Search Engine Musings

Either someone at Google has a sense of humour or they really are out to make robots of us all. Let’s hope the former is the reason for calling their latest venture Android. This is the apparent reality behind all the long running rumours of a Google Phone. In fact it appears to be an attempt to bring an open standard operating system to enable extensible gadgets and capabilities for internet-capable phones.

Such a system would have great attractions for a company that wants to put itself into every aspect of communications and potential advertising media, but the move must have a lot of phone manufacturers wondering what their long term chances of survival are. Can any of them afford to go it alone or is it a case or collaborate or die. Or will Google just take over anyway? It’s also another battleground for Microsoft who have been trying to push the use of their own mobile operating system in a market that currently has quite a few of them.

The search world has been in meltdown for the last few days because of a little green bar.

Toolbar PageRank (tbpr) is the source of more wasted blog time and forum comments than any other topic. Despite repeated statements from the more sensible end of the SEO market that toolbar pagerank is neither a true reflection of the real unseen PageRank, nor in any way worth bothering about, the mass of webmasters seem to obsess about it.

Last week a lot of people reported falls in their tbpr and the speculation machine surged into action.

• ‘They’re penalising paid links’ - hmm, so why are sites being affected that don’t sell links?
• ‘They’re penalising blog networking’ - hmm, so why aren’t some very obvious link schemes being affected?
• ‘We’re all doomed’ - hmm, your tbpr seems to have gone back up again.

None of these experienced commentators seem to have followed the usual golden rule in these situations - sit on your hands, do nothing, and wait to see what happens after a couple of weeks. After every piece of twiddling or lever pulling, whether minor or major, there is always a period of instability. Sit it out and then review the situation. Wildly changing some aspect of your site only adds another variable into a situation that already has too many of them.

Meanwhile Google themselves were remarkably quiet. Official mouthpiece Matt Cutts has been making no search related blog posts for a few weeks, and no other comment has been forthcoming. We seem to be back to the bad old days of complete non-communication. This really isn’t good enough for a company that expects us to trust it with all of our data. It has to realise that if it leaves a vacuum then speculation will inevitably rush in; most of it ill-informed and potentially harmful to both webmasters and to Google itself.

For instance the latest turmoil could easily be interpreted by the cynical as being the third year in a row that the natural SERPS have been thrown into randomness so that Xmas-dependent businesses would have to spend money on Adwords. Is that true? I don’t know, but I do know that a lot of people suspect it to be, and in the absence of any explanation from Google that is the view that will spread. Is that what they really want?

The fact is we don’t know if this is a major update, or a change in PR algorithm, or a manual blitz, or a warning shot across the bows of  link sellers, or an experiment (failed or successful). No-one can respond sensibly to such a situation, so if it is a warning shot as some have speculated, then it’s not very well aimed. And as has been mentioned by many, it’s one that won’t even be understood by most web businesses because outside of the search industry most people haven’t a clue what a nofollow tag is or why it might be important. They also have no idea about selling PageRank - they are just trying to make some money from advertising on their site. That’s the reality - most site owners don’t know much about web design and know nothing about SEO and it’s related subjects. They just see a medium for communication - and that includes advertising the same as any other medium does. They see Google selling adverts with links on them - must be ok then.

Come on Google - get rid of the PR and make with the Public Relations.

Steve Balmer, not exactly the shy and retiring type, has been having a go at Google again. With a fine eye for a good headline he basically said that Google reads your email - while of course those nice people at Hotmail wouldn’t dream of such a thing.

Now regular readers of this blog (probably Mrs Trellis of North Wales) will know that I’m not exactly unconcerned about online privacy matters in general and Google’s desire to index everything everywhere in particular, but even I wouldn’t go quite that far.

Naturally no-one is sitting reading your mail - in this case specifically Gmail - but what they are doing is parsing through it to find subject matter to suggest adverts to display. How detailed that parsing is only Google know; and whether the CIA or whoever would be able to get personal information about you if they obtained access to the records is another open question. Since I wouldn’t use a Gmail account under any circumstances anyway it doesn’t worry me unless I’m communicating with someone who does.

From the search point of view the important thing to realise is that essentially Google isn’t really a search company - it’s an advertising company, and it’s increasingly THE advertising company. And it’ll use any data it can to push more, and more targeted, adverts at more and more people. The days when it was a simple search engine company with a simple interface and low revenue streams are long gone.

After the recent episode during which some rankings were bouncing around unpredictably and I theorised that Google was dumping data due to a corruption in their indexes, we now seem to have returned to a rather more stable index with most of the sites I monitor being back to their normal positions or in some cases a little better. The erroneous backlink information seems to have disappeared as well so I suspect that the big reindex has pretty much finished and we are back to the normal everflux situation.

Let’s hope that this year there are no further dramatic shifts of the kind that have occurred leading up to the Christmas period in recent years, or the conspiracy theorists will be out in force again suggesting artificial Adwords boosting. Given the current state of near panic in the financial markets the world economy could do with a stable and prosperous festive period.
Which raises an interesting thought - one search engine, which didn’t even exist 10 years ago, now has the power to affect the world’s economy in major ways, just by changes in its search results; quite apart from what it does with the mountain of money it’s amassing. I wonder what the governments and the international banks think of that?

As a consequence of the paid link controversy and whether you should use the nofollow attribute on paid outbound links, there is now another one about whether webmasters should use it on internal links. On one side there is the original suggestion from Matt Cutts in his interview with Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz, and followups from such as Dan Thies, while on the other side are people like Michael Martinez who find the idea of trying to manipulate PageRank by this method dubious at best and downright dangerous in most cases.

In the meantime there is also the question of using nofollow on blogs as an anti-spam measure, or not, depending on your perspective.

Nofollow on Blogs

Lets take the easier one first - blogs. This is what the nofollow tag was invented for, to stop people spamming the comments sections of blogs and forums with pointless messages containing embedded links back to their sites. Even then it was a bit controversial and many argued that there were better ways of combatting link spam. The debate has raged on and there is now a “dofollow” movement that advocates getting rid of nofollow tags from blogs (some blog software adds them automatically). Of course you then need other methods of defence against the robot blog-spammers but this can be managed - Askimet does a pretty good job in Wordpress blogs and you can pre-moderate if you have low levels of comments or only allow people who have already had comments approved. I already make links within my posts carry full weight and I’m inclined to go the dofollow route on comments too - just need to decide on the best method of doing it.

Nofollow on internal links

On the thornier topic of using nofollow to manipulate PageRank within a site there are a few arguements that I find persuasive.

Firstly I don’t believe enough people actually understand PageRank enough to start trying to fiddle with it. Anyone who reads the SEO forums will know that they are full of questions which show that people believe the most nonsensical rubbish about the subject and pick up on old wives tales at the slightest opportunity. The sort of mess that these folk could make of their sites with nofollow doesn’t bear thinking about.

Secondly the kind of pages that are being suggested as candidates for downgrading - About Us and Contact Us pages for instance - are actually perfectly useful pages that often can be made to rank well for important terms. The potential gains are far outweighed by the likely losses.

Thirdly we have the problems that would be caused to the usability of sites. Many websites use Google’s own search system to provide site-search facilities, and studies show that many users will use the search boxes to navigate a site. If you close off some of your pages with nofollow then those pages won’t show up in these search results. Why would you want that to happen? Golden rule - build sites to serve your users.

Fourthly there is something very fundamental here which I think needs to be addressed. Google have always said that you should show users and search engines the same things. That’s why hidden text and cloaking is so disliked by them. If you show a user a link then you are telling them that it’s worth following it. If you use a nofollow attribute on it then you are telling the search spiders that it isn’t worth following. Isn’t that rather dishonest? Isn’t that against the very rules that Google want us to adhere to? I think it is, and for that reason as well as the other listed above, I won’t be using it.

I’ve mentioned a few times recently that I was seeing some pretty inconsistent search positions on a number of my sites. There now appears to be a potential explanation. Following a post from Michael Martinez of SEO Theory, a couple of the SEO forums are running threads which suggest that Google may be dumping data in a way that we’ve seen them do before, and that as a result some sites are seeing lower numbers of indexed pages.

This coincided with my seeing a drop in indexed pages on a couple of the sites I monitor and also the strange appearance of a large number of erroneous link reports in the Google Webmaster Tools reports of another site. This site is a bookshop but was being reported as appearing in high positions for a number of totally unrelated topics. Looking at the external links report showed that there was a big increase in the number of links and that their origins and link text tallied with the strange search terms. Needless to say the pages concerned had no links pointing at my this site nor would they ever have any reason to.

What I now suspect, though obviously this can only be conjecture at this stage, is that somewhere along the line the indexes have become corrupted and Google is having to rebuild them. We saw something similar a couple of years ago when they brought a load of new data centres online and something appeared to go wrong. It’s also possible that this may have something to do with the dreaded Supplementals index - although that is pure speculation.

Whatever the reason the only thing to do is sit tight and wait for it all to blow over in a few weeks and then see what the search results look like then. Keep on producing new content as that appears to be being incorporated as normal, but don’t do anything drastic with the old content - it will probably come back into the indexes in good time.