Google Lowered My PageRank, Was My Website Penalized?

A friend of mine recently emailed me to ask if his site was penalized for selling links. The same email went on to say that he is ranking better than ever in Google, even for his core category single word query, but his toolbar PageRank score dropped by one.

Google Stats Are Wonky

Many of Google's webmaster stats are rarely updated and/or intentionally inaccurate. And many stats change on a whim, while reflecting no real change in the structure of the web.

PageRank is the Wonkiest Stat of Them All

Toolbar PageRank scores are only updated about once every three months. In between updates hundreds of millions or billions of web pages are added to Google's index. These new pages absorb PageRank and generally cause the PageRank of existing pages to be lowered. Pages that were a high PR 7 might become a low PR7, pages that were a low PR7 might become a high PR6, and so on. The one exception to this rule is that if your site's inbound link authority grows faster than the web does then your PageRank score goes up.

PageRank is recomputed in near real time and toolbar PageRank scores are perpetually outdated. If you are starting from a PR0 and get a few quality links then of course you should expect a PageRank greater than 0 on the next update, but even the fact that your pages are getting indexed means you have some share of PageRank even if the toolbar does not show anything. In some cases the toolbar not only shows outdated data, but sometimes it even sticks, showing you the PageRank score of another site or showing all pages as 0.

It is no coincidence that Google chose not to update toolbar PageRank scores in a great deal of time before spreading more propaganda against paid links, and then launched a partial data push (how often do they do that)? This way when they finally update PageRank and many pages have a slightly lower PageRank score many webmasters will wonder "was I penalized?"

Why the Hate for Paid Links?

As Michael Gray rightly points out:

If Google wins what’s going to happen is the market will go underground. You’re going to have to "know a guy" to get you links. For a lot of people that removes any options, leaving the only option being Google. Does anybody really believe that the PHD’s at the plex haven’t applied any "gaming theory" to this model and figured out this will make them even more profitable? (c’mon we’re googly we’d never do that) Once the advertisers are underground, market forces of scarcity will take effect, and prices will skyrocket. So even if you don’t believe in paid links, you should still get involved in the debate, if for no other reason than to keep the advertising market free and open instead of under the control of Google.

If making PageRank function requires hand editing isn't that an indication that PageRank is irrelevant? Why not change they relevancy algorithms rather than trying to scare people?

Deflecting Blowback

Danny Sullivan posted about Google's latest battle against paid links. I followed up on the absurdity of the situation, and in response to our posts Danny and I were both called liars. Which might seem like a fair assessment of the situation to a person new to search marketing.

Why would Google make an official webmaster announcement, but provide no quotes for the story and not publish it on any of their own websites? Probably because they know what they are doing is illegal, and want to be detached from the story to not look like overzealous dictators.

What Google Can't Cloak

The two things Google can't cloak are the visitors they are sending you and how much they charge you for a click. Sure their ad auctions have a hidden "quality" factor to them, but that is just an indication of how much they trust your ad account and your site. If Google is sending you more traffic and ranking your site better then you have nothing to worry about.

My friend's lower PageRank score was an anomaly. It was irrelevant, because at the core, his site is ranking better and Google is sending him more traffic. At the end of the day Google can put smoke an mirrors wherever they like, but if your search traffic trend is up you are not penalized.

Why Search Traffic Can Go Down Without a Penalty

  1. Competition: if the competition is out-marketing you then your site might slip.
  2. Seasonal traffic patterns: if you go out of a high demand season it makes sense that your traffic may drop even if rankings improve.
  3. Automated filters: In some cased individual pages might get automatically filtered for being too closely aligned with a particular term, but they can usually overcome that by loosening the focus of those pages and their inbound anchor text. That is why it is important for an SEO to track their statistics, to know where they are and how reliant they are on each phrase. In some cases I have seen sites which ranked for many additional new queries but got filtered for one of their highest traffic terms. The page focus and anchor text was loosened and the page came back ranking better than ever.

Should I Launch My Website With an Affiliate Program?

Question: I am new to the market and have a product I am going to launch soon at a similar price-point to SEO Book. I am wondering if I should launch with an affiliate program, and if it will provide a substantial return prior to

Answer: I would say off the start don't enable an affiliate program until you have a better feel for the amount of effort required per purchaser and have brand awareness. I like launching without an affiliate program because it makes citations appear more natural. If you are launching a MLM hype program then a multi tiered affiliate program is a must, but if not the best option is to wait until you better learn your market and are well integrated into your market.

Why it is Best to Launch Without an Affiliate Program

  • If you test your marketing first you are going to be able to achieve a higher customer value and attract better affiliates.
  • If you are uncertain as to how to best sell your product and you have a new brand then it is going to be pretty tough for affiliates to sell it for you.
  • The best marketing looks organic. With a new product it is best to get reviewed by top editorial channels and earn a few organic citations to help others see your product as more than just hype. If a product is primarily or only hyped by affiliates off the start that can undermine your brand.
  • Some of my customers who did not sign up as affiliates have read my book and misquoted me to make me sound dumber than I am, and have misquoted to make me sound much smarter than I am. If others have profit incentive behind describing who you are or what you offer many will take the low road and use empty hype. Repositioning a brand after others have positioned it incorrectly is tougher than positioning it correctly off the start.
  • Another advantage of waiting on establishing an affiliate program is that by the time you launch it you have built enough trust that people will be willing to sign up with you directly.

The Dangers of a Loose Affiliate Program

If you start off with an affiliate program I think your best best is to make the affiliate program invite only off the start to ensure your brand is not dragged through the mud before you were able to build brand equity. Some of my affiliates have done things like

  • stealing content from my friends and wrapping it in banners for my site
  • mass email spamming (while signing my name to it)
  • a list of other dirty things I will not mention ;)

Because affiliates are hard to control, it is best to have a direct affiliate program rather than going through a third party website. This takes more time to manage, but enables you to

  • immediately warn affiliates and/or remove the profit incentive if they are doing things that are illegal and/or undermine your brand value
  • altert affiliates in advance of price changes, special promotions, or other changes to your offerings
  • keep in contact with your affiliates, protecting you from drastic cost increases seen at third party affiliate management firms like MyAffiliateProgram
  • more easily track historical trends
  • create your own dirty affiliate sites without risking your main brand

Some affiliate software also tracks referrals, which enables you to learn the difference between what sorts of traffic streams and marketing sell and which do not.

Corporations have sued other corporations based on ad targeting. Even if the lawsuits are bogus they still eat up time and valuable resources. Affiliate control is useful for mitigating some such conflicts.

A few years back a well known SEO said that I was deplorable for bidding on a broad basket of keywords including their name. One of their affiliates was bidding on my name, amongst others. Once questioned about the hypocrisy, this person eventually admitted that they were too lazy to police their own affiliates, which showed their complaint had no validity. If their complaint had validity they would have better been able to claim it by hosting their own affiliate program and holding their own affiliates to the same expectations they try to hold others to.

Affiliate Software Options

  • Some of the larger affiliate networks (like CJ) have a wide array of affiliates, but typically the best affiliates will hunt out the best affiliate programs wherever they are (instead of staying inside third party networks), so it might be just as easy to attract the best affiliates by ranking well for your keywords + affiliate program.
  • Google offers cost per action based referral ads, but they don't have much inventory, and most of the best affiliates do not like using Javascript or sharing their business model with Google.
  • Some of the smaller affiliate networks (like shareasale.com, as an example) have pitched me as a merchant for rates far below their published rates, but after seeing what happened with MyAffiliateProgram it does not make sense for me to pay a third party to place a roadblock between me and my affiliates.
  • ClickBank does not cost much to set up, but I have found that I get an extraordinary return rate there when compared with Paypal. Paypal does not have affiliate features baked into it, but does work with many affiliate software programs.
  • I use Idevaffiliate on Seo Book. Fully featured it costs $300.
  • As ShoeMoney recently highlighted, BOTW has a custom affiliate program which even tracks direct links to any page on their site. Creating such a program would probably only cost about $1,000 at most. And that link for BOTW may have been an affiliate link, and Google has no way of knowing.

The Beauty of Editorial Review Sites

Once you have a trusted brand you can create low value white label brands that are given a free pass by search engine editors based on the trust of your core brand. These can feed back profits to your main site in many ways, including allowing you to:

  • filter link juice to your mother brand site, which is especially useful for temporal news or in categories where link building is tough
  • create additional ad inventory that sells at the premium CPM rate of your core brand (see also: Extending the Reach / Circulation of a Web Based Content Site & Ad Network)
  • extend to new markets without requiring you to risk tarnishing your main brand

There are many ways to extend, including

What tips to do you have for extending your reach while protecting your brand?

Warning: New Google Webmaster's Guidelines

I just found another Google webmaster guideline worth sharing...

According to Matt Cutts, the FTC thinks you should clearly mark paid links. If you do clearly mark paid links Google editors will penalize you for buying / selling links, then they will pay an AdSense spammer to steal all your content. Don't worry though, as Google doesn't clearly mark their own ads.

Look at how closely timed the above posts were. Why would any webmaster mark their own sites to be penalized and stolen? Clear language is a wonderful thing.

Archiving is Getting Better, Cheaper, & Faster

Earlier this year the NYT dropped their subscription wall and Google started mixing many types of content (news, videos, etc.) directly into their search results.

10 Days ago Radiohead announced the name of their new album would be In Rainbows, and by the time the album was released today a person who uploaded a YouTube video of a live recording of the song Nude (from a concert I attended) already added the album name In Rainbows to the title of their popular recording.

Not only is more content coming online in more formats, and people getting better at writing for search and archiving information, but

  • personal search history and personalized search are making it easier to find things you found before
  • search suggestions are consolidating misspellings and other search errors into a streamlined set of searches

Everything is heading toward free, faster by the day, except attention and trust. All these types of changes pose new competition, shift business models, and kill off some forms of search arbitrage. But they also enable new forms of marketing, especially if you pay attention to the changing ways search engines attempt to guide searchers and surface information, create editorial partnerships with search engines, publish a well read channel, or have a strong enough brand and large enough reach to make others want to participate in your community.

Beijing SEO Meetup

George Kepnick (a.k.a. Werty) and Todd Malicoat (a.k.a. Stuntduble / Tuxedo Todd) will be in Beijing from October 12th through the 18th, and are hoping to hang out with some local SEOs. Just in case you have not yet met them, you can see a video of Todd talking here and a video of Werty dancing here. Please contact them via the contact form on Todd's site.

Interview of Eli from Blue Hat SEO.com

I have been a longtime reader and fan of BlueHatSEO.com, and recently asked Eli for an interview. He said sure, and here it is.

What is your background? What got you into SEO?

I started around '95-'96. I had a lot of interest in music and games and stuff so I created a couple sites related to stuff I normally really enjoy and download a lot. I got in good company with a few guys who ran hosting and colocation companies who made quite a bit of money so naturally my focus started shifting towards how I can make as much as they do. From there it kind of spurred into researching and developing traffic generation and search engine related stuff in an effort to keep up with these guys who had quite a bit more resources and money than my broke ass did. From there it kind of escalated and apart from a short break in college I've been doing it ever since.

You have many original posts on your blog highlighting many interesting techniques I have never heard shared publicly before. How do you come up with all your new ideas?

Thanks, even though they seem pretty generalized and polished many of the techniques I talk about are developed from either a problem I've had to solve in the past or stuff I've encountered while dabbling in specific industries. For instance bloggers as an industry have a multitude of resources and methods they use to promote their blogs. While a lot of their techniques may seem like common sense to them and are well formed over years of experience and others fine tuning it, their methods and resources may not be so obvious to people in other industries. It's fairly safe to say that I have ADD when it comes to jumping around in various niches and markets so I get a good variety of the unique ways each one markets their sites. While it may be standardized stuff to them, many of the techniques can be spun and with a little creative twist can be applied to any other form of generic sites. So while many of the techniques may create a Why didn't I think of that moment, most are well practiced and many marketers within the specific industries they came from know no other ways of doing it. I just kind of twist them and collaborate them into a methodology anyone can use based on my own experiences and how I've applied them to my sites. Eitherway none of the techniques I talk about ever negatively affects my actual business and I usually have the techniques spun an even better way before I give out the old way.

Isn't the value of many aggressive SEO ideas inversely proportional to the number of people using them? What makes you decide what ideas to share and when to share them?

In many cases that's absolutely correct. I've shared several techniques that have died within days of posting them. Just to list a few examples, my Abandoned Wordpress series, Wikipedia Series, and Amazon.com exploits. In all these cases I know before I ever post it that it'll die moments after I do. So most of the time I'll post it out of greed. They are usually techniques I've been using for several years and have since retired them out and quit using them. Naturally with any technique others are bound to figure it out. When I start seeing them popup underground and are being used against me in increasing numbers when I'm no longer using them myself I might as well wreck it. There's a saying; If you're going to wreck a room, you might as well WRECK IT. So in those rare cases when a retired technique starts becoming this annoying little buzz in my ear I might as well squash it and help out a few of my readers at the same time. Win-win if you ask me. Most of my other techniques on the other hand are scalable and free range. I develop them to last, so whether I'm the only one doing it or everyone else on the net is doing it they're not something that can get stopped only suppressed. Often times through saying stuff like Don't do that, its sneaky and we don't like it. Existing propaganda and inherent difficulties in the technique itself usually take care of the rest and help weed out the people who just read for entertainment. There are a few people however that have been reading since the very beginning and after every single post actually do every technique and report back to me through email. They'll be the first to testify that the techniques almost never die, and just because many people know about them doesn't mean everyone is actually using them.

What are QUIT and SQUIRT? Is your system fairly scalable? What types of risks are associated with using them? What types of site should I consider using them on?

QUIT stands for Quick Indexing Tool and SQUIRT stands for Super Quick Indexing & Ranking Tools. My office is filled with wacky and weird acronyms. QUIT is the free one that basically employs several hands off indexing techniques I've developed over the years. It helps get the submitted site crawled by the search engines very quickly, and often times indexed within a day or two. It works off a very simple principle. How many ways can you think of to attract a search engine bot to a specific url? Make a list...figure out a way to do each one with a hands off approach (can't modify the site). You got yourself a Quick Indexing Tool. :) SQUIRT is the paid version and works much the same way. It employs all the techniques QUIT does plus a few extras that aren't scalable, so the membership must be limited. It also goes one step further and develops a bit of link worth to the site to ease it into better deep indexing and rankings. Lastly, it uses analysis of the site to counter a few shortcomings through hands off methods. Just as an example, if a page of the site doesn't have the targeted keywords in its title, then give that page a few backlinks with the keywords as the anchor text. Stuff like that. Most of it is very simple, there's just a lot of it in play at once.

If search did not exist what do you think you would be doing right now?

Lol, I'd be super sizing your Value Meal.

Currently it appears as though Google is heavily focused on domain age and authority. Do you see them staying this way for a long time? Does improving automated content generation technology make it hard to move away from domain authority? Where do you see them going next with their relevancy algorithms?

I'm going to have to politely disagree with that. I think Google is moving in the opposite direction. More towards LSI technology and content relevancy as it pertains to the domain as whole much like Yahoo has been trying to pull off for many years. I think the direction switch started taking place when MSN came out with its own engine. While MSN focuses heavily on age as it pertains to their index rather than actual domain age back when it first opened it had a very young and growing index. So the rankings were more determined by keyword relevancy. So there was a brief period where MSN had all these really nice fresh sites and while rankings were much easier to come by they had fresh results with newly updated content and newer sites with better information. Meanwhile Google, who was relying heavily on DMOZ (as a basic prerequisite for rankings) was finding themselves with SERPS that had a bunch of old stagnant abandoned sites. This was very apparent if you were developing sites in aged industries such as Real Estate. Just three years ago if you had a real estate site, no matter how good it was, it was constantly outranked by old agent cookie cutter sites, and unless your site was at least a year old it would have a hard time even popping into the top 100 for its keywords. Now you can see things moved in quite a bit different direction. You can get a site competing in an aged niche just as easily as long as the content fits properly and in a much shorter time (3-8 months as apposed to a full year minimum in certain cases). I do agree and see authority as a big issue though. Fortunately authority can be replicated and pushed. I did a post awhile back called SERP Domination that talked about ways to push authority and get a brand new site to compete in highly competitive niches. I think improving your automated content plays a big part in that.

Google is starting to move away from being a search engine toward being a content host. How do you see this affecting the future of spamming Google?

Absolutely. There is a breaking point in Google becoming a content host, which I'm certain is their overall goal. As long as they can reward the contributors with increased traffic to their site (ie. -negative rankings..above the top listing like with google base products) people will be willing to donate content to them. I for one will testify that Google Base is very difficult to spam on a mass level as apposed to their search. This is due to the fact that they have a very good hands on antispam team and their content levels are low enough for human checks to be possible. The way I see it is, as their content hosting efforts increase, so will the possibilities for spamming them on a mass scale. It's just a matter of time. Until then, I limit my spamming of them at a level just below getting caught. At the moment, unlike Adsense, their multiaccount banning capabilities are very well done and to be frank it works out well for them. Their content is very good and in all objectiveness very well kept as far as spam goes.

I have never done much overtly black hat SEO. I was not good at programming when I got on the web and after I had been online for a few years I decided to try to build things that can grow logarthimically. Can black hat techniques grow logarthmically? Do you have any strong branded sites to stabelize your income if the black hat streams come and go? How many different website marketing techniques do you use at any given time?

With beautiful domains like blackhatseo.com and seobook.com theres no doubt in my mind you have a nack for predicting the next big things in the industry. If I were you I wouldn't bother with black hat either. You obviously got it made with the skills you already have. I do preach a lot about programming and building sites through autogeneration. In fact a lot of people consider my style Code SEO. I have quite a few very high profile sites, you've probably heard of them and they do bring in good money but I don't ever really talk about them. I like to diversify my investments because not every investment is solid. As far as my blackhat network goes it is actually as solid as it gets. It's very rare when a black hat site of mine gets banned and if you saw one unless you have a really well trained eye you'd probably have a very hard time knowing it was black hat. Thats just part of the investment though. The more legit you can make things appear while autogenerating it the more income you can squeeze out of it in a site's lifecycle.

What is the longest timeframe you have seen an overt black hat site rank for in the various engines? How much have the lifespans of these types of sites changed over the past 5 years?

I think the lifespans of black hat sites increase as your skillsets increase. I have some black hat networks that are still around now and bringing in income and gosh I don't even remember when I made them. Thats also why I talk a lot of "hosted black hat sites" on orphan subdomains and such. Like in my recent SEO Empire post. They really help when making the obvious ones stick. I usually stick to the rule of thumb, if you can mimic the footprints of white hat sites and minimize the footprints of blackhat sites than theres no reason why they shouldn't last forever. Search engines can only ban a footprint that no legitimate sites use. So if you're interested in starting blackhat, as long as you stick by that principle you'll be just fine as far as investments go.

Are there some markets that are too competitive for automated marketing? How do you do successful black hat SEO in hypercompetitive markets like mortgage or insurance?

I don't personally compete in competitive black hat dominated markets, like you mentioned mortgages and pharmaceuticals and such. I feel a little more secure with my black hat sites roaming around the longtailed phrases and localities. It's just a matter of putting in the extra effort which in those cases I'm too set in my ways to sit down and accomplish. I know several people who do strictly that and make a very good living, but I personally have no strong opinions on the matter. So I leave those markets to the pros and if I want to get competitive I use my white hat sites to do it.

Do you do much client work? Have any AdSense sites? Do you mostly rely on affiliate commissions? Have any infoproducts or more tools coming out? What business model do you see as the best source of growth for established SEOs? What segment do you think looks best for new webmasters?

I've never done any client or paid SEO work. I couldn't imagine a worse form of hell to be honest :) I do answer a lot of questions privately though, or at least as many as I have time for. I have lots of adsense sites. I do mostly affiliate marketing and CPC, but I've spent a couple years of my career building actual ecommerce sites. Other than additions to SQUIRT I really don't have any new webmaster related products coming out. I had a few ideas I set into motion but it may be a looong time before they actually come around. I would like to do more though, but I'm afraid of spreading myself too thing. Internet Marketers as I'm sure you're well aware of can be very demanding of ones sanity. When it comes to business models though I wrote a post called SEO Empire. It is MY business model. I've always wanted to write a detailed article on web investments and that's probably as close as it comes to making me happy.

Given the offline macroeconomic trends and trends online what high growth markets do you think are currently less competitive than they should be?

Well of course I'd have to couple trademarked markets into that group, such as myspace, facebook, digg and such. As long as they are working hard to knock down the big boys in the coattailing markets theres always room for new growth. The biggest market I see right now that no one has yet to figure out a good way of capitalizing on is web episodes and webtv. Theres sites like tv-links and other show specific sites that give out streaming episodes of tv shows and movies that are in constant danger of copyright infringement and being shut down by their hosts. More often than not these types of sites get more traffic than they can handle very quickly just because they are in such high demand. Even just putting up a simple site for a small anime type show with all the current episodes available to stream can drive thousand of visitors a day within a month or two of being brand new. The only problem the industry has to figure out is how to keep from getting shut down and attacked constantly. This just goes in line with a theory I've started pushing my own company towards quite a few years ago that television and the Internet are increasingly having an effect on each other.

You seem to be quite outspoken about there being many scams and a lot of hype in the SEO market, complete with A lists and all that sort of stuff. Do you ever see these trends changing? Are these niche specific, or just a reflection of general social structures that cross all lands and industries?

Yeah thats definitely a topic I feel very passionately about. I think scams and hype only exist where theres opportunity. Our industry just happens to have a ton of opportunities for it to flourish. I just try to do my part, step up the plate and make a difference. I take it to a bit of an extreme though by attempting to cover the Advanced SEO topic which is kind of like the Antarctica of SEO, most know its there but how many have actually seen it talked about? The reality is, all I'm doing is making changes by example. I'm saying this is how I want SEO blogs to be like, the spirit can be applied to just about any aspect of our industry including newbie material. Persistently, instead of using the success of it to promote myself or advertisers I use it to promote other likeminded blogs. Many small blogs have made it big and exploded over night just by showing they have what it takes by writing a guest post on Blue Hat and getting it published. Thats where I'm seeing this trend go every day. I really don't think it'll be very much longer before the bloggers that work torwards being helpful start really showing that they are truly taking over. You can see the gurus that establish their expertise by bragging rather than showing are starting to slope and decline to make room for those that are mimicking the helpful spirit. It's just a matter of time and I think it'll come faster than people imagine :)

I am new to online marketing...what books, articles, blog posts, and blogs should I start reading?

Lol, ass kissing aside, i really do send nearly all new people to the industry that talk to me to SEOBook. SEO book gives it out clearly and explains the stuff they need to know. Everywhere else tends to be flooded with bait and switch tactics and misinformation that leads them to the exact opposite direction they should be going. Not only is it a good resource but it's miles ahead of the other blogs and books trying to attract "offer fillers." <- my affectionate term for John Chow readers (my words not Aarons). I also like several blogs where the writer is not only talented but is also in the thick of the industry just like his/her readers and trying to make his way. For instance JonWaraas.com does a great job candidly talking about his experiences and what he's learning at the moment. He's also cool enough to share his sites with you. A great step from there might be the late NetBusinessBlog.com where the new writer and past talk about nice little techniques that range anywhere from intermediate to advanced and are always a great read. Also can't go without mentioning EarnersBlog.com, busin3ss.name, and professionalmiddleman.com.

I am new to the web...when should I consider quiting my job to be a full time marketer/webmaster? What are the biggest attributes I need to succeed online in today's market.

By all means please eat. Three out of every four projects I develop fail overall. As a new person to the business expect to do much worse, so make sure to take care of yourself first and the business second. The added stress of having to pay bills while developing your business only escalates the toll off the inevitable failures that await you. Thats the beauty of the Internet business. hehe don't just dive into a pool without checking the water first. You can get started without a $100k+ startup cash and tons of risk. You'll still have to work just as hard as any other business startup, you just have the luxury of being capable of starting small. The only quicksand you'll run into is the myth that you can make money in your spare time. Many often figure out, who actually has SPARE time? You have to treat it just like a regular job. Make smart investments in both time and money. Build and escalate until your other job starts to phase out. When you can finally answer both of these questions with a yes you should be good to quit your day job. 1) Does your day job earnings supplement your online earnings? (or is it visa versa). 2) If you suddenly got sick and were taken away from your online work for three months, would you come back to a business that has grown?

What is the best keyword you have ever ranked for? What is the best keyword you ever ranked for using almost nothing but automated mareting free content?

Should have specified a time frame, but since you didn't we'll go old school :)

At one time or another in my career: Music, MP3, Downloads, Freeware, Real Estate, Games, WWW, Homes, Pamela Anderson, Internet, Bikini, Sites and College.

No, sad to say I don't have any sites that still rank for any of those terms. :( But I still do have some very competitive phrases amongst my sites today, they just can't compete with some of the million dollar ones from back in the day when SEO was relatively new.

Have you ever felt a search engineer was lying about something? If so, have you ever called them out on it?

I think we're being lied to about nofollow. Consider this the call out :)

It seems as though large branded sites are able to get away with far more than smaller newer websites can. What tools or features would you like to see search engines make available to help level the playing field? Do you think search engines are more focused on relevancy or profit?

I think they're focused on profit through relevancy, and currently they attempt to accomplish that with authority factors. The playing field isn't level because its designed not to be. I honestly wouldn't want it to become level and fair. I kind of see it as "I don't have to outrun the bear, I only have to outrun you."

Do you ever see search losing some of its importance? What might replace it?

Webmasters set the pace the web, they always have. What's important to the webmasters becomes important to the users. It was the webmasters that made Google, MSN, and Yahoo important not the other way around. Just throughout history, the moment webmasters quit caring about something it becomes obsolete and forgotten by everyone within no time, the opposite is also true. It's entirely possible that search will lose its importance. I don't see it happening anytime soon, but if the average webmaster gets frustrated enough with them and a good alternative comes out I'm sure it won't take very long from that point before its gone. A good way for them to begin that process might be to hand pick a couple sites like wikipedia and have them conquer every single result...oh wait.

Do you ever see Google losing their dominance? What might replace them?

Going along with the above question, there was a short time in Google's history right before Matt Cutts and Webmaster Guidelines/Tools where they started becoming very secretive about their algorithm and lost nearly all contact with webmasters outside of a submit url button. During that time a whole multitude of search engines and creative forms of search started popping up like crazy. It was like there was a new one almost every day. Some were really fun to play around with. None really had both the form and function that would of inspired a permanent switch for me, but it goes to show how easy it is and I doubt Google will make that mistake again.

Do you feel domains names have large synergies with SEO? I am currently not using the domain names BlackHatSEO.com and WhiteHatSEO.com to their full potential. What do you think I should do with them? What would you do with them if you owned them?

I think domains are a very large factor in SEO and I don't think many will disagree. I was always curious about those domains of yours Aaron. They're awesome. I'm sure you get asked 10 times a day to sell them. Why not throw up forums on them or even mashups? I understand your underuse of them though, I'd be all excited to get them but then I'm certain a hard reality would hit and I'd come up blank for what to actually do with them. I personally would love to some day see an AskABlank SEO site. I'm sure you've seen the format before, its like Ask A Midget(hypothetical, don't go searching for it). Then people get to submit questions and the midget answers and it gets posted publically covering various topics, but with SEO. An idea?

Why BlueHatSEO? Why not another word/color?

Completely, 100% random. I'm not even fond of the color Blue, Green is my fav. If you've ever noticed, the site is extremely generic. Default Wordpress template, No SEO, no link building (never even done a link exchange), no link bait, no nofollow tags, no submissions to social sites, no promoting...absolutely nothing from the very beginning. Very very -by- all definition and to the core... pure white hat. I did it intentionally to make a point. Interesting Trivia For Ya: Can you name the ONE other popular SEO blogger that has also done it? Minus maybe the ridding of nofollow tags. :)

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Thanks Eli. Be sure to check out his blog at Blue Hat SEO.com.

Fear & Irrational Exuberance: Alan Greenspan Explains Why Google is Worth Trillions of Dollars

Alan Greenspan was recently interviewed on the Daily Show.

Explaining his old job, he stated:

I have been dealing with these big mathematical models forecasting the economy, and I am looking at what is going on in the past few weeks and say, you know if I could figure out a way to determine weather or not people are more fearful, or changing to more euphoric, and I have a third way of figuring out which of the two things were working, I don't need any of this other stuff.

I could forecast the economy better than any way I know. The trouble is that we can't figure that out. Forecasting today is as good or bad as it was 50 years ago. The reason is human nature hasn't changed. We can't improve ourselves.

Economic Trends Are Caused by Emotions

The prices of commodities often change without any underlying change in value, just a change in perceived value. After all, what is money backed by and why did the dollar lose 25%+ of its value over the last few years? If it is supply and demand related, why did we need to sharply increase the supply of currency? Once a trends start heading in one direction, just the creation of the trend (or perception of the trend) causes a following.

Investments are based on risk to reward ratios, and if people are afraid they are less likely to take risks. People like what is familiar, but by the time something has no perceived risk there is little upside potential, and then eventually the bottom falls out of the market, like what happened with real estate recently.

Tracking Real Estate

Paul Kedrosky recently posted about real estate predicting broader market trends, the mortgage market meltdown destroying a town, and using Google trends to predict real estate markets.

Letting Google Share Other's Emotions With You

Google makes communication faster and cheaper, advertising more relevant and trackable, and audience aggregation more efficient. They also create a lot of cool tools that evolve the web which allow publishers to layer value over the top of them. Not only can you use Google to predict real estate trends, but you can use them to

Trends Are Increasingly Fast

There is already a college course on making Facebook applications. Facebook applications are less than a year old, and colleges are typically years behind the market.

With Google's mass storage of usage data, huge reach, analytics and conversion tracking code they can track the changes of sentiment and demand faster than anyone else can. They can buy out competitors before anyone else understands their full value.

Classifying Fear & Euphoria

Just like Google can classify queries as being informational or transactional in nature, how hard would it be for them to

  • track searches and classify them as pessimistic or optimistic?
  • track searches of people who visit Google Finance often (or any other finance site, given the Google Toolbar) and classify them as pessimistic or optimistic?
  • track changes in outlooks from people who are known thought leaders, have old trusted accounts, and/or have spent significantly through Google Checkout?
  • track search volume and link it to economic activity?
  • assign an economic value to each query based on ad value?

Right there Google is already a better economic predictor than anything the Fed could hope to be, but what happens if Google decides to also buy and sell securities?

How Google Can Influence Markets

Answers.com

A couple years ago Google switched their definitions link partnership from Dictionary.com to Answers.com. Earlier this year Answers.com announced they were buying the competing Dictionary.com, and a Google update caused Answers.com's traffic to plunge.


When Answers.com announced their Google traffic was cut their stock plunged, which indicates two things:

  • Answers.com has a weak business model
  • Google has leverage to make Answers.com do whatever Google wants

In spite of Answers traffic increasing and a recent stock market rally, their stock is still down quite a bit from its highs. Answers recently did gain a bit of value though, when they announced they renewed their Google ad syndication partnership.

Syndication = Spam?

In the same way that an algorithm adjustment can kill the profitability of a site, so can a new Google business partnership with a competitor, as newspapers are figuring out right now. If syndication is a large part of your business model look for that stream of revenue to dry up soon.

Flawed Self Analysis

We are bad at self analysis, but we tend to like / trust / believe what is familiar. If we let machines know us well enough they will find the holes in our personalities and egos that are easy to exploit for profit.

Personalized search helps highlight what is familiar, and makes us trust Google more by reinforcing our worldviews. Not only can Google bring back things you liked in the past, but they can recommend new stuff, guide your thoughts, and share ads as content.

Predicting the Future With 99%+ Accuracy

Not only can Google update algorithms or add features to stun competitors, but they also could easily see real trends first hand (like cuts in marketing budgets, search related product demand, or organic mentions) and trade securities or derivatives in near real time. They also have a pretty good idea of the types of sites their next filters are going to take out.

What more for predicting market trends if Google buys DoubleClick (a leading online ad server) and become a free international Internet service provider? Cory Doctorow recently covered how Google can go wrong, but until more people think along those lines Google is going to grow to be the single largest economic engine in the world, and the best predictor of micro and macro economic trends.

Google is Becoming Wikipedia Without the Talk Page

In a recent post about paid links, Danny Sullivan wrote about how Google's army of engineers are going to start hand editing PageRank scores if they think you are selling links, which is a move that wreaks of desperation.

Google is only decreasing the PageRank for a subset of the sites they actually know about. ...

Google stressed, by the way, that the current set of PageRank decreases is not assigned completely automatically; the majority of these decreases happened after a human review. That should help prevent false matches from happening so easily.

In contrast, if you're a smaller site not deemed as important to relevancy, a harsher punishment of a ranking penalty may be dealt out.

Introducing the New, Corporate Web

If they actually follow through with any of this then Google, which touts the value of PageRank, clearly no longer believes in its value. They already show stale data in their toolbar, and might as well scrap the whole thing and start fresh. Their mind control exercise is getting a bit obnoxious.

Now they are editing PageRank and relevancy scores. They don't edit based on quality of information but based on method of promotion. And if it is a corporation breaking Google's arbitrary shifting ruleset then Google simply decides not to edit, or only fakes that they care.

Google is Wikipedia, but Worse

With this news of more hand editing, Google also shows that they are biased against small webmasters are and actively trying to screw over small webmasters to increase their corporate profits.

Google is becoming much like the Wikipedia, where generalists wrongly assume topical knowledge greater than that of the real topical experts. In some cases Wikipedia is saved by talk pages and community participation that allow the experts to be heard. Google has no talk page though, which means that Google search results will become a dried out and dumbed down version of the web.

The Real Problem With Half Truths & Hand Editing

The response to every move is a counter move. So if they actually try to squash link buying then webmasters will look for indirect ways to purchase links. Google also offers tips on how to sculpt PageRank, but sculpt to much and suddenly the intent is changed, and you are banned.

Why leave such a thing up to a single Google engineer making a judgement call? If they want to increase the quality of the web they need to be more innovative in encouraging the creation of good content, not make people afraid to invest into creating content only to watch a Google engineer kill it.

Link bait is good when you are a large corporation or are syndicating Google spin, but if you are too successful at link bait they will ban your site for it. They did it to one of my sites and they even banned one of their own site.

If you are a small webmaster and get judged by Google don't expect compassion. They have no talk page, and they already paid an AdSense publisher to steal all your content. They don't need you.

How to Do Well in Google

If you are a webmaster assume that Google is lying to you and ignore them. If their view of the web and webmaster advice are reduced to half truths and lies then we can only hope something a bit more honest will come out of their downfall.

While I Was Getting Married....

These are some of the interesting things that happened while I was getting married.

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