Why in Elvis’ Name Do I Blog?
Michael Goldberg tagged me. I was also tagged earlier by SEM Zone and I even wrote a response but I forgot all about it. UPDATE: JLH and John aka Softplus also tagged me. John says I’m not revealing enough about myself, hmmm…
So, should I post a serious reply, try to be funny like Wayne Knight fumbling through Thank God You’re Here, or write a link bait piece like I was Rand Fishkin Jr.?
I suck at talking about my cats, so I’ll let my honesty bore you to death.
In December 2005, one of my money sites went completely supplemental. I’m talkin’ a 2000+ page site reduced to 3 pages. This was back before Big Daddy when no one had a clue about the supplemental index. On WMW, everyone was fixated on duplicate content, gs1md leading that discussion with a ton of insights into combatting canonical issues. The SEO “experts” outside of WMW didn’t have much of a clue. For example, This is the first article I ever read about supplemental results, written by Jim Boykin:
Now, for the dirt - how to get out.
1. If you stole content - change it.
2. If there’s no content - add some.
3. If it’s orphaned - link to it.
(Love your blog Jim, but first impressions die hard :D) On Sept 6, 2006, Ammon over on cre8 said this about the supplemental index:
Supplemental usually means “Google knows of this URL, but has not spidered the document recently for it to be in the main index”.
As late as Nov 2006, in reaction to my post claiming low PageRank was the primary factor producing supplemental results, Rand Fishkin responded:
I think it’s bogus - maybe it’s the primary factor in that a huge number of pages that are no longer linked to (in site structures from large sites) drop into supplemental, but for most of the real pages that webmasters want in the index that get dropped, I don’t think PageRank is playing a big role.
Now, Michael Martinez bitched about my Supplemental Results page being irrelevant, out of date, and first tier, (which, in retrospect, isn’t completely untrue)
The article may very well create a buzz and go on to become one of the SEO community’s standard references on how to deal with Google’s Supplemental Index. And the irony is that it’s wrong, even though the correct answer (as far as what I have seen work in the past few weeks) is buried amidst all the bad/good advice.
but what he doesn’t know is there was virtually nothing on the web about supplemental results in the Spring of 2006 which is when I started writing that page. Even though the page feels near obsolete now, back then it was ahead of the curve.
Anyway, during Big Daddy’s release, Matt Cutts mentioned that lack of trust in the inlinks/outlinks of a site leads to PageRank devaluation, which leads to low overall PageRank for a domain, which leads to pages dropping out of the main index - which exposes supplemental results.
But guess what? No one was listening, or didn’t want to listen, because
They resisted letting go of the idea that PageRank is dead.
When you look at the mechanics behind any piece of code, you discover function calls, loops, if/then statements, variables. Like it or not, PageRank is one of those variables. While it remains inside Google’s code, it maintains its influence, however slight, regardless of what anyone outside of Googleplex wants to believe.
Marketers who excell at writing digg-happy headlines will tell you what sounds cool - but what do they know? For example, marketers say “trust” alot (yeah, I know, I do too). Trust in the scope of supplemental results isn’t about domains; its about links, exchanged links, paid links. It’s about pattern detection, not authority. It’s about link devaluation, not a ranking boost. Trust in the scope of TrustRank has to do with high PageRank sites penalized in search results when they got lousy link profiles. TrustRank doesn’t effect low PageRank sites.
But stuff like that bores the crap out of most readers. You want to read stuff that gets you more sales. You want to know how to game Digg. You don’t want to waste time trying to postulate theories about an uncracked algorithm.
If you look at my archive links, you’d notice I started this blog on March 2006, right around the release of Big Daddy.
So, I guess the one and only reason I started this blog is a selfish one - I used this blog like a sailor uses a compass while lost at sea.
Then again, I was never really that lost to begin with.
I’ll tag these guys:
Ireland SEO Marketing
John Andrews
Peter T Davis
Red Cardinal
Scoreboard Media Group
[…] It’s nice to see one of these big blog memes make it to Irish shores. Both Gavin and myself were tagged by one Mr Halfdeck. Gavin put up a great post, so now it’s my turn. […]
5 Reasons Why I Blog | Search Engine Optimisation Ireland .:. Red Cardinal said this on April 11th, 2007 at 5:45 pm
Glad to see you got on board! I still can only leave a comment if I disable CSS with firefox, as I can’t see the text boxes. They are all black as is the backround.
JLH said this on April 13th, 2007 at 3:21 am
Hey JLH, hope this looks better.
Halfdeck said this on April 13th, 2007 at 9:25 am
“but what he doesn’t know is there was virtually nothing on the web about supplemental results in the Spring of 2006 ”
Actually, there has always been a ton of stuff on the Web about the Supplemental Results from 2005 and before. But it’s all outdated information with respect to the post-Bigdaddy Supplemental Results.
However, where I disagree with many of your reasonably good analyses is that you look for trouble where it’s not needed. For example:
“Trust in the scope of supplemental results isn’t about domains; its about links, exchanged links, paid links. It’s about pattern detection, not authority. It’s about link devaluation, not a ranking boost. ”
That’s not what the Supplemental Results index is all about. It’s about proving that the Google approach to indexing Web content is the right way (it’s not). Google wants Web sites to earn link recognition through natural channels, which entails using non-search marketing channels to capture audience attention and citation.
But as long as Google allows links to pass anchor text the incentive to influence relevance through links is greater than the incentive to get natural recognition.
BTW — your submission form does not appear in some browsers. I suggest you consider using another template. White or light grey text on black may look cool but it’s very difficult to read.
Michael Martinez said this on April 19th, 2007 at 11:44 am
Hey Michael,
“That’s not what the Supplemental Results index is all about.”
I’m talking about trust, not supplemental results. The status quo thinking on trust is that its measured by authority on a domain-level. For example, people think a link from Wikipedia is highly trusted because there are many authoritative sites linking into it. If people you trust reference a site alot, that makes the site that much more trustworthy.
That’s a kind of trust Google can calculate using the TrustRank algorithm. By using a set of seed sites and inverse PageRank, you can calculate trust by following outlinks from sites like DMOZ, Yahoo! Directory, or Wikipedia.
When Matt Cutts says “The sites that fit “no pages in Bigdaddy” criteria were sites where our algorithms had very low trust in the inlinks or the outlinks of that site.” he’s not talking about TrustRank, and he’s not talking about domain-level trust. He’s talking about trust scores that are defined by intent - paid, unpaid, exchanged, editorial:
“As these indexing changes have rolled out, we’ve improving how we handle reciprocal link exchanges and link buying/selling.”
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/indexing-timeline/
Alot of SEOs have their blinders on when it comes to paid links. When they say “trust” they’re thinking of a metric that’s based completely on a site’s topical popularity. Well, two reasons why sites went supplemental during Big Daddy is because Google glued on PageRank tight to indexing and started devaluing links more aggressively. Here’s how I see it (I should draw a seomoz-ish diagram one of these days):
1. Google thinks your inlinks/outlinks are manipulative.
2. Google devalues PageRank (and whatever else) of your inlinks
3. Target urls of those inlinks and urls they link to lose PageRank.
4. Too much juice out the window and weak urls drop out of the main index, as Matt Cutts says “PageRank is the primary factor determining whether a url is in the main web index vs. the supplemental results”
5. No pages in Big Daddy “exposes” supplemental results.
“But as long as Google allows links to pass anchor text the incentive to influence relevance through links is greater than the incentive to get natural recognition.”
Well, out of thousands of urls for any SERP, only 10 sites fit on the front page, so there will always be an incentive for people to go all out on all channels that increase ranking, whether it be via legit or illegitimate means. It’s like a no holds barred demolition derby played out in the SERPs. Porn sites exploit anchor text on a massive level - they get away with it, even though they have 100,000 links with identical anchor text pointing to a page because no matter how much those links are devalued, add them all together and they still add up to a truckload of juice and relevance.
“your submission form does not appear in some browsers. I suggest you consider using another template. White or light grey text on black may look cool but it’s very difficult to read.”
Well, I tinkered with the comment CSS the other day - looks ok to me in FF and IE. But you’re right, I need to change up this template. Its sadistic on the eyes..lol.
Halfdeck said this on April 19th, 2007 at 3:41 pm