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My intepretation:
Having been a SEO (Search Engine Optimizer) for as
long as I have, I have many times felt the lashes from the
punishing whip of Google when they feel they have been
wronged. Now that I am trying to live on the right side of
the law, I am glad to see Google cracking down on many of
the blatant and abusive techniques being used by automated
programs producing absolutely worthless websites and web
pages. Of the many areas of the patent description, this
particular section of course is the one section that I
wish I could ask for some additional clarification as to
what they consider abusive, too fast, or too much of a
shift. I don’t think I’ll hold my breath while I wait to
get the answers that I seek.
What Google must mean when they say “watching for sites
that rise in the rankings too quickly.” It’s been a
long time, if ever in my opinion, since I have had a
website rise too quickly in Google’s ranks. I really
wonder if there is such a thing as rising too quickly. My
suggestion, just to be on the safe side, is that you plan
your inbound link gathering campaign to take place over a
six to eight month period. Rather than trying to reach the
top of the search results page for your favorite keyword
phrase in 60 days or less, plan on getting to the top on
the first day of the ninth month.
Google is “watching for registration information, IP
addresses, name servers, hosts, etc that are on their "bad
list." Google for some time has denied that there even
exists such a thing as a bad list. Many of us know
differently from first hand experience. Google has put
whole Class C blocks on their bad list in the past if they
think even for a minute that a bad person may have control
over the entire whole website class C block.
In a recent correspondence to Google, I asked to have a
website of mine re-included into there index as I am sure
it is black-listed. Google says that if you search for the
website by using it’s full URL like www.mywebsite.com and
it shows up, then you are included. Well I can easily find
my website when I search for it’s URL, but when I used a
very specific four-word-phrase I couldn’t find my website
anywhere. I looked at literally thousands of listings, but
no dice. There were websites that showed up that were so
far off the subject that absolutely mine should have been
in the list somewhere. There may not be a Santa Claus, but
there most certainly is a bad list.
I have been preaching for many months that website owners
of multiple websites should spread their websites across
multiple hosting companies. You never know when your
server might end up on Google’s bad list I advise. There
is an old saying that says “don’t put all your eggs in the
same basket.” This has never been so true as it pertains
to putting all your websites with the same host. Forget
Google for the moment. Just think about all the hackers,
possible natural disasters, regional power outages, and
tech companies going belly up. Right there is reason
enough not to host all of your websites at the same
location. Suffer through a little extra paper work but
separate your websites, each to a different hosting
company. You will be glad in the end. I certainly was glad
I did.
Often when I talk about SEO as it pertains to hosting,
nameservers, and registration information I compare it to
playing poker. A good poker player will learn what is
known as the other players “tells.” These are the things a
player does unconsciously when they have a good poker hand
or a bad hand of cards. Google knows all of our “tells.”
They mine the public domain registration database
constantly. They know who owns what website and where.
They have the postal databases to be able to tell what is
a legitimate address and what isn’t. They probably also
own a copy of the reverse number phone directory. For
goodness sake, they have ex NSA (National Security Agency)
employees working for them.
When it comes to your domain registration records you
either need to play it perfectly straight or start
thinking very, very paranoid like there is a conspiracy
theory around every corner. Oh, by the way, Google has a
good laugh at the people who think selecting the option to
hide your contact information in the Whois database will
slow them down for even a second.
An interesting point, that I had never considered before,
was brought up in the patent discussion document regarding
that Google will be watching to see how long you regitster
your domain name for. They implied in this document that
Google might give extra bonus points to those websites
that register their domain name for longer then one year
at a time. What Google is probably looking for is
stability in both the registration records and as to where
the website is hosted. Google must have at some time in
the past performed studies concluding that spam websites
almost always only register a domain name for a single
year at a time and that they have a tendency to move their
hosting accounts around fairly regularly.
Thus, by registering your domain name for longer periods
of time, it appears that Google is now ready to give some
bonus points to websites that are able to demonstrate some
longevity and stability. I can’t imagine Google heavily
weighting the algorithm in this area, but it is an
interesting point of view. Because of their new point of
view, it might be worthwhile for you to consider saving
some extra money and take some of those extended domain
registration discounts that are offered when you agree to
pay for both your hosting and domain names for an extended
time in advance.
What about “growth of off topic links.” You can
probably translate this to mean that the use of reciprocal
linking pages on your website will no longer work. The
days of trading links with anybody and everybody are over
if you are going to stuff everyone on some sort of
reciprocal links page. I am sure it will still be
beneficial to create a quality resource directories where
you list other related websites that are closely related
to your own websites theme. Make sure you put descriptions
of what the other website does and be sure to use keywords
from your own industry in the description to explain how
this other website relates to your website topic.
If you are going to put an off-topic link on your website
you will need to do a couple of things. In close proximity
to the actual linking anchor text you should surround it
with your own industry’s keywords to justify the purpose
of the link to an off-topic website. At the same time, you
should be adding one or two keywords directly adjacent to
this same anchor text that you get from the title of the
page you are linking to.
This is not as hard as it sounds. Google is not really
opposed to off-topic links just so long as there are
supporting reasons (read this as your industry keywords
and keywords from the page you are linking to) in direct
proximity to the off-topic link. This new form of doing
link exchanges (actually this is the old way before SEOs
emerged) from content based web pages will far out-perform
putting them on some hidden away obscure links page. Of
course once again, the best suggestion is to only trade
links with websites in similar industries to yours.
Don’t worry about the other website’s page rank as that is
not a significant factor any longer, but do insist that
they put your reciprocal link on a page that is actually
and regularly visited by their own visitors. If you can
get away with it, ask if you can to be on any page that is
updated regularly. Be sure to keep a list of websites with
reciprocal links to you and check them often to make sure
your link is still there.
Should you worry about “speed of link gain.” Here’s
a mistake that I have recently been guilty of myself.
Since I have been around on the Internet since 1993, I now
have a pretty substantial list of websites where I can get
links back to my own websites within just a few days time.
Since I can get approximately 150 inbound links in as
little as 3 days, I often will do just that, get a 150
inbound links in 3 days when I launch a new website. From
here on out I plan to exercise more constraint and
patience. My new goal is to get no more than one or two
inbound website links per day per website. Yes, it will
take me three to five months to do the same thing it used
to take me only 3 days, but I think I will avoid the heavy
sandboxing (penalities) that my websites have been hit
with in the past. Often it would take one of my websites
the same 3 to 5 months or longer to get out from under all
of Google’s “speed of link gain” penalties . Why not just
do it right from the beginning.
Why are they tracking “percentage of similar anchor
text?” The expression “Google Bombing” has been around
a long time now. A “Google bomb” or “Google wash” is an
attempt to influence the ranking for any given website for
a specific search term in the results returned by the
Google for that search phrase. For example, a SEO friend
of mine Brad Fallon has been working on showing up for the
search phrase “coolest guy on the Internet” try it and see
if he is still there. Due to the way that Google's
algorithm works, a website will be ranked higher for a
keyphrase if the sites that link to that page all use
consistent anchor text with that keyphrase.
You can still get away with this sometimes, like Brad,
when you are dealing with a five- word search term. I
strongly don’t suggest you try this on a competitive
phrase like “life insurance”, “debt consolidation”, or
even a three word phrase like “NY divorce attorney.” You
are very likely to accumulate severe negative points
quickly.
The technique was first discussed on April 6, 2001 in an
article by Adam Mathes. In that article, he coined the
term "Google bombing" and explained how he discovered that
Google used the technique to calculate page rankings. He
found that a search for "internet rockstar" returned the
website of Ben Brown as the first result, even though
"internet rockstar" did not appear anywhere on Brown's
webpage. He reasoned that Google's algorithm returned it
as the first result because many fan sites that linked to
Brown's website used that phrase on their own pages. The
first Google bomb mentioned in the popular press may have
occurred accidentally in 1999, when users discovered that
the query "more evil than Satan” returned Microsoft's home
page.
Needless to say that with a technique that has been around
since 1999, Google has figured out how to defeat and
penalize your website for even trying it. My suggestion is
that you use no less then six derivatives of your main
keyword phrase in any anchor text linking to your website.
For example, for the term “life insurance” you might also
use “term life insurance”, “life insurance quote”, “life
insurance rates”, “find life insurance”, and “life
insurance company.” All of the phrases hold your main root
phrase “life insurance” but they are all derivitives.
Google bombing is another reason as to why reciprocal link
pages so often have zero value or a negative website
impact. Most website owners are either lazy or uninformed
and give everyone wanting to link to their website the
same link anchor text to be used. What they are really and
unknowingly doing is setting up their own Google bomb.
When you look at websites that have taken the time to
create a “link to us” page explaining how to link back to
their website, they generally only have just the one link
option listed there. Having this kind of page is not a bad
idea, but the displayed link text that the visitor is
supposed to cut and paste should be setup to use some sort
of banner rotation software. This will make the website
display an alternate version of the link text and code to
each unique visitor who visits the “link to us” page. This
way each visitor will then cut and paste different
versions of keyword anchor text into their personal
websites, thus avoid Google bombing penalties.
What are “topic/subject shifts and additions.” What
Google is talking about here is what is more commonly
known as the “bait and switch” technique. In the Google
patent discussion, I think this is refered to in item
number 31 as “content changes in a document compared to
linking anchor text.” In this situation you get a
particular page listed for one popular keyword phrase and
once it has traffic you either completely replace all the
content with something of a more commercial nature, or you
push the real content down the page and put your
commercial (often annoying Viagra, Penis Enlargement, or
Breast Enhancement) ads at the top of the web page. This
technique irritates Google even more than even the people
tricked into viewing these pages. There is a new version
of an old expression from an old butter TV commercial that
now goes “Its not nice to fool Mother Nature - or Google.”
Search Engine Optimization Topics
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