Google Presents “Titanic” aka “Penguin” – Coming To SERPS Near You

Holy sweet mother of God. There’s adjustments, and there’s EVICTIONS.  Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to Google’s latest algo adjustment dubbed ‘Titanic.”  Why “Titanic?”  Because you’ll be searching for survivors, that’s why.  Well, the official name has now been officially entitled “Penguin.”   Our original “Titanic” moniker was at least  related to [...]]]>

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Google Update; Semantic Terminology Framework Utilization

Recently Google announced, as part of their monthly updates, a new method of semantic analysis they believe will help them in dealing with over aggressive search engine optimization practices. Code named ‘Orca‘ (project name; hide and seek) it will apparently be a companion to the now infamous Penguin and Panda updates many in the SEO [...]]]>

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How Google could detect paid links

Google’s Penguin update, and the unnatural link warnings they’ve been sending out through Webmaster Tools, shows that they’re now looking to penalise suspicious & paid links instead of just devaluing them.

But the thing that really interests me is how Google determines which links are paid and which aren’t. If you’re an SEO, when you see a paid link, in most cases it’s generally pretty obvious if it’s unnatural or paid for – but it’s not as simple for a machine to detect.

There’s been some speculation as to what kinds of signals Google is looking at – sites that have the link warnings apparently tend to have a lot of sitewide links, most likely in footers and sidebars – and they also often have a very high keyword to brand anchor text ratio.

I’m not convinced that the ratio of anchor text used is enough to flag links as suspicious, at least not on it’s own. If the site or page doesn’t have that many links, then it’s a small sample size that could be easily skewed, and could lead to a lot of false positives. Another issue is that exact match domains would effectively get a free pass (although, that might still be true).

I have a theory – and please note, this hasn’t been proven – that Google is looking at another signal to work out which links are suspicious. One of the big differences between paid links and natural links is when they’re placed. The majority of paid links are added to pages retroactively – i.e. a website has a page that mentions car insurance and a company might then approach them and offer to pay them on a monthly basis to change that text to a link.

I believe that if Google has crawled a page, and then at a later date recrawls that page and discovers a new link – with hardly any extra content added – that link is now flagged as suspicious. They might devalue it, they might send out a webmaster tools message or they might do both – but that link could well be flagged. The exception to this is if the page they’re crawling is the homepage, and potentially category pages, where content might change frequently.

If a reasonable chunk of text is also added at the same time as the link, then it potentially wouldn’t be flagged (so genuine updates to news articles wouldn’t accidentally flag that link).

Other times, a paid link might be added to a sidebar in the form of a banner ad, or in a blogroll link, or as a link in the footer. These are, in 99% of cases, now sitewide links. They’d potentially trip the same filter as above, because those links would appear on pages that Google has already crawled, but there’d also be a higher percentage of false positives here (i.e. good links being flagged as bad) as bloggers often link to sites they genuinely endorse in blogrolls too.

If I were Google, I’d treat those links differently to deal with the increase in false positives. Unless I was confident that the link was classified correctly as either paid or natural, I’d consider silently devaluing that link and not sending out a link warning. After a time limit (maybe 6 months, maybe a year), I’d allow that link to start flowing Page Rank. If you’re buying links, you don’t want to pay for them and not have them work for months – you might be more likely to notice that the links you’re building aren’t working, so you stop renewing them. If it’s a genuine editorial link in a blogroll, then it’s more likely that that site can wait a while before getting the link value – because that link is mainly serving to pass them useful traffic.

“I’d like to get a few paid link reports anyway because I’m excited about trying some ideas here at Google to augment our existing algorithms” – Matt Cutts, 2007

I think this is probably something that Google have been doing for a while, way before the webmaster tools warnings were sent out. Matt Cutts mentioned in the past that they’ve been working on algorithms to automatically detect paid links, and I imagine there are probably other signals they’re looking at too.

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Geolocation of Tweets Affects the Rankings in Local Google

At the end of last year Danny Sullivan wrote an article for Search Engine Land titled “What Social Signals do Google & Bing Really Count?” which featured an interview between representatives from both search engines. The article confirmed that Google and Bing use Twitter and (possibly to a lesser extent) Facebook as another signal to determine where a site is able to rank in the regular search results.

While a lot of SEOs had begun to suspect that tweeted links were influencing rankings, it was really good to see it actually confirmed.

What Google & Bing didn’t mention, though, was how strongly they were using these social signals as a ranking factor. Google has claimed for years now that there are over 200 ranking factors, so it’s hard to say whether their use of Twitter is a majorly influential factor (like links) or whether it’s just one of many neglible factors.

Google also failed to mention how long the Twitter effect would last – I think quite a few people may expect it to be a very time-sensitive thing, particularly around breaking news. The assumption is that, when Google uses tweets to boost a page for a search term, the ‘Twitter effect’ will eventually stop being such a strong ranking factor after enough time (or when the tweets stop) and then the regular SEO factors (links, on-page keywords, etc) start to take over. This wasn’t confirmed or suggested, it’s just what I would have expected.

A final point that wasn’t mentioned is whether or not Google differentiates between tweets from specific countries – so whether tweets from UK users to a specific page helps boost that page in Google.co.uk, or whether it also helps in US results in Google.com.

These two points – tweet locations and how long the Twitter effect lasts for – is something that I wanted to look into because of a post I wrote a while ago on Raven Tools. I wrote it very shortly after Sugarrae published hers, and I noticed something interesting about the two posts – my post very quickly started to rank very well for the term “Raven Tools” in Google.co.uk, out-ranking Rae’s even though I linked to her post from mine, and despite the fact that Sugarrae’s post, by all the regular SEO metrics like number of links and domain authority, greatly deserved to outrank my post. My post ranked so well on Google.co.uk that the only domain that outranked it was Raventools.com itself. This wasn’t true in Google.com though, the US results showed the results that you’d normally expect, with Sugarrae outranking me and with my site towards the bottom of page 1. I should also point out, my site isn’t geo-targetted to any location in particular.

At the time I assumed it was some kind of query-deserves-freshness effect, and that eventually my site would drop down the search results. That would fit with my original idea that Google’s use of Twitter is to spot breaking news and promote tweeted articles when the topic was hot, but then dropped those articles in favour of the most linked to over time, when the topic wasn’t being tweeted about as much.

It’s been over 5 months since my Raven post, and it’s still only outranked by Raventools.com in the UK.

This would imply that, in this case at least, the Twitter effect may not be time-based, and tweets from months ago may still help your page to rank well.

I wanted to look into why my post was ranking well in the UK results, but not anywhere else. It’s a .com, hosted in the US and it isn’t geo-targetted to any country, Google shouldn’t consider it a UK specific site.

Using Backtweets I grabbed a load of the data around who tweeted my post and compared it with who tweeted Sugarrae’s. An important point to remember is that Google is likely treating some tweets diffently to others, depending on how authoritative they think a Twitter user is.

While Sugarrae had more tweets to her article than I had mine (she had 23 to my 13), the majority of my tweets were from people who had their location set to somewhere in the UK (9 of the 13), while Sugarrae had the vast majority of her tweets from the US (17 of her 23), and she only had 2 UK tweets.

This would suggest that Google is using the location of tweets to determine which search engine the page gets a boost in. The theory is, if a page becomes incredibly popular amongst UK tweeters – it may only be relevant to people in the UK, and so it only gets a boost in Google.co.uk. This is an observation for just this one specific example – it’s not a cold, hard scientific fact – but if anyone was planning on testing how tweeted links can affect rankings, I’d suggest looking into how long the effect lasts for, and whether the location of the Twitter user plays a part.

And you can download the sheet here, if you’re so inclined.

Flickr image from view-askew.

Thanks to SEO Scientist Neyne for the title advice.

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Does Google Have A Secret Tablet?

As an SEO blog, this site tends to get a few visits from Google employees every now and then. I was looking through my Google Analytics stats the other day and noticed that, after writing my startup SEO advice post, I had a visit from Google Ireland that I couldn’t really explain.

There was a visit from Google based in Dublin, with the screen resolution 800 x 1153. Looking further into it, whatever that device was runs Android (and Google Analytics reports Safari as the browser, although I’m pretty sure that’s because Android’s default browser uses webkit, which GA may simply record as Safari).

It also has Flash installed:

From checking around, and from looking through Wikipedia’s list of Android devices, I genuinely can’t find what device this is. Is this a Googler that’s hacked a different device and installed Android on it, or does Google have a secret tablet?

If anyone knows what this device is – please, please put me out of my misery and let me know in the comments.

Flickr photo from Leo Reynolds

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Bing’s Google Argument Makes No Sense

Recently Google accused Bing of effectively copying their results by using toolbar data, and data from Internet Explorer if the suggested sites feature is enabled – you can read Google’s side of the story here, and the story of Bing’s response here.

I’m not going to explain it all in too much detail because I think those two articles cover it quite well, but as a quick summary:

1. Google suspected Bing of using some of Google’s data in Bing’s results
2. Google set up a test to prove this – by allowing pages to rank for “synthetic queries” (Googlewhacks), using IE8 with the Bing bar installed to search for and then visit those pages, and then found Bing returning around 9% of those results a few weeks later
3. Bing very strongly denied “copying” Google’s results once accused

Bing’s description of what’s happening appears to be around the use of “clickstream data” – it sounds like the Bing toolbar (and IE with suggested sites) looks at which pages you’re on and which pages you visit afterwards. This isn’t restricted to Google – this is, apparently, for all pages on the Internet.

There’s arguments from people saying that Google is right to find this unacceptable, and others saying that Bing is in the right.

I was actually quite surprised by the number of people siding with Bing over this, there’s something about Bing using it’s browser to collect user data from competitors that doesn’t sit quite right with me. Regardless, I was surprised by some of the things that Bing said to defend itself.

Google engaged in a “honeypot” attack to trick Bing. In simple terms, Google’s “experiment” was rigged to manipulate Bing search results through a type of attack also known as “click fraud.” That’s right, the same type of attack employed by spammers on the web to trick consumers

– Yusuf Mehdi, Bing.

What Bing is complaining about here, is that Google engineers chose to adjust Google’s results for specific terms, searched in Google for those keywords and then clicked on those listings. In Google. That’s not an “attack”, nor is it a “trick” and it’s definitely not “click-fraud”.

Bing also mentions that the clickstream data that they’re using is one of 1,000 signals used to determine where a site should rank, and that the honeypot keywords that Google used were noticeable because they were outliers – and as such they only really had the clickstream data to go on.

But this is what I don’t fully understand – the clickstream data itself. Bing says that the clickstream data isn’t just for Google – it’s for all sites on the web. But of course, Google – their biggest competitor – is the second most visited site on the Internet from the US, so it’s fair to say that a very hefty chunk of that clickstream data actually contains data from people searching on Google.

The other thing I don’t understand is what happens when you scale that clickstream data. We’ve only seen what happens when it’s used on 100 invented terms from Google’s honeypot test, where around 9% of those queries then appeared to affect Bing’s results. Bing implies that this isn’t a lot, and that the effect is much smaller when it’s scaled – but I’m not so sure. I’d actually be quite surprised if, when this was scaled to something the size of the Bing toolbar’s userbase, there wasn’t a very noticeable impact on Bing’s results. This is one of those things that cannot really be proved – we have to take Bing’s word for it.

During the Farsight video, the Bing rep mentioned that they were only using publicly available clickstream data – but of course, that data isn’t publicly available. The data is coming from a toolbar, and the conditions are, let’s face it, buried away somewhere in a EULA which nobody in their right mind ever reads. These users have legally opted in to sharing that data, but I don’t think they’re aware of it.

Regardless of that, though – Bing is taking data from Google users, who are searching on Google and allowing it to influence Bing’s search results. It may be legal, but it doesn’t mean you have to agree with it.

Flickr image from reway2007.

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