We keep optimizing our meta tags, keywords, link structure, content densities, markup, etc.. etc.. But how does Google optimize itself for us? If this is any sort of ‘relationship’ what’s Google been doing for us lately?
Anti-Spam DMARC Efforts
One of the big problems with promoting on-line is the folks who don’t care about courtesy or the rules and they just spam everyone/anyone. The best way to cope with this is to never buy products we have seen ‘spammed’; Yet this has been a nerd mantra for so long, and clearly the consumers never got the message because spammers still get paid.
Because of all the abuse, legit advertisers have a bad reputation even before they get started. This is why we have captchas, whitelists, RBLs, and many many other annoying services that some people actually pay to use.
Major email providers like Google and Microsoft (including Yahoo!/Hotmail), are working to ally with major online sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, PayPal, and more to work on the DMARC system to cope with not only spam, but phishing, fraud, password scams, ID theft, etc..
In a nutshell DMARC is:
..a technical specification created by a group of organizations that want to help reduce the potential for email-based abuse by solving a couple of long-standing operational, deployment, and reporting issues related to email authentication protocols.
Essentially it’s going to make ‘authenticated’ mail much more commonplace in hopes of raising the global bar on email authentication to help eliminate the spam problem. Still too long winded with the explanation?
Here’s an illustration of DMARC:
New Privacy Policy
I’ve witnessed a lot of complaining about this move, and yet I haven’t seen one logical complaint I could ally myself with. Personally, I’m a GMail user who has already invested the deepest amount of privacy I can into Google just by using GMail. Each time Google releases a new product, if I use the same Google account as I do with other Google services, I ‘expect‘ it to be smart and use what Google knows about me to the fullest.
If I wanted a privacy division between Google Maps and GMail, I’d make a separate account and use multiple logins so that if I am hunting for the closest guitar shop I won’t have to deal with Guitar adverts getting special preference when I am logged into GMail. In fact, if I was looking for a gift for someone and I really loved the focus Google has on ‘me’, I might just use a fresh browser instance to keep Google from getting confused.
Fresh browser instance?! I know, that’s jargon and we promised to explain ourselves, so a quick demo of this is to load Chrome (sorry Moz lovers) and then right click on a normal link. In the right click menu you should see this:
This will open a Chrome Incognito window :
Sites in this tab will not see browser history!
Try visiting your popular sites to test!
If all goes well, as long as you use the incognito window, you will be able to use Google services, and others, without them easily tying the info to a particular account.
Keep in mind that the alternative to a unified privacy policy is a system where the users have to read each privacy policy for every Google service to make sure they understand each service. Then, if you wanted your data to be shared between services you’d have to not only go and manually ‘share’ the information, but you’d also better be praying or something to find a way to motivate Google spend the time to enable the link between services because as we know already, Google doesn’t waste much resources on things that aren’t going to be popular. When you make something like this automatic it changes the entire functionality of that idea and what would otherwise be a ‘wasted effort’ suddenly becomes a ‘big win’.
Kicking Keister in Kenya
If you haven’t read about the Mocality debacle, you really aren’t missing that much, it’s more of a ‘How the heck?’ than anything.
In a nutshell:
There was a Google contractor in Kenya using Google IPs and identifying themselves as a Google entity that had been ‘scraping’ the sign ups from Mocality and stealing them away with lies.
When Google first heard of the situation there was a “No freaking way, let us investigate and get back to you.” response from the powers within Google looking into the issue. As things unfolded it became clear that Mocality was indeed providing honest information and that something very bad was happening over in Kenya under Google’s name. Google’s own team leads were ‘mortified’ over the details of how the situation unfolded.
At this point the head of the Kenyan offices for Google, Ms. Olga Arara-Kimani, has resigned stating she felt personally that ‘the buck‘ stopped with her and she wanted to take full responsibility.
While no official statement has come from Google there are signs that the investigation is over and that Google is already implementing measures to prevent something like this from happening again. I expect we’ll hear a few more details as things unfold.
How’s Chia Bart? Well he’s in limbo, and I haven’t started the re-plant. Time for a vacation I think? 
SEO news blog post by Ryan Morben @ 12:23 pm
This is the day folks, the bill is in Congress as I type and here’s some good spots to follow the proceedings closely:
EFF Twitter Feed
Video Webcast
Justin.tv re-broadcast of the live feed
Wondering what all the fuss is about?
Here’s a great read:
Wikipedia -> Stop Online Piracy Act
Who supports SOPA?
Domino Project’s SOPA Supporter List
What sort of organizations are opposed to SOPA?. It was such a bad move that Wikipedia was publicly contemplating a blackout of the service just to make it clear how bad the bill is!
There’s also a few very active/current discussions over on Reddit in the r/technology section that give a good ‘nerds eye view’ of the bill reading.
Wonder why Google was opposed to the bill? Here’s a humorous take on the essence of their fears:
If I had to personally sum everything up into a TL;DR I would have to go with:
“Artist and labour groups who don’t have a nerdy understanding of how the internet works and how to approach piracy are joining with other anti-piracy groups to fast-track an ill-considered and potentially dangerous bill.
While most folks don’t understand the internet enough to argue the bill as experts the general reaction today has been “we are rushing something we don’t understand and we can’t proceed”.
With any luck that’ exactly how bill H.R.3261 will end, some potential, but not ready. *fingers crossed*
SEO news blog post by Ryan Morben @ 10:42 am
Today is a sad day for those of us in the SEO industry. Yahoo Site Explorer is being boxed for good and as of today will be the last day you will be able to use it. Yahoo announced on Friday 18th that they would be that they would be shutting down the service. Many in the SEO industry are regarding this as the final demise of Yahoo Search.
“With the completion of algorithmic transition to Bing, Yahoo! Search has merged Site Explorer into Bing Webmaster Tools. Webmasters should now be using the Bing Webmaster Tools to ensure that their websites continue to get high quality organic search traffic from Bing and Yahoo!. Site Explorer services will not be available from November 21, 2011.”
This follows through on a previous announcement from July 11, 2010 that they service would soon be suspended due to falling use of Yahoo and the transition of Yahoo to Bing.
“In an August 2010 blog post, we said we would continue Site Explorer with a focus on new features for webmaster community, even after the transition to Microsoft platforms is complete. We listened to your feedback, and along with the team from Bing Webmaster Center looked jointly at the roadmap for the webmaster tools. Having two webmaster portals for a single source for organic results does not add enough value. Once organic results are transitioned to Bing in all the markets, we plan to shut down Yahoo! Site Explorer and Microsoft’s Webmaster Tools will be the source for Bing and Yahoo! webmaster site and analytics data.”
Yahoo Site Explorer went live in September of 2005 and was the progeny of Tim Mayer from Yahoo. It has been a powerful mainstay of the SEO industry ever since it’s initial launch. While most of us in the industry knew this day was coming, it is still tragic news for many SEOs who have come to rely on Yahoo Site Explorer as a free, comprehensive and search engine backed competitive analysis link tool.
SEO news blog post by Kyle Krenbrink @ 11:00 am
After being away for a few days on a mini vacation, I thought I would touch base on what has been making news since my last post. It seems Google is still dominating the news in several instances.
It was announced this week by StatsCounter that for the first time Google’s internet browser Chrome has risen to a 20.7% share of all browser usage in the market. Since 2009, Chrome has gone from only 2.8% share to become a major contender in the internet browser market.
In the same time, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer dropped from an 59% down to 44%, while Firefox only dropped marginally from 30% to 28%. It should be noted however that StatsCounter tracks totally surfing and not the total number of users in their stats. What this means is that it is the internet "power" elite that seem to be driving Chrome to its increasing success.
Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Browser Market Share
Starting at the end of last month you may have noticed a few changes to the look and feel of various Google products. Google has embarked on an aggressive new design (or redesign) strategy and part of their Multi-Month User Experience Update. In a blog post titled: "Evolving the Google Design and Experience"
The way people use and experience the web is evolving, and our goal is to give you a more seamless and consistent online experience—one that works no matter which Google product you’re using or what device you’re using it on. The new Google experience that we’ve begun working toward is founded on three key design principles: focus, elasticity and effortlessness.
Here are some of the implementations they will be rolling out:
- Focus: A large part of Google’s new focus is an attempt to reduce the amount of on screen clutter that has been becoming problematic for some time. By making a more user intuitive approach by making changes such as using bolder colors for actionable buttons, or hiding navigation buttons until they’re actually needed, which Google feels can help you better focus on only what you need at the moment.
- Elasticity: Due to the multiple, various types of mobile devices, tablets and high-resoultion monitors, Google, states that the new design(s) will soon allow you to seamlessly transition from one device to another and have a consistent visual experience. Google says they aim to bring you this flexibility without sacrificing style or usefulness.
- Effortlessness: Google goes on to show that their design phiolosohy is to combine power with simplicity by using clean, simple design architecture while embracing latest technologies such as HTML5, WebGL and the faster browsers available (like Google Chrome for instance).
Google has certainly come a long way over the last several years in the way they continue to change and evolve the look and usablility of their products. By studying how users use and navigate through the Google and related technologies, Google continues to keep itself on top of a very competitive market.
SEO news blog post by Kyle Krenbrink @ 7:09 pm
In a follow up to the post I published yesterday on the Top 20 “Losers” from Google’s Panda UK Update, one of the worst hit companies was Ciao.co.uk, a Microsoft owned company that was leading an EU competition case against Google. Accusations from Microsoft state that Google is purposely using the Panda algorithm update to attack Ciao in an effort to reduce its rankings.
Ciao.co.uk was involved in initiating an EU investigation into Google in November 2010. Microsoft claims that Google has used its dominant position to limit rivals products. The Panda update was designed to lower the overall positioning of content-farms and other low-quality websites and is part of a larger effort to reduce the amount of webspam that has permeated the search results for years.
Google’s head of search evaluation, Scott Huffman, said the accusation was “almost absurd” to suggest that the results were rigged. Of course "almost absurd" is no quite the same as “completely absurd.” Google and Microsoft have a great deal of animosity towards each other and are no strangers to the enmity that has existed between the two corporations for years.
Looking at the list of site that have been negatively affected by the Panda appears to show that most site on the list have been legitimately penalized by Panda. Panda was specifically designed to attack product comparison sites, reviews sites and voucher code sites; and Ciao is no different.
After taking just a precursory look at the Ciao website, the site is found to publish duplicate reviews on multiple pages and sites. Ciao is continually regurgitating massive amounts of content. This is exactly what Panda was targeting site for. One of the reviews on the site that I checked was republished in its entirety on over 30 individual pages and on no less than 3 other websites.
Majestic SEO reports 23 200 000 backlinks coming from 63 000 unique domains, which is an average of 368 links from each domain. Even when looking at the single domain: http://www.ciao.co.uk/, there are 157 049 backlinks coming from 1027 unique domains.
That averages 153 (157 049/1027=153) links form each domain.
From the backlinks analyzed from Majestic, this was the data over 10 000 incoming backlinks grouped by IP block.
| IP Block |
# of Links |
| 92.122.217.* |
109,721 |
| 94.245.123.* |
45,810 |
| 65.55.17.* |
45,588 |
| 69.175.60.* |
32,634 |
| 66.216.1.* |
28,385 |
| 207.218.202.* |
21,540 |
| 212.227.159.* |
13,800 |
| 178.79.137.* |
11,100 |
| 95.154.211.* |
10,428 |
| 69.163.188.* |
10,266 |
One of the worst offenders was http://small-business-service.com/ which has over 10974 links pointing to ciao.co.uk from a single IP.
On the site, a visitor can see the huge proliferation of spammy, low-quality links that this site engages in. The total number of links to all pages on the ciao domain including sub domains and redirects was even more astonishing:
Pages Indexed: 19,174,884
# of Backlinks Links: 23,199,785
# of Unique Domains: 62,886
It would appear that the newest iteration of the Panda algorithm update form Google is doing a great job on catching the low-quality sites and dealing with them quite justly. The new algorithm certainly needs some tweaking as many quality sites took penalties as well.
As lesser quality sites are displaced, those sites that do offer a quality user experience, use legitimate linking strategies and can offer quality content will begin to see their potential rankings increase.
Beanstalk is currently in the process of testing organic vs. non-organic strategies in an attempt to challenge the effectiveness of Panda’s filtering capabilities. Watch for our 3 part blog series on this topic coming soon!
SEO news blog post by Kyle Krenbrink @ 10:16 pm
It looks as though Bing is finally starting to crawl up the search engine usage ladder. For the first time, Bing has outranked Yahoo in the global search engine market. StatCounter Global Stats finds that globally, Bing has attained a 4.37% share of the global market in February, ahead of Yahoo! at 3.93%. Both engines are far behind Google’s 89.94% of the global search engine market. In the United States, Yahoo! is still maintaining a marginal lead over Bing who has 9.03% of the market. Google still has the lion’s share of the market in the US at 76.63%.
StatsCounter bases their findings on aggregate data that is collected over a sampling of 15 billion across their network which carries approximately 3 million websites.
"It is significant that Bing overtook Yahoo! globally for the first time on a monthly basis but it remains a tough battle to claw back Google’s market share. Although Google dipped below the 90% mark in February worldwide for the first time since August 2009 it shows little sign of losing its global dominance any time soon." commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter.
Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Search Engine Market Share
In 2009, Microsoft announced that it would be powering the Yahoo search technology. So in essence they are effectively one company. If you add up the two totals as in a single corporate entity to compare against Google, the Bing-Yahoo conglomerate totals about 8.3% of the search engine market.
As an SEO, Google is the primary search engine that I use for statistics gathering and in our client ranking reports. The fact is that I rarely give more than a cursory glance at Bing or Yahoo on occasion. Having said that, I think that competition is healthy in every industry. One could speculate that the usage patterns have shifted due to the major upsets in the SERPs caused from major Google algorithm updates in January.
SEO news blog post by Kyle Krenbrink @ 7:06 pm
If you’ve been reading the IT news you may have seen an article from Experian pushing out some statistics on Goole losing ground and effectiveness to Bing. Really, if you love statistics, head on over to Experian for the full scoop, they have a few clearly laid out images showing the data they have collected. What I’d like to do is discuss the interpretation of the data and some of the seemingly odd takes that people around the web have on the info at hand.
First, lets discuss what made the headlines, the 21 percent increase in Jan 2011. Google has been making all sorts of changes lately, instant search being one of them. On at least one browser I own, it’s now defaulting to Bing as the search engine because I do not want Google looking at everything I’m typing into the address bar on that browser and then trying to suggest something.
There are privacy and performance issues at play for my decision, and while I could hack at the browser to disable it and keep Google as the default, I personally didn’t have time for it, and I’m a nerd. This alone could account for a gain on Bing’s side of things. Lets also consider that Google has been shifting algorithms around and any savvy site owner/SEO would be wise to compare Bing results to the changing Google results. Again, Google is driving the trend, Bing’s been winning by default.
Finally, the end of January also saw the end of Yahoo Site Explorer. This meant that people wishing to gather info would either have to turn to another source, or run some searches of their own and manually pull all the data together. Google’s an ace at swatting automated attempts to grab data, so if I was pulling this data, I’d go over to Bing for it.
These are all factors "that I can see" and certainly in no way reflects all the factors at play, but clearly gives some better explanation for the 21 percent increase considering the unquestionable preference of core users with Google.
The next figure I want to talk about is the "Success Rate" statistics. Google has worked very hard to provide a results page that has the answer. Remember me saying I was a nerd? Well I play a nerd-approved video game called Minecraft, and last weekend I needed to know the decimal data value for an egg (I had to make a cake). By typing in a rough longtail search into Google I got the data value without even leaving the results page.
Bing tries to get the same result but it’s not nearly as consistent at getting the right answer at the top of the SERPs. What about when I ask Google to handle some metric to imperial conversions or do some math for me? Am I making Bing more successful? When the answer you need is on the results page and you don’t need to click anything, that’s a real "Success".
Experian seems to have really great statistics and I love pouring over the data they share, but take everything with a grain of salt. This is the same company that lists websites as the top search terms for 2 years running. Who the heck wants to know that? Pull all the site names out of the list, now it’s interesting.
SEO news blog post by Ryan Morben @ 9:54 pm
For those of you who have noticed significant fluctuations in your rankings – you’re not alone. Across the web people have reported significant changes in their rankings. We at Beanstalk were fortunate on this one in that we had ranking reports running for the past few days and got to watch the changes over the course off the report. A happy coincidence.
Unfortunately the algorithm shift isn’t particularly favorable to solid site optimization. There was an odd connection is what we’re seeing. Site that had link building that focused on high relevancy and high trustability lost ground and sites who’s links building was focused on volume in recent months have gained ground. This indicated a shift to volume over quality. For obvious reason we’re convinced that this shift won’t last.
This shift in quality isn’t just apparent in the sites we’re working on but as we analyze various sites across the web we’re noticing a larger degree of lower quality backlinked sites ranking.
Now – to be sure we’re always in favor of diversified link building strategies and that includes strategies that focus more on volume and other strategies that focus on trust and relevancy but from everything we can see indicates that this update puts a disproportionate emphasis on volume. I expect to see the rankings shift again – likely over the weekend.
I should note that this isn’t just something we’re noticing but that has been noticed by a wide array of SEO’s. My advice? Don’t react too quickly – corrections are coming and you don’t want to adjust the wrong way.
And in other news …
And also noticeable in the current ranking report we’re running for our clients is the merging of Yahoo! and Bing search results. A couple days ago Yahoo! announced that their organic results in North America were being fed by Bing. This is of course the first set of ranking reports though that have refected this. This is (in my opinion) very exciting news and you can read more about it on Search Engine Journal here.
And stay tuned – I’ll be posting more as the Google update continues.
SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 3:13 am
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