Entries from April 2007 ↓

A quick post referencing a few comments from Adam lasnik of Google on Webmasterworld.

Our site evaluations rarely depend upon just one black/white signal… but rather groups of many, many signals.

A page with a zillion links is probably more likely, on average, to be the sort of page which isn’t very user-friendly. Other signals of such a page might make it look even more spammy, or perhaps less spammy.

On the whole, though, I’d definitely shy away from having an excessive number of links on a page.

As what Google has been saying all along, its usually not just one factor that messes things up for you. Stay away from the dark side and you will feel the love is the general message.

Another post from him to highlight this

I wouldn’t be particularly concerned about “PR leakage.” It’s more important to make sure that you aren’t engaging in link schemes designed to manipulate your site’s ranking.

Many top-quality sites feature quite a few (quality) outgoing links, and are appreciated for that by visitors.

personally, I feel that its only natural that Google doesnt look to a single factor due to the wide range of sites on the internet. This also explains the mixed messages that we get regarding SEO.

However, you should definetaly try not to stray too far with one of the no-nos … i.e. - Dont pass the ‘maybe buffer’ into the ‘Sure looks dodgy’ territory.

The hot hot topic around the webmaster forums these few days is undoubtedly regarding the Google Page Rank update. For the newcomers to the GOI(Google Optimisation Industry), A Page Rank Update is what we term an export of a page’s Page Rank to the Google Toolbar - This happens once every 3 months or there abouts.

There is a thread on Digitalpoint that I found funny in a twisted sense of humor kinda way. As is the norm with PR updates, a respected DP member posted that they have found pages that seem to have been updated. This was followed by some further evidence submitted by other members on newly found updated pages.

What I found funny was the number of members that downright refused to believe that an update had started because they did not see it on their sites. To be honest, the responses this time was a bit more civilised to previous updates.

Anyways, the point of this post is not to moan about PR updates or even to calrify whether a PR update has started or not, but rather my observation on some webmasters refusal to accept good solid advice because they have not experienced the same. Whilst I appreciate that alot of advice from webmaster forums are from people that could do with advice themselves but when a respected member of the community gives you advice, its wise to take note.

This is the reason I feel of why there are so many SEO myths around our industry. There are so many voices of self acclaimed experts that sometimes, its hard to pick out the facts from the opinions. If someone asked me to give them the best SEO tip, I would tell them to read certain SEO blogs and maybe the replies of certain community saints like tedster on Webmaster World.

You can only give opinions based on your knowledge and experience so its inevitable that the competitive SEO industry will be filled with so much smoke. As they say, if you cant stop them .. err .. just ignore them.

Discussions in the Internet Marketing World still revolves Google’s Paid Links are naughty talk, the long awaited pagerank update and Webmaster tools upgrades. I sense something big brewing and its the calm before the storm at the moment.

However, the real purpose of this post was for me to cunningly embed a Technorati code to claim the blog - Technorati Profile

Interesting post by Matt which I missed a few days ago about Hidden Links. It goes on a bit discussing what a hidden link is which is pretty obvious but doesnt really mention anything on how and if Google penalises it. Although information can be gathered on how Google determines what a hidden link is if they do penalise them.

As for Paid links, this little extract is interesting

As long as we’re talking about links, this seems like a pretty good opportunity to talk about a simple litmus test for paid links and how to tell if a paid link violates search engines’ quality guidelines. If you want to sell a link, you should at least provide machine-readable disclosure for paid links by making your link in a way that doesn’t affect search engines. There’s a ton of ways to do that. For example, you could make a paid link go through a redirect where the redirect url is robot’ed out using robots.txt. You could also use the rel=nofollow attribute. I’ve said as much many times before, but I wanted to give a heads-up because Google is going to be looking at paid links more closely in the future.

Basically Google expects you to make paid links non spiderable … hmm .. I don’t think that this will go down well with the webmaster community at all. In fact most of the webmasters consider the latest flurry of No Paid Links messages from Google as scare tactics. Personally, I think that Google will do something soon to make sure that the message is heard, how drastic the move will be is the question.

Out of the blue I have decided to link to this page on my articles Directory - Articles.

Its a deep page from the directories popular articles index and its just a little experiment on deep linking I thought I’ll try out. If anything interesting comes of it, I’ll share this in the comments.

Apologies for this strange post but hey thats SEO .. always test test experiment think coffee.

Well well, Mr. Matt Cutts from Google made an interesting post on his blog yesterday that is causing some noise in the SEO word. Basically, he is asking people to report paid links in the Google spam report.

One thing I heard at SES London was that people wanted a way to report paid links specifically. 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. Google may provide a special form for paid link reports at some point, but in the mean time, here’s a couple of ways that anyone can use to report paid links:

Most of the comments from this has been about how people will abuse the reporting and report competitors but I dont think thats what Matt is after. As he says, he is after something to try out some ideas to augment their algorithms, maybe he just wants more examples of sites that are paying for links to use as data.

Anyways, so as we mentioned in our forums a few days ago, seems Google is moving towards fighting paid links which is very interesting. Google pretty much made the paid text links industry due to their Pagerank algorithm and now they want people not to treat links as a commodity. From my view, they can do this a variety of ways.

• 1. Devalue outbound links from sites that shows signs of selling links.
• 2. Devalue inbound links from sites that show signs of buying links.
• 3. Manually review and devalue sites that are buying or selling links.

Google has repeatedly said that they want to rely on their algorithms over manual sorting of data so lets ignore no.3.

How would Google devalue inbound and outbound links correctly using their algoithms without a massive effect on their SERPs. We know that they already use Link Churn as a method but what are the new ways Matt is said to be testing?

• 1. Devalue unrelated links more? - If there seems to be no reason why a particular link should be on a page, I suppose it wouldnt hurt to devalue that link.
• 2. Increase reliance on the trust of a site? - Not sure about this as even TRUST has been made a commodity by Google as can by seen by the sudden increase in Viagra from educational institutes.
• 3. Detect common link selling signs more? - This is an interesting concept as a lot of lazy webmasters will be forced to move away from the Sponsored Sites link boxes into more creative links selling.
• 4. Outbound links ratio? - This is a bit hard to determine as all pages are different but coupled with no.1 may give algorithms some clues.
• 5. Inbound links ratio? - I think this maybe interesting and by this I mean the inbound linking that a typical site would get would I presume be mostly on one page but this should reflect on links to other pages. If a site is getting 99% links on one page by one or two keywords, say the homepage maybe the algo could devalue it as unnatural linking. This is probably already used by Google in some way but putting more emphasis on this may deter some link buying.

I dunno, the above are just ideas springing around whilst the footy match is on and I am sure there are more creative guys at Google putting more thought into this. Well I hope so anyways as it is bound to affect SEOs and webmasters around the globe, lets all hope they get it right and most of us don’t get hurt in the crossfire.

I’ll probably write more on this subject soon, its back to Football for me now though.

First, let me apologies for the downtime over the last two days for the site, this was due to a server change we had to do because of some problems with the old hosting company.

We are happy to announce that Xenyo is back on track now bigger and stronger than before.

Development wise, we are hard at work on our Main Xenyo Tool which is shaping up nicely and I’ll update you guys nearer the time. The tool is actually pretty much complete for first phase but we are going to implement a much requested Links Marketplace into it so some back end changes needed to be implemented.

So thats me out for the now, need to check my emails.