wolfram Alpha search engine is due to be launched this month. We are waiting for it anxiously as unfortunately we didn’t get the opportunity to test it, however, others did and it looks amazing. I will start with the fact that many said that this is the Google Killer, but in fact Wolfram Alpha is not a conventional search engine, it is more a computational knowledge engine which is based on ideas from Stephen Wolfram. Recently, Google launched its public data search, and not even that can be compared to Wolfram Alpha.

Don think of Wolfram Alpha as a Google Killer, though, because frankly Google doesn’t really have anything like it—except for maybe Google’s new public data search, which, while impressive, doesn’t look nearly as robust as Wolfram Alpha. (Then again, we’ll have to wait and see how well Wolfram Alpha works when it gets in the hands of the public.) Either way, Google will still corner the market on most normal search. (We’re not always looking for the kind of answers Wolfram Alpha provides when we hit up Google.) As for how this editor uses Google and Wikipedia, I’d actually imagine that Wolfram Alpha could be more of a Wikipedia competitor than a Google competitor.
The system, Wolfram Alpha, was developed by Stephen Wolfram (49), a British physicist, and showcased at Harvard University in the U.S. last week. “Revolutionary new web software could put giants such as Google in the shade,” the daily claimed. Although the system is still new, it has already attracted massive hype among technology pundits, it added.

“Wolfram Alpha will not only give a straight answer to questions such as ‘how high is Mount Everest?’ but it will also produce a neat page of related information – all properly sourced – such as geographical location and nearby towns, and other mountains, complete with graphs and charts,” it said. “Or ask what the weather was like in London on the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated, it will cross-check and provide the answer.”

http://www.wolframalpha.com/index.html