Will Google provide a rank-checking service?

Mark Lykle, from Oslo, Norway asks “When will Google create a software similar to Web Position so that SEOs, spam fighters and regular webmaster can check rankings etc. without violating the guidelines? Why not make a better product instead of going to war against these programs?”

Well, I wouldn’t call it going to war; I mean our guidelines have said the same things that they have said for 5, 6 or 7 years, which is essentially please don’t hit us with automated queries. And the reason that we’ve said that is because people do hit us with automated queries and that takes up some server capacity. So if someone is scrapping Google if we know that person then we may write to them and say, hey please stop scrapping, it does violate our guidelines, it does takes server capacity, we’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t scrap us. And then we do have automated system to protect ourselves against denial service attacks, scrappers, there are some viruses, Trojans and malware that try to spread themselves, by doing searches on Google on vulnerable software and so we try to find those things and block it. So if something is taking a sizable amount of our server resources we do have automated systems that attempt to stop that. That said we do have tools for example in the webmaster tools council at google.com/webmasters we can sign in and you can see the sorts of words that you are ranking for and the sorts of words that people click through on through your site for. I think we have a philosophy that it doesn’t do you as good as to pay really a ton of attention to ranking reports. It’s much better to look at your server logs to look at what are the queries that people are really showing up for and may be try to find queries that you rank at number 5 or number 4 that you can rank at number 2 or number 3 or 1 or queries that you rank on the second page that can be moved to the first page. You can also look at those queries and try to improve your ROIs, so if one percent of the people who land on your site convert into people who subscribe you newsletters or buy your products. If you can improve that so that more people convert, that’s a much faster way to improve your bottom line than just trying to rank for everything when it isn’t necessarily relevant. So I think it’s a little bit of philosophy that we don’t want to encourage people to get obsessed with their rankings when in fact they should be paying attention to what they already have in their server logs and thinking about how to convert better and thinking about those sorts of terms rather than getting obsessed with rankings. That said I would support if we had more ability for people to see the sorts of things that they rank for in Google’s Webmaster Council, it’s just a question of resources, is it better to support something like a canonical link tag, which takes the engineer working on it or ranking reports. At least historically we have said lets have all these newer features let’s show all of your back links lets show you what does your latency looks like when Google boff fetches your page and not concentrate or obsess about ranking reports. That’s the little bit of background how we feel about it.

Two questions about nofollow

Let’s talk a little bit about nofollow. Here are a few questions regarding this: Vince Samios from UK asks “Do you feel the widespread and blanket use of nofollow tags is devaluing Google’s search algorithms?”

Let me inter-check before I finish the question, even though SEO’s may feel like nofollow is everywhere on the web, if you look at the percentage of links that have nofollow, it’s actually a pretty minuscule percentage. So nofollows aren’t that common on the web compared to how the perception of them might be.

(Continues with the question) “Examples such as Wikipedia, where all external links are nofollow. Does Wikipedia mean nothing to Google’s algorithms?”

And Jonaths from Brighton, UK asks “Do Google take into account quality factors from nofollowed links when the links come from well established authority websites, such as Wikipedia?”

We are not trusting or taking into account the links from Wikipedia because they are nofollows. So don’t bother to spamming Wikipedia, it’s not going to make any difference in search engine rankings if you get a link because, that will be nofollow. If you have a great resource and people find it via Wikipedia and it’s just fantastic and people link to that because of that, or you getting traffic from a link in terms of direct surfers or visitors, then that might benefit your site. But it’s not going to get any search engine ranking boost just because Wikipedia links to you with those nofollow links. Now let me take a one slight detour and mention that, if a particular site does have trust in the person who is making the link then there is plenty of good reasons to make that link flow page rank and take the nofollow off. For example, Wikipedia has experimented with all kinds of different ways to improve their process, may be anonymous said that it has to be approved before they go live. So you could certainly imagine a scenario which Wikipedia editor, who is very trusted, who had made a ton of edits without them ever being reverted there are other editors they have asked for, however they want to define trust those links might for example take the nofollow off. So a very simple thing when you are being under attack from a spam register at that nofollow tag and then it doesn’t benefit spammers anymore. But if you run a blog or forum or Wikipedia or whatever and you can come up with a good metric to say, ok these are the links that we do trust that we do think that are editorially given and are valuable for users then there is plenty of good reasons to go ahead and say make those links flow page ranks. But in general nofollow links are relatively small percentage of the web and it does prevent lot of sites from getting spammed. We don’t use those links from Wikipedia currently, but if Wikipedia want it to put them on newly asked policies and place, I would definitely support that.

Does anchor text carry through 301 redirects?

Mharris from NY asks, “Does anchor text carry through all 301 redirects? Will there be a penalty for sites that do this as their sole way of link building?”

Typically, anchor text does flow through 301 redirects, but don’t promise that, that will always happen. So the question is does it carry through all, not necessarily, we deserve the right to score not only links and how we determine the weights in trust of the links and also the trust that we have for redirects. I can tell you that if your sole method of link building is trying to get 301 redirects that’s going to be pretty conspicuous, because we log all the redirects we see, just like we log all the links that we see. And so if all of your incoming anchor texts is through 301 redirects, that’s going to appear pretty strange. Especially because, whenever we go looking for our tools that would be a pretty abnormal thing to do, so my advice is make a great site that attracts links naturally because it’s a fantastic resource and don’t worry about trying to get some page ranks or some anchor texts in some way that search engines might not be able to catch or other people may not be able to follow. Because if you get that organic long term sort of links, the links that are given freely because you have a great resource those are the links that typically last the best and have the most impact.

Is Google putting more weight on brands in rankings?

First question is, Can you verify that Google is putting more weight on “brands” in search engine rankings? If the answer is “Yes” – what is Google’s definition of a brand? Inspired by Aaron’s Wall’s post: http://www.seobook.com/google-branding. That comes from Monica, Madison, WI.

So I’ll try to give a pretty complete answer to this. I was planning on talking about a little bit more at pub-con in Austin in just a couple of weeks. But inside of Google at least within the search ranking team, we don’t really think about brands. We think about words like trust, authority, reputation, page rank, high quality and so the Google philosophy on search results has been the same pretty much for ever. It’s that if somebody comes to Google and types an “x”, we want to return high quality information about ‘x’. And sometimes that’s a brand search; sometimes that’s an information search; sometimes that’s navigational; sometimes it’s transactional, so there are all sorts of different information needs that people have. First off, Yes, Google has made a change in our rankings; it’s one of over 300 or 400 changes that we make every year. So I wouldn’t call this an update, I would call it just a simple change. If we have to refer to it, one of the people did a lot of work on it, his name was Venz and this particular change we talk about is Venz’s change within the Google places. So I wouldn’t really call it an update, but I would say that, there has been at least a change in how we do some rankings. It doesn’t affect a vast majority of queries it’s more likely and most people haven’t even noticed it; I mean Aaron talked about it and I think even before that people at webmaster were talking about it. But it affects relatively a small number of queries, it’s not like it affects a ton of long queries or anything like that. I don’t think of it as putting more weight on brands, we don’t really think about “brands” in search quality that much. For example, if you type eclipse, if Google was really focused on brands we might return Mitsubishi eclipse you know number one or something like that. And if you actually go to Google and type in eclipse, we’ve got eclipse.org because it’s a development environment, we’ve got Nasa’s eclipse website and there are some commercial results, for example; Eclipse is the name of the book in the Twilight series, so we’ve got a page from amazon. But it’s not like we always try to return brands, we try to return whatever we think the best results are for users. So the net update of this change is pretty simple, we try to return high quality results, we think a lot about trust, reputation, authority, page rank and so what you should be doing doesn’t change. Try to make a great site, try to make a site that is so fantastic that you sort of become known as an authority in your niche. It doesn’t have to be a big niche, it doesn’t have to be a huge well-known keyword, it can be a smaller niche and if you are still the expert and that’s the sort of thing that people want to link to or talk about, the sort of things that people really enjoy and those are the sort of sites the experts that we want to bring back.

How is Google helping Google Analytics users with site speed?

Today’s webmaster video question comes from Polyana, Sao Paulo, Brazil. Polyana asks, ‘ When analyzing rankings for highly competitive keywords in our industry, we have found sites not as optimized as ours ( on-page), and that have few links & little content are still ahead of us. What gives? Why are “unoptimized” sites ranking so well?”

Well, the thing that I want to avoid is the impression that it’s only the optimization that would make you rank. In others, there are lots of different factors that would make you rank well, but fundamentally, we try to look at on-page contents as well as off-domain links and it’s not the case that just because somebody has done optimization, it is automatically better than the site that hasn’t done optimization. There are lots of sites from schools and students and people that hand-write their html and they might not necessarily get every single thing optimized, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not a good resource. So, another thing is we typically do not show all of the back links for a site to your competitors. If you log into Google webmaster tools then we give you a very exhaustive list. But even if you go into yahoo link explorer or anywhere else, you are going to get only a subset or different sampling of the links that point to a particular competitor’s site. The reason we do that is link: originally; we did not have the storage space to return all the back links and then over time that sort of became a tradition. So there might very well be links from very high rate page ranks or very reputable sites pointing to that particular other page that’s allowing it to rank. So, you know it’s always tough whenever you are talking about it in terms of other people in your industry; we always want to look at it and say, that’s not good as a page or not as good a site as my site. But bear in mind that you can absolutely have links that you might not know about as far as two competing sites or to your own sites that your competitors might not know about, and then we try not to put so much emphasis that you have to do SEO because we want sites to be able to rank well on the basis of mirror, if they are good they should show up in search results, that’s our basic philosophy.

Caffeine update datacenter goes offline:

Mattcutts in his recent post said caffeine is ready to go live. Most people are happy with the results in caffeine datacenter and it seems Google is making it live. They have already took down the test datacenter at www2.sandbox.google.com
When i visit that URL i get this message:”Thank you! We appreciate all the feedback from people who searched on our Caffeine sandbox. Based on the success we’ve seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given.”

Most of our sites and our client sites are doing exceptionally well in this particular datacenter and i am happy to see it go live. One particular client whom we have been doing work for about 2 years now is doing exceptionally well. I am sure he will be the happiest person to see his site do so well. I feel this update brings a lot of happiness among users.

Matt cutts says in his comments the delay for a full role out is because of the worry it will create on webmaster’s mind. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-caffeine-update/ I was just stunned to see a response like that from a senior Googler. Because Google gave a damn for anyone’s website. I can remember back in 2003 when we had the great infamous Florida update it make lots of webmaster cry and even lot who depended on Google went out of Business. People were yelling but Google never cared. Good to see Google care for webmasters a lot these days.

Caffeine update – upcoming Caffeine update in Google updated my Matt cutts

Mattcutts Google’s web spam head recently revealed in his blog mattcutts.com/blog/ that Google is about to make an update to their index. He named it as Caffeine update. This caffeine update seem to be an upgrade to the way Google indexes site. Not many visible changes to ranks i virtually see zero movement across our sites and our client sites.

He tells us to check Google ranking changes in this datacenter http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ . Only big visible change i see here is the wonderful update timings of sites. Almost all results show updated in few minutes or few hours which is amazing.
But one funny thing i noticed which i searched for “Google blog” i got this funny result with site links.

We usually see the notice “this site may harm your computer” when there is a virus alert and the site is infectious. Here a sitelink for Google blog looks very similar to a virus injection warning. 🙂 thats funny i hope Google realizes that fast or they might loose some people who are afraid to click a link that says a look alike warning like that.

Mattcutts video transcript – Meta description still useful?

Tom From seattle asks

“Query deserves freshness.” Fact of Fiction?

Its fact i have met people in newyork times and they said there are queries that deserve freshness so GDF ( Query Deserves Freshness ) that is what he talked in new york times and that is fact not fiction.

Quentin from Vancouver asks

In the search results, Google often display a snippet appropriate to the specific search query – often disregarding the meta description. Is Google doing away with meta description use like they did with meta keywords?

Alright let me lay a little bit schooling on you so it actually turns that we use to not use meta description at all we would only use the snippet appropriate to the search query and only in recent years if you have a meta description we choose to use it over the little snippet from the page so its moving the other direction from using snippets from only within the page we are now likely to use meta description from the page. But we don’t use it all the time if we think its useful for the query dont make the same meta description on every single page like a cookie cutter then we know its not a very useful meta description. So not that we are doing away with meta description we are using more than what we did 7 or 8 years ago. But at the same time we need to decide that its useful before we use meta description. Best is to use a more useful meta description so you are more likely to see that than the snippet from the page. But if you dont want to bother its completely fine we are just trying to do whatever is best for users and hopefully users will click through and find your content.

Mattcutts Transcript – Google or twitter

Here is a fun peculiar question from martino
Which search media does return the more reliable information: Google or twitter?
Don’t go hate of twitter and make people bust heads twitter has many many great users and its great for breaking real time sort of news its fantastic for asking your friends and Google on the other hand we try to really give reliable reputable information so if you sort it by data twitter is fantastic or if you want to ask a question that has been there for a while then Google is great for that and try both for different situations if you don’t have as many friends then you might not be able to get the answer for the question that you want it answered and i wouldn’t be surprised if spammers actually see traffic on traffic as whoa. Because if you only sort it by date then any news that spammers post will come onto that so they are different they are different for different things i would say do what ever works best for you.

Mattcutts video transcript – Does site load time affect rankings

Its time for an other round of grab bag questions. We report all these questions on one and then we send them on a course of many different days, so last time every body complained that they were seeing same red polo shirts for thirty of forty days so we actually brought a bunch of different shirts and we are just sprinkling up and mixing it up a little bit so you get a little more variety in your shirts. So lets start with the first question from Deepesh in newyork.

Deepesh Asks

What impact do site load times have on Google rankings?

The short answer is none right now, so lets give it a little more color so ofcourse if a site took so long to load we can’t even fetch it Googlebot cannot get a copy of it, then it will have an affect on your rankings because your site is essentially timing out so if your site is taking 20 or 30 seconds to respond to requests that could be a problem. But if your site takes one second or two seconds there is no problem what so ever on Google’s rankings. So that’s the short answer. Now lets give it a little more color. If you haven’t heard Larry ( Larry page ) talked about how he wants the web to be, he wants the web to be really fast he wants it as fast as a magazine like as soon as you turn the page you are ready for the next page. So the crawler is build of that philosophy. We want the web to be really fast make it a really good experience. So currently Site load time do not have any impact on Google’s rankings , what might happen in the future i don’t know, i can imagine Google to say we want the web to be faster what can we do to encourage people to make their site faster and how can we get the word out that if your site is faster people will be happier and more likely to come back to your site and use your site more often. We are seeing that on our own site, so it is interesting that we want the web to be fast and we want the site to load quickly right now its not having any effect in our rankings but in future who knows what might be involved so personally i feel its a great idea if you look at some of the ways to make your site load faster. So for example don’t include 49 different javascript files you can compact all of them into one Javascript or one CSS file. Don’t set huge images which your images are actually meant to be tiny there are lot of ways you can magnify or compact your pages so that it turns faster for users. SO there are a lot of ways that you can look at that is really good for user experience don’t worry in search engine perspective right now but it can probably make a lot of difference for your users.