System and method for supporting editorial opinion in Google results.

I was just reading through a patent filed by some leading Googlers on editorial review and user based opinion on a website, It was a very interesting topic to be discussed.

“An editorial opinion parameter for a favored source may, for example, cause the score of the associated web page to be upgraded by a percentage of its previous score or by an absolute value. Similarly, for non-favored sources, the applicable editorial opinion parameter may cause the score of the associated web page to be downgraded by a percentage of its previous score or an absolute value. In extreme cases, the applicable editorial opinion parameter may cause the web page to be moved to the top of the ranked list or removed from the list completely. In another case, the applicable editorial opinion parameter of a web site may selectively affect one of the scores used in determining the final ranking (e.g., the text match score, the connectivity-based score, or the popular opinion score). Once updated scores have been determined, the server 120 may provide the updated ranked list of search results to the user [act 660]. The updated ranked list may be provided to the user via the output device 270. If, in act 630, the search query does not match any of the query themes stored in database 400, the server 120 may provide the original (i.e., non-updated) ranked list of search results to the user [act 660]. Implementations consistent with the present invention allow editorial opinion to apply to entire web sites. The techniques described herein also provide integration with other parameters in computing an overall ranking. For example, editorial opinion may be considered as an additional input parameter that combines with other factors such as textual-matching, connectivity analysis scoring, etc., for determining the overall ranking. This provides for a better result than conventional processes that simply return web pages on favored sites that match the query. In particular, implementations consistent with the present invention could assign a higher rank to a web page that is on a web site that has not been identified as a favored source in comparison to a web page from a favored source, if it is found to better match the query. “

Upgrading and downgrading a websight is based on editorial opinion compared to other factors in Google’s search algorithm. Search engines had moved a lot of towards editorial opinions, google has team of quality testers around the world who are supposed to check their results for quality and any possible search engine spamming,

Also editorial opinion depends on monitoring visitor behavior through their toolbar or analytics or through cookies. Google has ways of understanding through toolbar day a user behaviour and the time a user stays on a website.

Some points from the patent as noted by tedster:

1. Get a bunch of people to find and rate really good websites and really spammy websites for certain searches
2. Make their rating into a parameter
3. Look at what the algo says the top results “should” be for a particular search
4. See if that search is in one of the topic areas that has an editorial rating
5. If so, look to see if there is some relationship to either the good guy list or the bad guy list
6. Shift the search rankings according to whatever parameter the editors generated.
7. Serve the shifted results to the user.

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=7096214.PN.&OS=PN/7096214&RS=PN/7096214

Google Announces – GOOG Internet Availability of Proxy Materials

Google has announced it will make available its proxy materials for the upcoming investor meeting. Google’s press release states,

Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) today announced the Internet availability of proxy materials for its 2008 Annual Meeting of Stockholders under the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s new Notice and Access rule. Google’s proxy materials can be found on its investor relations website at http://investor.google.com/.
Pursuant to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s new Notice and Access rule, companies may now satisfy their proxy materials delivery requirements by delivering a “Notice of Internet Availability of Proxy Materials” to stockholders, providing Internet access to the proxy materials, and providing a printed set of proxy materials by mail to any stockholder who requests them. Google has elected to take full advantage of these new rules in order to minimize impact on the environment and maximize cost savings relating to the printing of the proxy materials. By implementing the procedures permitted under the new Notice and Access rule, Google reduced the number of printed copies of its annual report and proxy materials this year by more than 84 percent.
Google’s 2007 Annual Report on Form 10-K and proxy statement for its 2008 Annual Meeting of Stockholders have been filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and may be viewed on Google’s website at http://investor.google.com/ . Google’s stockholders may obtain hard copies of these proxy materials free of charge by following the instructions provided on its website or in the “Notice of Internet Availability of Proxy Materials”.
Google’s 2008 Annual Meeting of Stockholders will be held on Thursday, May 8, 2008 at 2:00 p.m., Pacific Daylight Time, at Google’s corporate headquarters at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, California 94043. A webcast of the Annual Meeting will be made available at investor.google.com.

Want to be a friend of Vanessa Fox – EX Vanessa Fox Google webmaster central Team

I have seen vanessa speak in some of the search conferences and she is pretty cute. Though I never got a chance to speak to her ill probably get a chance to meet her when I am back in US after july.

She is a very good speaker and her presentations were very interesting.

If people don’t know who vanessa Fox is she was a former employee of Google and founder of our favourite http://www.google.com/webmasters/ also she is one of the main backbone behind the Google Webmaster Central blog, she left google in June 2007 to join zillow now works for Ignition Partners as an ‘entrepreneur in residence’

Google’s new sitelinks feature – A very useful addition.

We believe the new google’s sitelinks feature is an excellent addition to already relevant search results. When we search for the domain name or site name we can now see additional pages of a site listed under the main URL its called sitelinks but google.

A Search for our company name Search Engine Genie has sitelinks to pages like our SEO plans , tools, pagerank 10 sites list, why us and the Google rank checker free tool. Actually its very good we know these are some of the most important pages of our site and its no surprise these URLs are picked up as sitelinks for our site. Based on what we are seeing sitelinks are selected based on pagerank and quality of external and internal links to those pages. Our Google rank checker and pagerank 10 sites list are 2 of the most important pages of our site and has good number of external links to it.

Sitelinks can be deleted in google webmaster tools login. That is again great on part of google to offer something like to webmasters a great platform for editing our sitelinks.

Page specific Google ban / penalty – Does it really exist?:

We have often heard of google imposing penalty for sites or infact ban them completely from the index. Some of the forums had been buzzing on whether Google has any sort of page specific penalty in my experience yes google does have a page specific penalty. Here is a simple check what are possible reasons that could cause a page specific Google penalty

1. Links to a bad neighbourhood from that page. Say you have a grea site and you run a grea forum in that, one day some spammer posts an adult spam post. If googlebot sees this and see that your site is linking to an other highly spammed site then mostly that page will be penalized and stopped from entering google’s index. This is particularly tough when you run a good site and only one page is all adult stuff. Googlebot is designed to understand potential reasons how adult content came into your forum and they will impose a penalty only for that URL. we have seen this in our very own site’s forum.

2. Too many spammy links to sites that google considers spammy will hurt that page.

3. Duplicate content across the web or within your site if you have a particular page that is replicated as multiple versions within your site then it will hurt the duplicate page copy and Google will impose penalty or ban on duplicate version of the page / pages and keep just one copy of the page. Ban can simply be for the duplicate pages.

4. Strong filters applied by google on specific pages can also boot a page from rankings or prevent it from ranking. Google has very strong ranking filters and this could stop a page from ranking or penalizing it for reasons that are in the filter.

5. Hidden links or hidden images /gifs or hidden content can also cause page ban please make sure you do a complete review of that.

SEO Blog Team,

Google’s April fool 2008 Joke project virgil

Google plays with people’s mind again with their new april fool joke named project virgil, If you can see from this URL http://www.google.com/virgle/index.html google has plan to send people to space. LOL that is a very cool joke . They claim to form a human colony in mars with the help of virgin airlines I am sure people dont fall for google’s april fool pranks anymore

Remember their previous prank like the Lunar job or the pigeon rank instead of pagerank

From their FAQ that was very well written statement,

How are you planning to reach Mars?

During the first couple of decades Virgle will use standard technology of the day – chemical rockets to ferry cargo and crews to Mars. As the bootstrap plan stands today, in order to reach Mars (once the tri-module is assembled in LEO) the Virgle 1’s cruise stage will start a burn for insertion into a lunar trajectory and then back toward Earth for final insertion into a modified Hohmann Transfer Orbit. This multi-day round trip will use a variant of the Oberth effect, the Krasnokutskaya periapsis maneuver, to increase the final Earth-to-Mars transfer velocity through a periapsis delta-v burn performed at the closest lunar and subsequent Earth approach, with the additional delta v gained on account of the potential energy from the mass of expended propellant. The total useful mass sent this way to Mars will be 569 metric tons, meaning (obviously) that it will take four launches to complete the assembly. The design does allow for easy reconfiguration for varying payload capacities and transfer duration times. This round trip is also a final test and verification of the cruise configuration, assuring mission support that all systems are running within their nominal values. The design also provides for several orbital abort modes, decreasing significantly the probability of any mission losing a payload, human or otherwise.

Google update April 2008- Update Dewey names by matt cutts of Google

Google’s web spam head Mr.Matt Cutts has asked for feedback on new changes being rolled out in Google. Google has done a major update to its index and it seems lots of sites are affected. I personally see none of our client sites affected in any of the ips mentioned . One DC to look out for is DC 64.233.167.104 , When I checked I dont see much difference does anyone figure out what’s happening.

Here is Matt’s post

“Hey all, I asked a few people to look into this and they weren’t seeing many large differences in rankings between these datacenters. The issue with discussing on this thread is that specific urls/queries aren’t allowed. If anyone wants to mention a search where they see large-scale differences, feel free to send feedback to Google in the usual way. I’m going to pick a random-but-pretty-unique keyword so that I can look up reports. Let’s use “dewey” as the word. So if you want to mention a search where you think the results are very different at one data center compared to other data centers, use the spam report form at ihttp://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html\ and make sure to include the word “dewey” in the “Additional details” text area. Or feel free to point out differences in other ways: do a blog post, leave specifics on the Google webmaster help group, or whatever way you want to point out specific searches that look different to you.
The usual rules of thumb apply: you probably won’t get a personal reply, but I’ll try to get someone to check out reports that get sent in. There shouldn’t be much difference between data centers, so I’m curious to find out what queries people seem to be seeing different results on. “

Dewey what a weird name for an Update, I hope people never forgot the great updates like Google florida update, Austin update, Jagger and more.

Forum discussion and ramblings as always here webmasterworld.com/google/3615693-3-30.htm

Google webmaster central full audio transcript raw unedited version

Hello Everyone,
Atlast we are done with audio transcript from the Google webmaster central live chat audio which was recorded last friday when webmasters around the world had live chat session with Google. we have posted that here its about 11,000 plus words which is equal to 20 plus 500 words article. Google did a great job and we were able to record the full audio ( transcript here ) as well as the full Q and A session as well as full chat log. The audio came out to be of very poor quality since it was recorded with a Mobile phone and the mobile phone was placed near the laptop computer through which we were monitoring and listening the session. Laptop’s speakers messed up the audio but still we were able to get the transcript read which you can read it here. Please read the disclaimer and NOTE before proceeding on reading the transcript.

Feel free to link to the document, don’t copy it.

Search Engine Genie SEO Blog Team,

Ranking in First page in google not in top 1000 in yahoo – yahoo banned

I know many of you wondered why they don’t rank anywhere in yahoo but are in top 10 in Google results. Most of the time yahoo’s ranking criteria is same as google’s but there are somethings which will prevent your site from ranking in yahoo

Here is a simple checklist criteria that you need to make sure for your no rankings problems with yahoo:

1. Make sure your site is not penalized or banned by yahoo, Yahoo is very good at doing this they are more tougher than google when it comes to penalty. Check whether your site gets indexed in yahoo make sure your pages are there. If you just see your homepage and not your inner pages then its still a problem. If you feel that your site is banned or penalized file for a reinclusion into yahoo. We do offer a reinclusion services in our company for Google, yahoo and MSN. We don’t have any tie up with any search engine but we will make sure we follow all their guidelines clean up every single possible mess with the site and submit it to the for a reconsideration request. Have a banned site in yahoo or feel its banned feel free to contact us through our contact form and please explain what you did or doing on your site,

2. Remember to have backlinks from sites which yahoo feels are important. Both search engines don’t value backlinks the same way. For example yahoo places a lot of weight on their directory link much more than google. So you can possibly try adding your site to yahoo directory and see the impact.

3. See if your site has any redirect issues if your site has redirect problems and yahoo’s crawler is unable to pickup then still your site can be in trouble. Make sure to check all possible external links coming into your site for wrong 302 type redirects. If you feel suspicious about a link hurting you contact the webmaster and tell them to remove your link. Google has become very efficient in handling redirects I don’t think yahoo is doing the same way.

4. Add a sitemap and link it to your homepage ( if you don’t already have one ) as well as submit a sitemap to yahoo through yahoo Site Explorer it might show some difference.

5. You can fine your presence felf to yahoo by featuring in their articles, added to their newsletter etc.

6. Make sure your Web hosting company don’t have any problem with yahoo’s crawler sometimes this could a problem where yahoo’s crawler have problem accessing your site because of bad DNS resolving with your hosting company.

7. Make sure you don’t do anything against their guidelines on your site check for yahoo’s search engine guidelines policy

8. If you are an affiliate site you need to be careful, Yahoo don’t enjoy affiliate sites in their index.

9. Yahoo loves content rich sites unique content and not a directory type of site with millions of URLs without any added value to the users.

10. Last but not the least check for potential violations of yahoo’s guidelines on your site which google didn’t detect but yahoo did. Yahoo is more efficient and strict when it comes to some search engine spam make sure its not there on your site. Also check for any potential restrictions in .htaccess or robots.txt or other areas where you might cause problems for yahoo’s crawler.

Good luck
Search Engine Genie Blog Team,

Checking backlinks in yahoo similar to google webmaster tools backlinks download

Many asked us whether we have an alternative for Google’s webmaster tools backlink tool where we can see atleast 30 to 40% of the links a site has. From what have seen no you cannot see more than 1000 backlinks in yahoo. Probably if they add a platform like google to validate a site and download backlinks as a CSV in future it will be great. But till now by far the only search engine that is even close to showing something accurate for a site is yahoo. We have not seen any other search engine show as accurate backlinks data as google. There are different methods to check backlinks in yahoo. We had an article written couple of years back based on this. Please read it here http://www.searchenginegenie.com/backlink-strategies.htm