Search Engine Musings

And the wider issue of communicating with the search giant

For most of the last month or so there has been a problem for some sites in accessing the useful tools that Google makes available for site administrators. This manifested itself as a failure to verify the “ownership” of the sites using either of the two methods available, with an error message that varied between indicating a server timeout and a DNS error in looking up the site.

Unfortunately this wasn’t acknowledged as a problem until three weeks after it first started and at time of writing it still hasn’t been resolved on many of my own sites amongst many others. As a result many webmasters have been wasting time trying to solve non-existent problems with their sites and making pointless support calls to their hosting companies. At least in the last week there has started to be some individual responses from official Google staff to some of the postings on the relevant Google groups forum and this is a welcome development but it serves to highlight the fact that they are generally a very unresponsive company and getting hard facts out of them is extremely difficult.

Now to some degree I have some sympathy with their dilemma because if there were totally open channels of communication then they would be deluged with millions of queries and complaints, many of them half-baked or misinformed at best - we’ve all seen the nutters and chancers who complain bitterly about dropping rankings when their sites are riddled with blatant black-hat techniques and spam. However a way has to be found to allow genuine webmasters to report real problems.

With any system of the mind-boggling complexity of a global search engine there will inevitably be problems and bugs. But by not engaging with the webmaster community Google are missing a perfect opportunity to get exactly the sort of feedback that they need from people in a position to see the effects and give them early warnings of possible errors. No matter how good Google’s engineers are they aren’t looking at search results in the same intensive way that we are. Sometimes we’ll see puzzling inconsistencies in data that will ring bells for us, or we’ll see patterns when analysing SERPS results over an extended period. You can develop a sixth sense for when things are not quite right and this could be invaluable to them in tracing problems.

Remember the Big Daddy update? For months webmasters were baffled by perfectly good sites losing all ranking; of course there was a lot of noise from the less reputable as well but it was easy to tell that there were plenty of genuine people suffering. For quite some time the official line was that there was no problem and people should just clean up their sites and add more content. Of course many desperate webmasters ended up making major changes to try to get back some rankings and traffic to help their businesses survive. I myself lost a swathe of high rankings for things that I was clearly one of the most relevant sites for - not just dropped down a bit but dropped out of the index altogether - but was fortunately able to sit it out making no changes. A good while later we started seeing a particular datacentre with rankings that looked a lot like they should be, and then a few weeks after that all the datacentres had that data rolled out and all my top rankings returned. With better communications all that wasted effort, lost business, and vast quantity of forum chatter could have been avoided and maybe Google could have got enough useful feedback to roll out the corrected update a bit sooner. And they wouldn’t have lost so many friends and suffered such bad PR.

The development of Webmaster Tools was a great step forward but I’ve seen a number of oddities in it at times. For instance one client’s site was (quite naturally) largely based around two keywords yet one of them wasn’t listed in the “How does Googlebot see your site” section. This seemed bizarre since the same term was prominently listed in the link text pointing at the site, but it did raise suspicions about an apparent penalty they seemed to be suffering from when we took over their account. We tried emailing Google about it but received no response. That could have been an opportunity for a useful dialogue that would have helped us to ensure their site was clean and of good quality by knowing where to look.

Other issues come to mind. I regularly see a set of results coming round that is pretty obviously broken data - a range of ranking terms all drop out for a few days and then go back to normal for the next month or so only to repeat the cycle again. A couple of months ago the rankings for this very blog dropped away suddenly and I later discovered I’d been hacked at exactly the time the drop started. However I didn’t receive the message in the Tools that we are led to believe is sent in such cases. I was lucky and found the problem with the help of a correspondent. Others may not be so fortunate if they rely on the messages.

A feedback form of some sort within the Tools would be at least partly self-filtering of the nutters and they could be easily ignored in any case since their sites would likely be flagged up already as dodgy. Of course that wouldn’t help much in the current case since many of us still can’t validate our sites, unless it was situated at the opening page of the account.

So come on Google, let’s come up with a method of sensible collaboration that will help both sides.

Some of you will by now have seen the new BBC home page with its movable and customisable sections which can be tailored to your preferences. Fiddleability rules!

When I first looked at the beta version I wasn’t convinced; it looked a bit “play-school” and some of the option weren’t too well thought out. But it’s now much better and if you reduce the text size a notch it fits together pretty well to give you a selection of news items of the sort you want without the stuff you dont.

I can see this becoming the defalt home page for a lot of people, and maybe not just those in the UK either!  Depite the seemingly universal dumbing down all over the media the public still trust the BBC in a way that applies to very few other organisations. So the question is, will this take some traffic away from Google?

I suspect it might, particularly if the search facility was made more prominent and the “All the Web” option promoted a bit more. It’s ages since I tried any competitive searches on this engine - in fact I’d forgotten if it was still their own engine or if they were using someone else’s results - but I tried a few queries today and was quite pleased with the results. (they must be good, I was in the top ten for “search engine optimisation scotland” ;-)  ) If I have time I’ll try and remember to do a few more and compare them to Google and Yahoo.

If the BBC really wanted to push this I suspect they could get a reasonable share of the market. Who do you trust more - MSN, Ask, or good old Auntie Beeb? Well, that’s third place pretty well assured then! Of course what they would be allowed to do with it is another matter; they can hardly start up a BBC adwords-style operation can they?

Earlier this year I wrote about the rankings that this blog had enjoyed dropping substantially despite the main site holding on to its positions. Yesterday I discovered a possible cause. A correspondent on one of my other blogs notified me that his anti-virus program had alerted him to an attempted trojan link when he visited my other site. I investigated and found that a section of JavaScript had been added to my header.php file which used character code to open an iframe containing a link to a malware site. I removed it and restored the original clean file. Naturally I then checked my other blogs and discovered the same problem on this one. (Interestingly another blog based on a different template was clean, though that may just be a coincidence.)

The dates on the infected header.php files were the 18th and 19th of January and I don’t know yet how the JavaScript code was attached, but I’ll be updating the Wordpress installation (ironically I hadn’t upgraded immediately to 2.3 because I thought 2.1 was stable and secure) and trying out a new security technique that I discovered last night. If you have visited the site since those dates then I’d advise you to run your anti-virus programs. I’ve checked my own machine and found no problems so my own security seems to have held firm.

Now for the SEO implications. I check some of my rankings every week. On the 17th Jan they were fine with a number of top 5 results. By the next check on 24th Jan they had dropped substantially in Google. This strongly suggests that Google had identified the malware link and marked the blog site down for it. The blog rankings continued to tumble, suggesting that each fresh visit from Googlebot was pushing it further down. However I haven’t had any messages in Webmaster Tools notifying me of any problems. The question now is whether I should wait and see what happens after the next couple of Googlebot visits or if I should send a reinclusion request straight away. Suggestions welcome!

One thing for sure. I’ll be checking the file dates on my blog files regularly and keeping an eye out for any JavaScript in the source code.

Be careful out there!

Interesting; midday on Saturday (UK time) and Google is down. A tracert command runs fine on both the .co.uk and .com addresses but the wewbsite doesn’t respond. Not only that but sites that I know run Google Analytics are slow to load, presumably because the analytics calls aren’t responding.

My first thought was to look for news on this but what do you do when your main source of news is the thing that’s not working? Nothing on the BBC News (probably don’t think that new-fangled internet thing is very important), nothing on the various blogs and RSS feeds I monitor. Let’s try Yahoo - nothing useful in their web search (stuff from an outage in 2005), and their link to news takes ages to load before again showing nothing current. How about MSN/Live - hmm, taking ages to load and then eventually appears with no CSS formatting or images. The search box is still there though - but nothing in the results. The alternatives aren’t doing too well are they.

Checked three SEO forums but nothing there; guess the Americans are all still asleep. Some UK blogs, nope nothing there either. Now in the old days we’d have had Fidonet…

If it wasn’t for the single hop tracert result I might wonder if it was an ISP problem. Hmm, just noticed the Sphinn feed isn’t responding either. I’m beginning to feel as if I’ve woken up in a parallel universe or a sci-fi story and people are going to reply, “Google? what’s that?” Like Beverley in ST-TNG when she’s trapped inside a collapsing warp field and people keep disappearing.

So, this all begs the question. What do you do when the company that has almost a monopoly on information disappears. Expect further thoughts on this. (Though you might not be able to find them if Google doesn’t come back up!)

(Edited to add that Google came back up around 3.45pm )

So the much speculated bid has finally happened. Will they say yes? If they do what will the search industry look like in a years time.

Recent figures on search market share in the USA suggest that Yahoo may be losing ground and MSN/Live gaining, though there seems little suggestion of it in the UK. Indeed there is a suggestion in some figures I’ve seen that Ask is finally beginning to make an impact and is close to MSN/Live, though both are at a very low level.

Looking at the respective assets of Microsoft and Yahoo there is a great deal of overlap that would seem to suggest that any amalgamation is going to be painful for both staff and users. Both companies have mail systems, both have instant messenger systems, and of course both have search systems. The chances of duplicate systems surviving the accountants’ eagle eyes seem to be low, yet a lot of brand loyalty could easily be killed off if it’s handled badly. There some areas that will be attractive to Microsoft - the Flickr photo archive for instance - but the conventional wisdom amongst most commentators (Aaron Wall being a notable exception) seems to be that they want Yahoo for search.

Now Yahoo search is a strange beast these days. Aaron calls it stale and there is something in that description. Their speed of response seems slow - at one time they were faster than Google but these days it seems to take weeks before they respond to site changes - and their results are often very strange. The odd thing is that they themselves took over some interesting search engines but don’t seem to have done much with them - Alta Vista may have been an odd takeover choice but AllTheWeb was a very promising engine that seems to have been sidelined rather than incorporated. Maybe that’s one of the things that Microsoft want. Certainly they seem to be getting nowhere with their own search system; it was promising for a while about 18 months ago but once Live Search arrived it seems to have become erratic and on some searches produces some of the worst results I’ve seen. Another possibility is that they want the Overture PPC part of the business to shore up their falling ad revenues

Quite honestly I can’t see Google losing any sleep over the search aspects of the combination - they are so far ahead in that area that it seems impossible for anyone to challenge them unless they themselves make some bad blunders. Not impossible, given the negative press they’ve been getting over privacy for instance, but fairly unlikely. But they certainly seem to have been stung into action given their hard-hitting comments about “illegal practices” being carried into the internet arena. Maybe that’s just a knee-jerk reaction or maybe they think Microsoft are up to something and are desperate to nip it in the bud. Apparently they were concerned enough to offer Yahoo a deal to stave off the takeover.

All-in-all my suspicion is that the war between these two giants is going to be more far-reaching than just search. Such is Google’s lead that Microsoft can’t win on just search and they are a company that doesn’t like to come second. They must also be worried that Google’s attempt to switch users to online-based data storage and office apps is threatening Microsoft’s traditional monopoly in the PC office suite and operating system area. If they were to lose that then they’d be in trouble. So the search market may not change all that much this year but a lot of other things might.

I noticed a curious phenomena in my Google rankings this week. While my general rankings based on the main site are doing well and mostly improving, all the terms that were ranking via this blog have dropped out of sight. Now I haven’t been blogging as much recently due to other committments so now I’m wondering if the drop is simply a Google glitch that will recover as they generally do, or some more fundamental change in the algo that has hit my blog results, or if it’s simply because my content isn’t being updated as quickly as before.

If it’s the latter then I wonder if we’ve all made a rod for our own backs in that we need to keep on writing new articles more and more or face the consequences. As I blogged about in my Coals to Newcastle post I’m reluctant to churn out the same stuff that everyone else is doing because that feels wrong and pointless. On the other hand I’m a bit miffed to find that the top rankings I had for  terms like “Scottish SEO consultant” and which I blogged about in Despairing of Google, have collapsed down to about 280th place.

Anyone else seeing a blog dropping out of the rankings?