23 out of the top 32 Google search results for titleist provx golf balls are ebay.com, subdomain.ebay.com, spam.subdomain.ebay.com, popular.spam.subdomain.ebay.com, etc.

Maybe they didn't intend to use the subdomains so aggressively. Maybe it is not search spam. But even if that is the case, it is a display of pathetic relevancy algorithms by Google. Time to move away from core domain authority or put a cap on the subdomains Google.

Nick Carr posted about Google's plans to police the web. Imagine if you give Google your data that they certify you with some symbol of trust. And if you don't, you are less likely to be certified unless you have a preponderance of other quality signals. Guilty until proven innocent is the way of the relevancy algorithms. Why would the safety algorithms be any different?

What happens to your sites rankings and sales if it is unrated or deemed potentially risky? Fear is a compelling marketing mechanism. AOL has used it for how many years?

Many publishers hide additional information sections that they want people to be able to select viewing if they show interest in the topic. For example, each of Think Progress's navigational sections are expandable, and some publishers have more information or other informational cues to make additional page content visible. These can be used deceptively, but if you have a strong brand and are trying to use them with the end user in mind, I doubt search engines will think the intent is bad.

AdSense Section Targeting:

As search has taken a larger and larger piece of the web search engines have given us ways to mark up our pages to suit their needs. AdSense section targeting made it easier for Google to target content ads to your site. That sounds like a good idea, but they also offer tags that offer publishers no value.

Google's NoFollow:

Nofollow was originally recommended to stop blog comment spam, but it has morphed into a tag that Matt Cutts wants you to use on any paid or unnatural link. What makes a link unnatural? In one form or another almost everything is paid for, by giving away value, exchanging currency, or nepotism.

Do You Trust Yourself?

If a page has many nofollow tags on it isn't that another way of saying that the publisher does not trust their own content? If a publisher says that they don't trust their own content or their own advertisers then why would search engines (or savvy webmasters) want to trust them?

The Machine is Broken:

Bob Massa recently highlighted how absurd the current use of the nofollow attribute is:

Mr. Cutts, speaking on behalf of Google presumably, made the comment, "if you want to buy links just for traffic, totally fine just don’t do it so they affect search engines".

This concept is completely flawed. This self serving philosophy is also at the very core of the problem. When the machine attempts to modify the behavior of people to satisfy it’s own ends, the machine is broken. What people do should not be seen as affecting the search engine. What people do should be the very reason for the engine to exist in the first place. If the search engine is being affected by the actions of people, is any logical person going to honestly assume that it is the people that are broken? That is exactly what is happening here.

Yahoo!'s Robots-Nocontent Attribute:

Search engines have got better at identifying duplicate content. Some search engines may boilerplate strip obvious navigational elements from pages. Some may place pages with too much duplicate content in supplemental results. Some may sites with too much duplicate content in reduced crawling status.

There are all of these ways to fight off content duplication and Yahoo! offers a robots-nocontent tag. One of the first people to comment on the news was Google's Matt Cutts, who said:

Danny, can you ask how Yahoo intends to treat links in the "robots-nocontent" section?

Don't Use the Robots-Nocontent Attribute:

It might be easy to add class="robots-nocontent" to some of your divs, but should you? I think it has little value. Sure you could use it in a sneaky way, as suggested by Jay Westerdal, but the problems with that are:

• it looks sneaky

• you are removing content from your pages (and will thus rank for fewer phrases)
• there are easier and more effective ways of changing the meaning of a page without looking so sneaky...like just rewriting an article, adding a spammy comment that looks like it came from a third party, or adding a few additional words here or there.

Yahoo! is the top network of sites on the web. Internally they have publishing teams and an SEO team. If their search engineers can't figure out how to use their own internal traffic stats and other relevancy measurements to refine their duplicate detection algorithms they deserve to bleed marketshare until they no longer have relevancy in the marketplace.

How to Change the Focus of a Page Without Using Robots-Nocontent:

If you want to change the focus of your pages here are some of the best ways to do it

• Ensure your page title and meta description are unique. Do not place the same words at the start of every page title on all the pages of a new website.

• Make your h1 headings and subheadings target a slightly different word set than your page title.
• If your page is thin on content, add more additional relevant unique content to the page. The solution to not getting killed by duplicate content filters is adding more unique content, not stripping out obvious required duplication (such as navigation and advertisements) that search engines should be able to figure out.
• If your site has comments or consumer feedback you can post or encourage feedback that targets other keywords. Comments offer free text. A 500 word page with an additional 1,000 words in the comment section may rank for 2 or 3 times as many search queries. Don't throw away the free content.
• For those who are really aggressive and have crusty links that will never be removed, consider placing your commercial messages on one of your highly trusted high ranking pages. People buy and sell websites, who is to say that the contents of a URL can't change?

The .TV relaunch was not very successful because the premium domain name prices are yearly recurring fees (which may increase beyond that price buy some unknown amount). People who would create great content and later stumble into a business model are not likely to do so on a premium .tv name...which means most of those domain names won't have high quality content on them. Those that do may see thin profit margins because they have no control over their domain names...as they make them more valuable the registrar can increase prices without mercy, and when the registrant can no longer afford the domain names the registry gets to keep or sell any brand value the registrant built up. John Scott had a great post about people feeling guilty for buying links:

If you feel guilty about buying links, you’re probably feeling guilty for a reason. Perhaps your guilt comes from the fact that you are trying to rank a site for a keyword it doesn’t deserve ranking for. If that’s the case, stop trying to rank it for that keyword, and get you’re business in order. Get the site and your business to the place where you can honestly say that your site deserves to rank #1 for that keyword, and your business deserves to be #1 based on the merits of your business.

Yesterday at a market I bought this terrific soap with my girlfriend. The problem is that the packaging has a URL on it. No need to go to the vendor again. It is hard for the end vendor to get any traction as the supplier sells directly, has pricing control, and is more convenient to order from.

If you are too dependant on any one supplier or any one source of leads then you need to re-evaluate your position to decrease your risk profile and come up with ways to build your brand value.

Forbes recently wrote an article about Google's supplemental results, painting it as webpage hell. The article states that pages in Google's Supplemental index is trusted less than pages in the regular index:

Google's programmers appear to have created the supplemental index with the best intentions. It's designed to lighten the workload of Google's "spider," the algorithm that constantly combs and categorizes the Web's pages. Google uses the index as a holding pen for pages it deems to be of low quality or designed to appear artificially high in search results.

Matt Cutts was quick to state that supplemental results are not a big deal, as Rand did here too, but supplemental results ARE a big deal. They are an indication of the health of a website.

I have worked on some of the largest sites and network of sites on the web (hundreds of millions+ pages). When looking for duplicate content or information architecture related issues, the search engines do not allow you to view deep enough to see all indexing problems, so one of the first things I do is use this search to find low quality pages (ie: things that suck PageRank and do not add much unique content to their site). After you find some of the major issues you can dig deeper by filtering out some of the core issues that showed up on your first supplemental searches. For example, here are threadwatch.org supplemental results that do not contain the word node in the URL.

If you have duplicate content issues, at best you are splitting your PageRank, but you might also affect your crawl priorities. If Google thinks 90% of a site is garbage (or not worth trusting much) I am willing to bet that they also trust anything else on that domain a bit less than they otherwise would, and are more restrictive with their willingness to crawl the rest of the site. As noted in Wasting Link Authority on Ineffective Internal Link Structure, ShoeMoney increased his search traffic 1400% after blocking some of his supplemental pages.