Yahoo Search Index rankings algorithm update

Yahoo recently updates their algorithm and search engine rankings. They made major changes as reported in their blog http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000533.html . Update was reported on April 21st and it should be rolled out by now. We did notify some significant changes from our client sites as well as our sites so did you see it?

How was your site performance?

Effect of Stumbleupon

Stumbleupon has been a great hit in recent days. Some of our sites get huge number of referrals from stumble upon. I went through a webmaster world thread which showed a similiar experience with Stumbleupon

Pageoneresults explains here how to get started with stumble upon

Getting Started with StumbleUpon http://www.stumbleupon.com/guide.html
After you’ve read the Guide and fully understand the terms and conditions of being a Stumbler, then there are 3 Steps you’ll go through to become a Stumbler…
Step 1: Join StumbleUpon and become a Stumbler… http://www.stumbleupon.com/sign_up.php
Step 2: Connect with friends if you have them in that network.
Step 3: Install the StumbleUpon Toolbar… http://www.stumbleupon.com/download.php
Step 4: Start Stumbling.
As with any “social network”, you will need to develop a reputation within the StumbleUpon Communities and there are many. With 4.99 million Stumblers, there are all sorts of “arms and legs” inside the community.
Your goal is to of course become a Top Stumbler and that only comes with tenure. Don’t expect things to happen overnight. Think of StumbleUpon like a Digg or Sphinn…
Top Stumblers http://www.stumbleupon.com/community.html

Forum discussion in webmaster world, http://www.webmasterworld.com/link_development/3629897.htm

SEO for Beginners download powerpoint slideshow

Pagerank Grey bar for pages of a website – why do we see it

I have seen Greybar display in Google toolbar for quite sometime, I am sure people are wondering what causes it. Personally I can speculate some reasons though i don’t have any evidence it. Here are some reasons I see what causes Grey bar display,

1. New pages: When ever a new page is created i don’t see a white PR bar anymore. Its grey PageRank display when ever there is a new page created. So as we know if Google has not assigned a PageRank it used to show white bar now its not the case any more we see Grey PageRank display for all new pages which is definitely new with Google.

2. Abandoned Pages: Pages which are not updated for a long time without any update are showing Grey bar i am seeing it across couple of our pages / websites. So probably it has something to do with abandoned pages.

3. Duplicate Pages: When a competitor or some spammer copies contents of that page and duplicates in his site pages the main page might loose its existing value and can display Grey bar. Seeing this substantially duplicate pages do have some reason for Grey Toolbar PageRank display.

4. Potentially penalty to those pages especially link exchange pages since I see more and more grey display in link exchange pages. This is just a speculation though penalty is the least reason I can imagine of since I see lot of grey PageRank pages rank in search engines.

5. A standard reason which has always been is that the communication between your toolbar and Google data center which delivers PageRank to toolbar is some how interrupted. Though this has been a reason given directly by Google employees still i wonder how one page can fetch PageRank from Google data center and other page cannot at the same time. This is a reason but very rare unless you see grey bar for all sites and pages you browse it cannot be justified.

6. Some people speculate Grey bar display has something to do with supplemental index. Google has been into controversy for a long time on supplemental pages debate. Pages in supplemental index never rank and some have seen grey PageRank pages also never rank so it could be a by product of supplemental results. Just an idea only.

7. Bad PR distribution for those pages from internal pages of your site. If those pages don’t have good PR distribution then it could cause grey PageRank but for many sites i monitor those pages have ton of internal links. For Example our blog homepage has link from all over our site but shows grey PageRank display. We see this page is crawled regularly, contents from this page is indexed regularly but still it shows Grey PageRank very difficult to say this as a reason.

8. Lack of Good external links or consistent external links to a page: I seriously wonder whether this could be a reason. Most of the inner pages I have seen that shows grey bar has very less or zero external links from other sites coming into it. So i wonder whether this could be a reason for grey bar. PageRank algorithm probably sees that this page is important only for this site and is not a good page for Internet. I do have controversy over this too. Again our blog URL have good links coming to it from external sites but it displays grey bar don’t know why. But recently our blog never got Good back links we seriously abandoned our blog for about a year and never posted any new information. So lack of consistent back links could be a reason for Grey PageRank display.

9. TPR ( Toolbar PageRank Reduction ) : Another reason i can speculate is the infamous Toolbar PageRank Reduction penalty which Google applied to sites which buy and sell text links. Is Grey PageRank bar a side effect of it?

My final opinion is if a page is more than a year indexed in Google and has a PR grey bar it could simply be that the page is not of best value for its users. So they dont assign pagerank for that page which might result in that page not passing pagerank to other pages in other words not contributing any link juice to the pages it links to.

Search Engine Genie

Google Update reverts back – Dewey update no more visible

Google recently made an update to their index and matt cutts commented on that here http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3615693-3-30.htm . From checking different datacenters I dont see much changes now and the small changes that was visible in the datacenters mentioned in that webmaster world thread is not visible any more.

Most of the changes have reverted back and there are no visible signs of changes that happened on those datacenters propagating to other DCs.

Other cool thing is updates are not the hot topic anymore. People used to discuss 100s of pages for any major updates. When I see this dewey update thread i hardly see it go beyond 30 pages which is a good sign. People are becoming more and more aware of the changes and the communication between search engines and users have improved which has resulted in lesser worries for people.
While Google update mania is no more Pagerank Mania still continues.

False Pagerank update alarm has triggered 10 pages of posting in digital point forums

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=808970&page=2

Pending Spammers – Aggressive affiliate Marketers

Google and other search engines have weeded out most of the spam out of their search engines. But still one industry that keeps Spamming the search engines using very innovative methods. is the ever aggressive affiliate marketing industry. I know many affiliates still depend on Search Engines for traffic to their spam site will affiliate links all over the place. So how many of us like affiliate.

Personally affiliate sites are a No-No for me. When I click on Search engine results and end up an a affiliate page first thing I do is to close the browser and find an other result. I hate to buy from someone who is reselling the product than buying directly from the dealer.
Affiliates still spam the search engines using methods search engines are never aware of before. Its very difficult to tackle this industry since lot of money is involved in this industry and many affiliate marketers are not willing to find better ways to do online business. I don’t blame all affiliate sites there are some rare sites which do provide Good information while have random affiliate links mixed on their site but most of the affiliate sites don’t add any value for any visitor. Also MFA ( Made For Adsense ) sites are an other disgrace to search engine users. When i click on a result and see a page full of adsense ads, affiliate links i never enjoy the site nor will i want to visit the site again.
i hope search engines completely get rid of all sites that have affiliate links and dont add any value for users this is the last type of death to spam I am looking for in Search engines.

Dont teach how to run business for Search Engines.

So what’s up with the paid text link debate. I have seen enough places where people complain Google is teaching them how to run their website and Business. Is that considered Joke of 2008. SEOs are here because Google and other search engines are here. There is no special technological industry named SEO. This whole industry is here because of flourishing Search engines so why complain them.
Text link advertising is not the traditional way you advertise? You do it for Search Engines. Everything you do for search engines be ready to face the consequences. Want to ride behind the back of a Search Engine make sure you play by the rules. Search engines have the rights to penalize text link publishers/advertisers manually, algorithmically by editorial review anyway they want way as long as it improves the quality of their results. Why complain that Search engine’s are teaching you to run a business while actually you are the one who is teaching Search engines how to run a business. As the Search Engine experts have stated you are free to do anything on your website and the same way Search engines have every right to do anything with their algorithm as long as its for the best for their users. I am part of a SEO company too and I always Bow to any changes Google make if there is a ranking change for our sites or our client sites we try to see what mistake was done and find a solution. We never put the blame on any Search Engine. As long as we are in Search Engine Optimization industry lets be close to Search Engines and play by their rules. If we move a bit away from their guidelines lets face the consequences.

I humbly request Search Quality engineers like Adam Lasnik, Matt Cutts not to try and defend what you are doing, keep doing what’s best for your users and don’t worry when somebody tries to curse Google for something they do with their algorithm. If 1000 SEOs join together and curse Google for penalizing paid links what does it show? They want Google to stop penalizing paid links so that they can keep buying links and keep manipulating results its as simple as that. I cannot find an alternate reason for it i am sure its not the reason you are looking for that is best for your users. So keep doing what’s best for your algorithm and users and please dont justify and try to defend your ideas. People who love Search Engines will know how to appreciate it.

Search Engine Genie.

Using nofollow on internal pages – Not a spam

Google has clearly stated using nofollow to prevent pagerank flow to your pages like the copyright, TOS etc is not considered spam. But in the recent webmaster chat Google guys did state its not worth preventing links from passing pagerank. Pagerank flows naturally across pages and just preventing some pagerank from passing to any of your pages is not worth the effort.

Crawl Date in Google’s Cache: Matt Cutts Video Transcript

Ok everybody we have a new illustration today. Vanessa Fox of Google webmaster central blog talked about this some people like to learn visually , some people like to learn screen shots, so I thought ill make a little movie so this is going to be a multi media presentation the 2 media we are buying today are skill and peanut butter red ones. So lets talk about Googlebot and how it crawls the web. First off what are the red imminent represent, well everyone knows red is bad so these are going to be 404s. The Googlebot is crawling around the web and it sees a 404 sucks it down and then later on it will come back to try to check it again.

So what are the purples mean well everybody knows purple means a http status code of 200 OK, That’s the only thing that it could possibly represent. So in other words Googlebot comes along and it sucks up the page and we got the page just fine. So we got a 404 we got couple http 200s so life is pretty good next, now lets talk about the cache crawl date and what they represent. So we are not able to tell that easily but this is purple we got two greens , purple and the rest greens. So what do you think the green imminent represent? Everybody knows the green imminent are great we know it’s the good ones so green represent a status code of 304. So in a browser Googlebot comes to a page they say hey I want to copy this page or you can just tell me if the page has been modified since I indexed and that the page if the page has not been modified since a certain date you can get 304 status back saying that this page hasn’t changed and all that Googlebot has to do is to ignore that page. SO this is what Googlebot does , this is going forward in time so in other words we crawl a page we get 200, the next 2 times Googlebot crawl the page it gets a 304 which is the If Modified Since that said that the page hasn’t really changed. And later on then here the webmaster actually changed the page and we see this purple that again means the page has been changed since the last crawl and now we get a 200 since the page is actually fetched.

Now going forward the page didn’t change so the web server is smart enough to return a 304 status code for each one of the visits by Googlebot. Now the thing that is interesting is if you want to check whether Googlebot cached the page it will show the last date that the page was last retrieved. But the interesting thing is that until recently the post that we checked on this date and this date it will still give us the very first time that we fetched that page. Now you fetch the page again and it would show this cache crawl date and this would continue and may be for 6 months if the page and the page hasn’t change we would still show the old cache crawl date. So the change in policy in what we are doing is if we check on this date and on this date to see if the page has changed we will now show that date in the cache crawl date. So in other words as Googlebot comes along , slipping stuff along it might used to a page which might look pretty old we update that so as we know about even if the page is changed or not we update the crawl date in the cached page so the pages look more fresh in the cache crawl date even for the fact we are showing the date to reflect in the fact that we have actually recently checked the pages has changed.

Lightning Round matt cutts video transcript

Alright this is Matt Cutts Coming to you on July 31st Monday 2006 this is probably the last one ill do tonight so lets see if I can kind of do a lightning round. Alright Peer rights in and says

Is it possible to search just for homepages? I tried doing minus in URL html and in URL htm , so and so URL php , ASP but that doesn’t filter out enough. That’s a really good suggestion peter having thought about that, fast used to offer something like that I think all they did was look for a tilde in the URL I would file that as a feature request and see if people are willing to prioritize that if we are willing to offer that. My guess is it will be relatively low on the priority list because the syntax you mentioned subtracting a bunch of extensions would probably work pretty well.

I got to clarify something about strong Vs Bold, Emphasis Vs Italic. There is a previous question where somebody asks whether it is better to use bold or it is better to use strong because bold is where it was used in olden days when the dinosaurs were roaming the earth and strong is what the w3c recommends. And that time last night I thought that we barely , barely like we prefer bold over strong and I said its not the most part that you would worry about it and the next thing is that a engineer really took me to a code and showed me in live and I can see that Google treats bold and strong exactly the same weight. So thank you for that paul I really appreciate it. And also I saw an other part of the code where the M ( emphasis ) and italics are exactly treated the same. So there you have it so mark it like W3C wants to do it, do it semantically well , do it and don’t worry about just small tags because Google will treat just the same way of both the versions.

Ok next in Lightning round Amanda Asks “ Do we have more kiddy posts in the future”?
I think we will, I tried to bring my cats here around me but they are afraid of lights and just jumped off. Ill see if I can bring them in future.

Tom Html asks, Where is Google SST, Google guest , google weaver, google market place, google RS 2.0 and other services discovered by tony rescow?

I think its very clear for tony to do a dictionary tag again, services check-in but I am not going to talk about what all those services are.

A preview Joseph Hunkins asks what many topics will be there in duplicate contents as yet, a little bit of a preview on one of the other sessions is on video but I think what I basically want to talk about is it will be there lot of people will be there it will be shingling
What I want to say is Google detects duplicate contents all the way from crawl to all the way people see things when searching. We do stuff that’s exact duplicate detection and we do stuff that’s near duplicate detection so we do a pretty good job all the along the line like detecting dupes and stuff like that.

And so the best advice I give is to make sure your duplicate contents like the page that has contents as much similar as possible to make it look as much different as possible if they are truly different content. A lot of people talked about word versions or .doc compared to html files typically no need to worry about that if it has similar contents on different domains may be French and an other version in English you really don’t need to worry about that, again if you do have the exact same content may be for a Canadian site and for a .com site so probably we will roll the dice and see which ever one looks better to us and just show that but it wouldn’t necessarily trigger any sort of penalty or anything like that if you want to avoid you can make sure your templates are very, very different but better if the contents are similar its better to show us which ever is the most ideal for representation and guess the best anyway. And Thomas writes in and says does Google index and rank blog sites different than regular sites?

That’s a good question not really, somebody asked me whether links from gov, edu’s , and links from two level deep govs and edus like gov.pl or gov.in are the same as .gov?

The fact is really we don’t have much of a difference in a way to say hey this is a link from ODP or .gov or .edu and so on. There is no some sort of special boost its just that those sites have higher Pagerank because more people tend to link to them and reputable people link to them so blog sites there aren’t anything distinct unless if you go off to blog search ofcourse and its blogs and totally restrained to blogs. SO in theory we could rank them differently but most part its just a general search the way it falls out.

Alright thanks.