Wikipedia introduces the "no-follow" tag

Wikipedia has introduced a rel = "nofollow" tag that is evidently used on all outbound links. This was evidently done to reduce link spam that is part of Black Hat SEO. However it is applied indiscriminately to all links, including those on which the articles are based, which makes it somewhat unethical. What it will mean is that the gigantic volunteer encyclopedia which Google lists as #1 for so many keywords will perpetuate and increase its web dominance at the expense of other Web sites. It means that nobody but Wikipedia can be number 1 for an informational keyword niche. At least in theory there could be an excellent article, much better than Wikipedia's for a given subject at a different Web site, but it will never exceed Wikipedia in the listings because no site is probably going to have more pages and authority than Wikipedia. This shows an important weakness of Google PageRank which bases authority and positioning on the number of backlinks

Search quality: How good is Google?

Yesterday I wrote about Google Quality Rater Secrets - how Google uses humans to rate its search engine results. Improving the quality of search engine results was the aim of the original search engine and ranking algorithm described by the Google founders in The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine and The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web.

Google has brought search engine quality a long way since then. But I did a little experiment which shows that Google's results are, by its own standards, not nearly as good as they ought to be or could be.

More at  The Quality of Google Search Results

Google quality rating and what it means

Google's philosophy was oriented to obtaining high quality search engine results from the beginning. This is evident from the original papers published by Page and Brin,  The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine and The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web,  High quality is defined by them, basically, as the results that the user would want to get. The various algorithms and tweaks, beginning with with  Google PageRank are all intended to provide the highest quality results.

 

Not surprisingly, Google maintains an army of quality human checkers who evaluate the results of searches. Enterprising bloggers found a confidential document that describes the rating criteria for Google quality raters and put it on the Web for a while. This provoked a lot of comment that was based on the mistaken notion that the criteria reflect what the Google algorithm actually does. That is not the case. At best, they reflect what Google wants its algorithm to do. In brief, Google wants the algorithm to carry out the intention of the surfer. Pages that are retrieved are rated for relevancy to the search query. No attempt is made to determine if the information in those pages is correct or reliable, other than the criterion of "authoritative" citations. If other people think it is right, or if the page cites "authorities" then it must be right, according to Google. But the important point is that the algorithm doesn't necessarily carry out the desires of the management. If you design a page according to the quality handbook, it will not necessarily get a high ranking in Google.

 

In fact, we do not know that the ratings are related in any way to position of the pages retrieved by Google. The raters don't either evidently. They are presented with a lot of information about a page retrieved for a qury, but that information doesn't include the position of the query in the result returned by Google or the pagerank of the page retrieved (though raters they can usually find both). There is no attempt, at least not by the raters, to determine if the page returned as #10 in the search is better or worse than the page returned as number 1, or if the first 10 pages are better or worse than the next 10 pages. 

 

For a detailed discussion of what the raters and Google are looking for, see:  Google Quality Rater Secrets.

 

Ami Isseroff

Visitor statistics - What do the numbers mean?

How many actual people come to your Web site and how can you know?

 

How many people actually visit that Web site where you want to advertise? Is it better or worse than the competition?

 

See Web Site Statistics Versus Truth and  Web site statistics and don't believe every number someone tells you until you have checked!

 

Care and feeding of Web sites

Web sites have to keep running in order to stay in the same place - because the web is growing, and because information, like Paris Hilton, is aging.

 

Once you get to the top, you need to keep tending your Web site if you do not want to lose visitors and Web site visibility.

 

Read all about Web site Maintenance

 

Ami Isseroff  

 

Don't let disaster strike your Web site

If you have an online business Web site, don't bother reading this. But if you have spent a lot of time building a news Web site, an online dictionary, a site with a lot of historical material or other informational Web site, please read on.

 

Not long ago a friend died at a relaively young age. He had spent 12 years pioneering use of the Internet, and built a Web site of about 20,000 pages. His widow had no way to maintain the site, and didn't even know how to renew the domain name. When the domain name expired, the man's work was simply vanished off the Internet. 

 

As a last resort for such Web sites, the www.archive.org Web site maintains a digital archive of Web sites. It is slow and awkward, but at least it saves the information in the sites. For some reason, a directive in the robots.txt file of this particular Web site intentionally or unintentionally excluded the archive.org spider, so even that is lost.

 

Even if one day the site and domain are restored, all the search engine visibility that was built up over 12 years by all the backlinks to this Web site will probably have vanished - it will be "Gone with the Wind." 

 

If you work and your Web site are precious to you, and you want others to see them even if you lose interest in the Web, go out of business or become unable to take care of the site for any reason, read about lapsed domains and vanishing Web sites - and how to protect your site : http://seo.yu-hu.com/Lapsed_Domains.html.

 

 

What makes a page or site rank well?

There is a very important article out in SEOMOZ  surveying what "expert" SEO practitioners opinion on what makes a page  or site rank well. It is mostly important to you if you have been listening to Voodoo practitioners, and there are a lot of them out there.

 

I will eventually get around to discussing each factor, but in general:

* The highest ranked factors are certainly valid for Google.

 

* What doesn't matter for Google at this point just doesn't matter. If someone tells you they get all their traffic from Yahoo and MSN search engines, it doesn't mean they are experts. It means there is something really wrong with their optimization strategy.

 

* From eyeballing it, anything given less than a rank of 3 out of 4 in that article is probably a waste of time and might be harmful. These get into the realm of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Superstitions.

 

* What is basically a test of the expertise of the "experts" is given in one of the Pie charts at the end of the article. About 32% of the experts said there is no Google Sandbox (new sites are not ranked for a long time). Find out who they are and do not use their services. There is no Santa Claus and there is no Sandman, but there sure is a Google Sandbox.

 

* Another pie chart illustrates the naivete of the people making the survey. It asks which factor is most important for "Google Rankings" - It doesn't differentiate between overall ranking of a site and ranking of a page for a keyword. It asks if "Authority" of the domain is most important or Keywords on a page or backlinks (extermal links) to the page. Most people chose Authority (= Google PageRank) of the site. I would have to say "depends," though if pushed to the wall I would say external links to the page with the right anchor text based on empirical data. Of course, it depends how many links and who is your competition.   Wikipedia pages are always going to rank high. But it is hard to separate out the fact that such pages tend to get links and have high Keyword density from the authority of the site.

 

A relevant article that tries to refer to the above article is here. Unfortunately, while their article discuss link building "authoritatively," their link to the other article leads to a 404 error page - the URL is wrong. But it is still a good article, that discusses many of the errors people make, such as not linking to authoritative Web sites, avoiding links from 0 PageRank Web sites and so on. There are good reasons why people make those mistakes - they are all due to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Superstitions, such as never link to a site with lower rank than yours, or do not link to sites unless they link to you (see SEO penalty for unreciprocated links).

 

Google quirks are best understood if you also understand the philosophy and approach of the inventors. What are Sergei Brin and Larry Page and their disciples trying to achieve and how do they think they will do it. That also tells you what Google is likely to do in the next year or two, as well as what they have done in the past. That is why I have included their original Stanford university accounts of pagerank and of the prototype Google search engine - with an extensive discussion

 

The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine

The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web