SEO Junkie

I just came across a WMW thread titled Datacenter Watch: June 5, 2006 that rustybrick pointed out on his blog. This 25-page thread has been tracking the SERPs at various datacenters since June 5th. According to the thread, Google SERPs seem to be moving back and forth. Plus many “sandboxed” sites are getting out of Sandbox.

As far as I’m concerned, lots of spam and MFA sites have been appearing in Google which are mostly now replaced with authority sites at the top positions. Google has strengthened some of its filters and much emphasis seems to be on topical links.

Sounds like they are coming to a major update soon?

Detecting a fake PR is fairly simple. If you think that a particular site is showing a fake PR, then simply take a look at its cache version on Google.

For example, http://www.pr10.darkseoteam.com/pagerank-5.php is showing a PR6 and you want to confirm whether they are showing a fake PR or not.

To do so, you go to Google and run the cache: command as follows:

cache:http://www.pr10.darkseoteam.com/pagerank-5.php

OR

http://66.249.93.104/search?q=cache%3Awww.pr10.darkseoteam.com/pagerank-5.php

Either way, you will see the cache of http://johnny.ihackstuff.com/. That means that the site in question is most probably faking its PR6.

In addition, they are either doing a 301 / 302 redirect to http://johnny.ihackstuff.com/ directly or using cloaking.

To find out whether it is doing a 301 / 302 redirect, you have to look at its HTTP Header. Go to http://www.webconfs.com/http-header-check.php and type in http://www.pr10.darkseoteam.com/pagerank-5.php and press Submit button. You will see the following:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK =>
Date => Wed, 07 Jun 2006 11:01:35 GMT
Server => Apache/1.3.33 (Debian GNU/Linux) mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a AuthMySQL/4.3.9-2
X-Powered-By => PHP/4.4.1RC2-dev
Vary => Host
Connection => close
Content-Type => text/html

It shows that the site is NOT doing a 301 / 302 redirect since the HTTP Status code it is returning is 200 OK. So, it is doing the redirect via Cloaking. It is only redirecting the GoogleBot to http://johnny.ihackstuff.com/ with either a 301 or 302 Status code on the basis of its IP address or User Agent field.

It is an indicator that http://www.pr10.darkseoteam.com/pagerank-5.php is faking a PR6.

Via CNET comes news that Google has launched its first mashup - a map-based Web site with information about earth-friendly locations in five of the U.S.’s top travel destinations.

 According to Luanne Calvert, creative director at Google:

The site, at maps.google.com/green, features information on and video tours of spots in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York and Orlando, Fla., as well as tips for “traveling green” during the summer using Google Maps.

 She further explained:

By “green” Google means “things that are earth friendly,” That includes “restaurants that are about sustainable living” and “a car service in New York that only uses (gas-electric hybrid) Prius vehicles,”

They will certainly get more and more people to use Google Maps to get around this summer.

Channel 4 News posted a video of Q&A session with Larry Page & Eric Schmidt. Larry Page, one of Google’s founders answered questions from the press.

The answer - artificial intelligence - with search engines so powerful they would understand “everything in the world”. It’s the dream of Larry Page - one of Google’s founders and now a multi-billionaire.

RustyBrick also blogged about the Q&A session with the Google “heads of state”

They talk about how artificial intelligence will change the future of search. They also discuss the “do no evil” but yet Google does evil in China, which Google responded to that the US government also does the same thing, which was replied to that it wasn’t a good response. They also talk about privacy, specifically with gmail and discuss how the tradeoff of convenience and privacy must be the right balance.

Also, there is an interesting thread titled Larry Page sets out his Vision at WMW that is worth a read.

On his blog SEOBook, Aaron Wall points out that an abundance of low quality links could cause decreased importance in crawl priority as told by Matt Cutts over at ThreadWatch.

Matt also made a detailed post on his blog saying that some sites are completely removed from Google’s index due to heavy reciprocal linkage.

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. Examples that might cause that include excessive reciprocal links, linking to spammy neighborhoods on the web, or link buying/selling. The Bigdaddy update is independent of our supplemental results, so when Bigdaddy didn’t select pages from a site, that would expose more supplemental results for a site.

Aaron further explained the issue:

Knowing that having a certain percentage of shady links will kill your ability to rank in Google adds an additional opportunity cost to building shoddy links which. Things that were once “cheap” or “free” suddenly became expensive, and quality votes gained a bunch more value in the process as well.

Thus, it is extremely important that you be extremely cautious while building links to your site. Don’t engage in excessive reciprocal linking and avoid linking to spammy neighborhoods on the web.

Today, I was doing a search for seo in Google. I was stunned to see google.com and google.ht ranking at #2 and #3 respectively.

No matter both of the domain names are owned by the same organization; they are simultaneously appearing in the results for the same term.

In addition, Google is quite unable to detect their duplicate content and consequently penalizing them. Even, their robots.txt is the same.

Last but not the least, these pages contain their guidelines for webmasters and they themselves are violating them.

 Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.

Google has recently been sending email notifications about penalties to the concerned webmasters. Now it has incorporated it with ‘Google Site Maps’ and added many new features like.

• Report spam
• Reinclusion request
• Indexing Summary
• Crawl Errors
• Add A Sitemap
• Query Stats  
• Crawl Stats
• Page Analysis
• Index Stats
• Top Search Queries
• New Help Center

Accorting to Matt Cutts,

The Webspam team and the Sitemaps team have been working together for several months on a new approach: we are now alerting some sites that they have penalties via the webmaster console in Sitemaps. For example, if you verify your site in Sitemaps and then are penalized by the webspam team for hidden text on your pages, we may explicitly confirm a penalty and offer you a reinclusion request specifically for that site.

I’m really happy about this new way to communicate with webmasters, even though it is a test for now. If the initial results are positive, I wouldn’t be surprised to see us gradually broaden this program.

The catch is that Google won’t be informing each and every website which is penalized as Matt further pointed out:

Our program to alert webmasters by email has been successful, and this new program is a natural extension of that, but we’re still testing it. We are not confirming every site that is penalized for now, and I don’t expect us to in the future.

After all, the ideal search engine should help site owners debug and diagnose crawl problems and tell legitimate site owners when they risk not doing well.

While analyzing the domain names of thousands of websites appearing in the top rankings in the Google results pages for a variety of search phrases, I noticed that there is only a VERY small number of websites at the top which have more than 2 or 3 dashes in their domain names.

I have a hunch that Google uses an excessive number of dashes in the domain names to detect spam and the websites in question must have to pass through an even stricter spam test. And it goes without saying that most such domain names are registered by the ‘hit-and-run’ spammers to rank well in Yahoo! and MSN in the short run.

As far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t seem out of the question. To identify spam, all major search engines are known to have devised such flags that when triggered put a possible spam website to a relatively tough test and either completely delist it or lower its rankings once it fails and is successfully identified as spam.
 
So, in my opinion, it is better to create a sub-domain on an existing website without many dashes than registering a domain with plenty of dashes therein. Or better yet, register short, easy to remember domain names without dashes.