The Google Dilemma

Google, once the finest search engine of all time, has recently taken a turn for the worse. Since June 4^th Google has been steadily getting worse in the results it serves up to its visitors. Not only do these results affect those searching for something they want, they also affect your traffic as many quality and relevant websites are no longer ranking high and/or are not even indexed within Google period.

Google has not stepped forth to let anyone know exactly what is going on with the SERPS. It has been mentioned in several locations such as seochat.com, webmaster.com, and seroundtable.com that maybe it was a human mistake at Google. When a leak like this comes out you can’t dismiss it. Following is a quote from an article at http://www.searchnewz.com/topstory/news/sn-2-20080609GoogleSERPsDancingJune2008Update.html

“According to Webmasters World Google SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) are returning fewer results for specific queries, pointing to possible Google SERPs update. The speculations for such changes are that, it may be due to the quality control practices employed by Google, or it can also be a human-error.”

I highly suggest reading the rest of the article as it also tells of some of the other problems that Google showed after June 4^th.

Many other posters can be found talking about Google on many forums, here is one remark from http://forums.seroundtable.com/showthread.php?t=3169

“I have had this happen to me on one site in particular which ranked well for long tail keywords then one day it was 5 pages back and still has not fully recovered its a strange feeling when that happens its almost as if google is saying we dont like you because you smell.
You could understand it if you were doing something wrong but if you are not it can be mystifying.”

Another poster at seroundtable.com had this to say (here is the thread http://forums.seroundtable.com/showthread.php?t=3131 ):

“I am not a professional web designer, but I write a site called Local Wally’s Guide to San Diego at www(dot)localwally.com. It’s been up since 1996 and I’ve always been in the top 3 listings when you google “san diego tourist guide”. Lately I’ve noticed if you google “san diego tourist guide” I no longer exist – but if you google “san diego tourist” or “san diego guide” I am back on top. So I went back in to add my url, and in a couple of days I’m back in business. But in about a week and a half, I fall off again and need to resubmit.

Any idea why this is happening? For years I have had top ranking, no issues, but this started about 2 months ago and it’s getting irritating!

Thanks for anyone’s help!

Gary
Local Wally”

If you notice the date of this post is 7-19-08 and he said it hit him about 2 months ago which, would put us back to around the time the June 4^th event occurred. Coincidence? I would have to lean towards a firm NO.

If a person was to take the time to really search through all the forums you would see a great amount of these same types of posts. Remember this is only a small amount of the webmasters that are having google problem as not every webmaster goes to a forum to post their findings. This is not just happening in the USA either, it has been affecting Google the world over. And if you dig into these posts you will see most lead back to the time around June 4^th.

The behavior of this “June 4^th problem” seems so erratic that no one can guess what site will be hit next. The sites that have been affected so far have been completely random where as it may hit one site in a niche industry and leave all others alone. Many forums are also commenting on what they are now calling the Google YO YO effect where rankings go up and down, up and down, on a daily basis and these sites that got caught in this loop can’t do anything to make their ranks stabilize anywhere, whether high or low.

There was also a cache problem that occurred with Google at the same time as can seen if you read the article I linked to first at the top of this document. With all these numerous problems that occurred at the same time it is hard for any individual to comprehend what could have happened at Google. I would guess that the leak about a human mistake is probably the closest to the truth where something within the Google system may have broken and realistically something breaking down in a system the size of Google would be like trying to find the proverbial needle in a haystack, which would be why it has not been fixed as of yet.

I can’t condemn Google if they did make a mistake or allowed something of this size to break because I understand the depth of their situation. However I do condemn them for not stepping forward to allow webmaster the world over to understand what is happening to their lively hood on the internet. But with many businesses dwindling away at the fault of Google they are probably afraid to come forward and be at the middle of a lynching mob.

Understand that this is the theory of one SEO specialist, and I can not solidly prove this last information to be solid fact, but after almost 2 months of research into what happened this does seem to be highly likely. If you the reader have any spare time start doing some searches on the topics I have mentioned and see if it takes you down the same road I have followed. I bet when all is said and done you will meet me at the end of the road…..

We at Blackwood Productions understand what you are going through if your site has been affected with the “June 4^th” bug. Until there is a better understanding on how to combat this or Google finally finds the fix we will do what we do best, white hat seo. Even if your site was hit by Google you still have Yahoo, MSN, and cuil. Rest assured that Google if broken will fix the problem because it is making the average web surfer suffer their crude results as well. And we will do our best to inform you of any updates to this Google dilemma.

Search Quality

A few weeks back Udi Manber introduced the search quality group, and the previous posts in this series talked about the ranking of documents. While the ranking of web documents forms the core of what makes search at Google work so well, your search experience consists of much more than that. In this post, I’ll describe the principles that guide our development of the overall search experience and how they are applied to the key aspects of search. I will also describe how we make sure we are on the right track through rigorous experimentation. And the next post in this series will describe some of the experiments currently underway.

Let me introduce myself. I’m Ben Gomes, and I’ve been working on search at Google since 1999, mostly on search quality. I’ve had the good fortune to contribute to most aspects of the search engine, from crawling the web to ranking. More recently, I’ve been responsible for the engineering of the interface for search and search features.

A common reaction from friends when I say that I now work on Google’s search user interface is “What do you do? It never changes.” Then they look at me suspiciously and tell me not to mess with a good thing. Google is fine just the way it is — a plain, fast, simple web page. That’s great, but how hard can that be?”

To help answer that question, let me start with our main goal in web search: to get you to the web pages you want as quickly as possible. Search is not an end in itself; it is merely a conduit. This goal may seem obvious, but it makes a search engine radically different from most other sites on the web, which measure their success by how long their users stay. We measure our web search success partly by how quickly you leave (happily, we hope!). There are several principles we use in getting you to the information you need as quickly as possible:

• A small page. A small page is quick to download and generally faster for your browser to display. This results in a minimalist design aesthetic; extra fanciness in the interface slows down the page without giving you much benefit.
• Complex algorithms with a simple presentation. Many search features require a great deal of algorithmic complexity and a vast amount of data analysis to make them work well. The trick is to hide all that complexity behind a clean, intuitive user interface. Spelling correction, snippets, sitelinks and query refinements are examples of features that require sophisticated algorithms and are constantly improving. From the user’s point of view search, almost invisibly, just works better.
• Features that work everywhere. Features must be designed such that the algorithms and presentation can be adapted to work in all languages and countries. Consider the problem of spell correction in Chinese, where user queries are often not broken up into words or Hebrew/Arabic, where text is written right to left (interestingly, this is believed to be an example of first-mover disadvantage — when chiseling on stone, it is easier to hold the hammer in your right hand!).
• Data driven decisions – experiment, experiment, experiment. We try to verify that we’ve done the right thing by running experiments. Designs that may seem promising may end up testing poorly.

There are inherent tensions here. For instance, showing you more text (or images) for every result may enable you to better pick out the best result. But a result page that has too much information takes longer to download and longer to visually process. So every piece of information that we add to the result page has to be carefully considered to ensure that the benefit to the user outweighs the cost of dealing with that additional information. This is true of every part of the search experience, from typing in a query, to scanning results, to further exploration.

The start of your search is typing in a query. A common cause of frustration is if you don’t know the correct spelling of a word! Spell correction — which seems like a simple and obvious feature — hides many technical challenges. No common English dictionaries would ever include the correct spelling of Britney Spears, for instance (who, probably completely unbeknownst to her, has become the poster child example for this feature). We do a huge amount of analysis of the billions of pages on the web and our query logs to determine what are “real words” on the web, and what are likely to be misspellings. The system that gives you the spell correction has to, in a fraction of a second, consider a huge number of possible words you might have meant (vastly greater than any dictionary ever manually constructed) and determine if there is a more likely query you meant to type. When we are confident that you actually meant to type something else, we take a rare liberty with our search results: we try to distract you from looking at the top result on the page. The spelling correction is in your line of sight and colored a bright must-see red. Furthermore, we now make sure that nothing else on the page is red, unless it is as important to you as spelling! (so far, nothing is). The algorithms involved in spell correction are constantly getting better. They now work in a large number of languages and are even better at detecting when you have made a spelling mistake. Getting the spelling of your query right is so important that we are considering showing you the results of the spell-corrected query in the middle of the page (just in case you missed our bright red text at the top and bottom!).

Having formulated your query correctly, the next task is to pick a page from the result list. For each result, we present the title and url, and a brief two line snippet. Pages that don’t have a proper title are often ignored by users. One of the bigger recent changes has been to extract titles for pages that don’t specify an HTML title — yet a title on the page is clearly right there, staring at you. To “see” that title that the author of the page intended, we analyze the HTML of the page to determine the title that the author probably meant. This makes it far more likely that you will not ignore a page for want of a good title. Below the title comes the snippet, and a key early innovation was in what Google showed for the snippet. At the time, search engines showed you the first two lines of the web page; Google, instead, showed you parts of the page where your actual search keywords showed up (information retrieval experts call this “keywords-in-context”). Showing keywords-in-context is visually simple and virtually indistinguishable from the simpler style of snippets, but vastly more useful in helping you decide which page to visit. This simplicity belies underlying complexity: when we create a snippet we have to go through the actual text from each result to find the most relevant part (which contain your keywords) rather than just giving you the first few lines.

We have been making improvements to our snippets over time with algorithms for determining the relevance of portions of the page. The changes range from the subtle – we highlight synonyms of your query terms in the results – to more obvious. Here’s an example screenshot where the user searched for “arod” and you can see that Alex and Rodriguez are bolded in the search result snippet, based on our analysis that you might plausibly be referring to him:

As a more obvious example, we now extract and show you the byline date from pages that have one. These byline dates are expressed in a myriad formats which we extract and present uniformly, so that you can scan them easily:

For one of the most common types of user needs, navigational queries — where you type in the name of a web site you know — we have introduced shortcuts (we refer to them as sitelinks). These sitelinks allow you to get to the key parts of the site and illustrate many of the same principles alluded to above; they are a simple addition to the top search result that adds a small amount of extra text to the page.

For instance, the home page of Hewlett-Packard has almost 60 links, in a two-level menu system. Our algorithms, using a combination of different signals, pick the top ones among these that we think you are most likely to want to visit.

What if you did not find what you were looking for among the top results? In that case, you probably need to try another query. We help you in this process by providing a set of query refinements at the bottom of the results page — even if they don’t give you the query that you need, they provide hints for different (likely more successful) directions in which you could refine your query. By placing the query refinements at the bottom of the page, the refinements don’t distract users, but are there to help if the rest of the search results didn’t serve a user’s information need.

I’ve described several key aspects of the search experience, including where we have made many changes over time — some subtle, some more obvious. In making these changes to the search experience, how do we know we’ve succeeded, that we’ve not messed it up? We constantly evaluate our changes by sharing them with you! We launch proposed changes to a tiny fraction of our users and evaluate whether it seems to be helping or hurting their search experience. There are many metrics we use to determine if we’ve succeeded or failed. The process of measuring these improvements is a science in itself, with many potential pitfalls. Our experimental methodology allows us to explore a range of possibilities and launch the ones that work the best. For every feature that we launch, we have frequently run a large number of experiments that did not see the light of day.

So let me answer the question I started with: We’re actually constantly changing Google’s result page and have been doing so for a long time. And no, we won’t mess with a good thing. You won’t let us.

What Is SEO and Why Do I Care?

SEO is yet another techie acronym to add to your arsenal. It stands for Search Engine Optimization and is all about optimizing your website’s position in search results. Many books have been written about SEO and websites are dedicated to it. It’s big business—and it should be.

Showing up higher in search results (like when you go to Google and type in a phrase or keyword) usually means more traffic and more business.

SEO is part science and part art. The SEO experts figure out what search engines look at when they rank websites. Then they figure out what can be tweaked to improve a site’s rank in the results. Some SEO tactics are of questionable value and others are borderline unethical, but the mainstream of SEO thought is simple, basic improvements that will boost your rank in search engine results.

It’s usually simple things like figuring out keywords for your site and then putting those keywords in the right places. Those right places include the title bar (the text that shows up at the top of your browser), any headers, headlines or bold text on a page, and the meta data (helpful information in a page’s code that’s not visible in a browser).

It’s really not rocket science. What search engines do is look at a page and try to figure out what’s the most important thing on that page. For a page to be the number one search result for something like rocket science it better have the words “rocket science” and other important keywords in key locations on the page. Otherwise it’s probably not really about rocket science.

Good SEO is about recognizing the same thing for your site. So if you’re in the rocket science business, you’d probably have keywords like rocket science, rockets, propulsion, physics, NASA, booster, missile, etc. And you’d want to use those words in your headlines and other important places on your site.

Online Social Marketing and the Call to Action – Just Do It

We firmly believe that the absolute most important part of using social media (Web 2) sites is the content you submit. Without good content you will not get your articles ranking in the search engines and even if you do get the rankings you will not get any conversions.

There are different types of online social marketing sites available to use. There are some that allow you to bookmark, some leave little comments or posts and others that allow you to create your own little page such as Squidoo.com, Hubpages.com, Ning.com, Google Notebook & Ezinearticles.com. It is these sites that the content we talk about in this post is focused on being used on.

The majority of people out there trying to earn money with these types of sites are often too focused on quantity rather then quality. They will outsource the content or spin it without taking the time to ensure it reads well and is informative. Your first priority needs to be focusing on the human visitor. You can then go back and tweak the content slightly to better optimize it for the search engines, which we will
explain more about later on.

The simplest and most effective method that we use for creating good “human focused” content is to follow the simple formula A.I.D.A. which stands for…

A – Attention: Get the persons attention right away. This is where your title (headline) comes into play. You will want to right away grab the attention of the reader and for an example, say we were promoting a page on our site that was a weight loss pre sales affiliate page for “Supplement X” and our keyword was “supplement x reviews”; our headline (content title) might be…

“Most Supplement X Reviews Are Full Of Crap, I Stopped Using It and I Will Tell You Why!”

Now, this might seem aggressive to some, but if you were looking for a supplement x review, would this not get your attention?

I – Interest: Now that you got their attention it is time to get their interest in what you are talking about. Following the above example, if our main purpose is to promote this product, this is where we have to pull the reader in and get them interested in learning more.

We have taken the stance that we will be slamming the product but in reality we will not be, the title was just to get their attention. You may want to start by explaining why other reviews are so fake and how it is so hard to know what is real out there. Peak their interest in what you have to say so they keep reading. It is very important that you relate to them right away as well. Remember, this is just an example of a strategy to try… you can write this however you want.

D – Desire: You got their attention, peaked their interest in learning more and so now it is time to spark a desire. In this example we would now need to make sure to come clean and explain what was meant about quitting supplement x. Maybe take the stance that we quit early on because of forgetting to take the supplement and then a month later started up again and we soon realized that quitting was the worse mistake we made because the product worked.

Make sure to explain the benefits of the product and how it will help. Do not just say something like “lose weight” instead you will want to highlight exactly what the benefits of this feature is. So you might say something like…

“Helped me to fit into my size 32 pants from a size 38 in only 30 days”

A – Action: This is now were you tell them how they can quench that desire. This is also where many people fail because they make a weak call to action and just leave the reader hanging. It is so important that you tell the reader exactly what to do. Do not just put something like a keyword linked to your page or use “Click Here” because this does not tell the reader why they need to take that action. Instead tell them why to “Click Here”.

A couple examples may be…

“Click Here Now to Learn How Easy it is to Get Started”

“Get complete access to this incredible system by Clicking Here Now”

You will want to reemphasize the benefits and encourage the reader that this is one of the smartest things they will ever do.

IMPORTANT: You will want to ensure you have linked to your page with the keyword but we also recommend you use a call to action word such as “Click Here”, these get much better clickthroughs then just the keyword. You can add a nofollow to the click here link if you like

It is also important to understand that this type of content is not for every social site, these are meant more for the sites that allow you to create a page that you own. Some sites however frown upon this type of content and do not like call to actions in the content and get up tight if there are more then 2 links in the content. Do not be discouraged if your content gets taken down from some sites, learn and tweak and try again. Remember though, the whole purpose is to get the reader to take an action and visit your blog.. so use the content to convince them that they need to do that.

TIPS: Grab a notepad and a pencil and rough out the outline of the content. It is easier to start it out this way then on a computer. Also, create your headline first and then the article… this helps guide you as to what to write about.

Once you have your content ready, you are going to want to optimize the content (we will talk about this tomorrow) and we will also show you how to make a few variations of one article for a few different sites

So, did you get anything worthwhile from this post?

Content Variation An Essential Ingredient in Web 2 0

As we hope we have been able to get across, one of the greatest things about using different “Web 2.0″ sites is the ability to own more then one result in the top 10 of Google with your content.

The problem is with Google’s “duplicate content filters” and if you are using only one variation of the content that you submit to the different sites you are pretty limited on how effective you can be. Of course you are already aware of this but it is just so much damn work… you create a great piece of content and then having to rewrite it over and over again… it is sooooo painful.

Here are two very simple “FREE” tricks that may.. and we stress “may” help you rewrite your content in a fraction of the time. These do not work in all situations and are not good for everyone but some of you will love them. With both of these methods, sometimes the resulting content can be very confusing and is almost easier just to rewrite the content from scratch but do test these out for yourself and see what you think.

Tip #1 Auto Summarize

With some of the sites you submit to you do not have to add the entire article, you can instead submit a 200 word summary of the content. We use this on sites like clipmarks.com and tumblr.com

To create a summary, simply use the Microsoft Word “Auto Summarize” feature. To use this feature click on the “Tools” menu inside MS Word and then click “AutoSummarize. . .”, then select the “Create a new document and put it there” and select 50% in the drop down menu (or less if you want).

Here is a helpful link to info about how to find and use it within MS Word. . .

http://www.microsoft.com/education/autosummarize.mspx

IMPORTANT –> Make sure to copy, paste and save the final document into a NotePad document (.txt) with the reason for this being MS Word will add extra hidden formatting characters that get copied into your posts and become formatting nightmares. By saving the document as a notepad .txt you remove all those extra characters. We wish MS Word would come out with the ability to copy clean text with no formatting… but no such luck yet.

If you do not own MS Word then there are some online tools for this and one of them is located at. . .

http://www.pertinence.net/ps/main.jsp?ui.lang=en

Tip #2 Google Translate

Step 1: Go to http://translate.google.com/ and enter your original content in the text box.

Step 2: Select to translate from “English” to “Spanish” and then click “Translate”

Step 3: On the right hand side of the screen, highlight and copy the spanish version and now paste it back into the text box.

Step 4: Select to translate from “Spanish” to “English” and click translate and voila you have a rewritten article. You will of course need to edit it so it reads well

If you need more then one variation, repeat this with the different languages.

Just a couple little tips on a summer weekend that we hope you find useful. If you have any tips you want to add, leave a comment below and I will add them to this post with a link to your site.