At what point does Google cross over from "ranked by algorithm" to "ranked by algorithm selection as editorialized by Googlers and bloggers?"
Publicly discussing algorithms changes like this seems like a potential PR problem.
Google algorithm change launched
81–90 of 203 posts
Re: Google algorithm change launched
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
This comment made me chuckle. I agree all this should be discussed out in the open, but blogging and then tweeting links to the blog post....what happened to email!? :)
I get way too much email already, but the main reason is that email is a poor use of my cycles for doing support. In the 10 minutes that I would use to reply to one person, I could make a webmaster video that 1000+ people would benefit from, or 1/6th of a blog post that could answer other peoples' question for a year or more. Even Twitter is 1 to many instead of 1 to 1. I do get and reply to a ton of email, but when…
This is the best legitimate advertisement for twitter that I've ever read.
Re: Google algorithm change launched
#83may be here is a good place to ask - may be someone can answer - what does the term "original content" actually mean , original in what sense ? if you have a blog about wines, then what do you need to write - in order to be "original" blog about wines - does it mean mostly: 1) express original opinions about wines, 2) original structure of sentence and original wording - but the same opinions that 10 other sites writ…
In order to be considered "original" from the search engine perspective, it needs to be around 30% new content. There are websites like http://www.copyscape.com/ that can tell you how original something appears.
Internet marketers use software to "spin" text and make it appear unique. Sometimes the text is annoying for humans to read, but search engines eat it up. You can take one article and turn it into 50 with the click of a couple of buttons.
Re: Google algorithm change launched
#84Since Matt is responding here, I figured this is worth a shot, no harm in asking. Matt, would love a response from you if you get a chance, since the Webmaster Tools appeals process gives no insight whatsoever to our situation.
Following on from one of the comments here, namely the idea that "value is in the eye of the beholder", I'd like to raise our own plight. I run a number of aggregator sites - the largest and oldest of them being celebrifi.com, which was a PageRank 5 until Google de-indexed us in December (along with some of our other sites, but interestingly not all).
A little background - the purpose of the sites is to aggregate, organize, rank and add context to what's happening in the news, with each site focusing a specific vertical. Think Techmeme, but with more context.
I'll be the first to admit, there is no original content, but I strongly believe that we "add value" by figuring out what exactly is going on in any given story or blog post.
We add value to publishers, by always linking to the original source (indeed, many publishers directly request that we add their feeds to the sources we track), we respect copyright by only displaying a short snippet of the original text and only displaying thumbnail images and we add value to users by giving them easy access to a lot more content on the same topic/story, all in the same place.
Google's Quality Guidelines clearly state that duplicate content is penalized, and that is totally fine with us, but is it right to totally de-index a site for duplicate content? I wouldn't even want to rank above the original source for any given piece of content, as I respect the hard work that writers and publishers put into creating quality content, but aggregators who add value have a role to play in the content ecosystem. Digg, for example, uses the "wisdom of the crowd" to aggregate and rank content - hence adds value. Topix takes a local approach to aggregating content, and uses comments to rank content - hence adds value. We take a verticalized approach to aggregating and ranking content, and hence I believe that we add value.
As mentioned above, we got de-indexed in December, and despite going through the appeals process, fixing a few things on our end to do with sitemaps, and clearing out some older "low quality" sources that we were tracking, we received no clarity into what our crime was.
Matt, I'd like to raise this issue with you - both as it relates to us, but also as a general industry question - are all aggregators going to be de-indexed? And if not, which aggregators are and which aren't? What is the criteria, and who decides? If its algorithmic, then I am very curious to know what on our sites triggered the de-indexing? And even more curious to know why some of our sites got de-indexed, and some didn't.
I have great respect for Google's efforts to clean up spam and low-quality content - and would always expect to see original content ranking higher than aggregated content. But to completely de-index an established aggregator site and strip it of its PageRank seems very draconian.
I would love to hear your/Google's position, and look forward to some more clarity on both our situation, and the future of news/content aggregators.
Respectfully yours, Niko
Re: Google algorithm change launched
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
The high-order bit for me is that Stack Overflow is #1 for both pages. We can do localization based on TLD: the query [bank] will return different results on google.com vs. google.ie, for example. Without doing a deep dig yet, we might have thought that open-mag.com was more helpful for European searchers, for example. It looks like that site is based in Portugal.
Kudos for keeping locational variety. Is there a flag/keyword we can enter into the search to ignore location?
http://google.com/#q=kudos&hl=fi&gl=fi
hl refers to the UI language and gl to localized results.
Re: Google algorithm change launched
#86Yes - I've been doing a lot of YII related searches the past week, and I've noticed that a lot of times a site called 'devcomments.com' pops up somewhere in the first 5 results. Usually with a bogus page that does contain the keywords you were looking for, but not the actual discussion/forum thread. It appears they have copied their content directly from the official site, yiiframework.com.
Example: http://www.google.com/search?q=Any+yii+way+to+get+the+previo...
In that particular instance it is result number 3 (and the original is number 1), but on more than one occasion it was the top result and it's never what you are looking for.
Re: Google algorithm change launched
#87I don't suppose you'll tell us how you know whether a site's content is original or not.
What if you have a blog with lots of quotes from other sites; will that hurt your rankings because Google sees "unoriginal" content?
Is there some ratio of original to unoriginal content that must be met to keep from being flagged as a scraper?
Re: Google algorithm change launched
#88Matt, I just went through my search history because i remembered a very specific instance of seeing this. Here's the query. http://www.google.com/search?q=nstoolbar+bottom+bar&ie=u... You'll notice that efreedom.com shows on the first page with content taken directly from stackoverflow. While stackoverflow does show in the results, the exact page that efreedom copies does not. Anyway, I'm glad you guys are taking thi…
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Re: Google algorithm change launched
#89Matt, I just went through my search history because i remembered a very specific instance of seeing this. Here's the query. http://www.google.com/search?q=nstoolbar+bottom+bar&ie=u... You'll notice that efreedom.com shows on the first page with content taken directly from stackoverflow. While stackoverflow does show in the results, the exact page that efreedom copies does not. Anyway, I'm glad you guys are taking thi…
For [nstoolbar bottom bar] I see (from an incognito window):
#2) stackoverflow.com/questions/3977343/nstoolbar-on-bottom-of-window
#3) stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/nstoolbar
#9) efreedom.com/Question/1-3977343/NSToolbar-Bottom-Window
The #9 result is copied from stackoverflow.com/questions/3977343/nstoolbar-on-bottom-of-window, which is the same as the #2 result.
This actually is really hard to do as well as Google has given that the stackoverflow page doesn't have the word "bar" on it anywhere, while the efreedom page does.
Neither Bing nor DDG seem to have either the StackOverflow page nor the Efreedom page. I would give an uninformed guess that they probably can't match the StackOverflow page because it doesn't contain "bar" and are probably doing some sort of hand demotion/removal for efreedom. As a result, you get no pointers to the information you want instead of two.
Re: Google algorithm change launched
#90Since Matt is responding here, I figured this is worth a shot, no harm in asking. Matt, would love a response from you if you get a chance, since the Webmaster Tools appeals process gives no insight whatsoever to our situation. Following on from one of the comments here, namely the idea that "value is in the eye of the beholder", I'd like to raise our own plight. I run a number of aggregator sites - the largest and o…
Respectfully - Sites like yours ruin the internet. You admit it yourself: you produce no content of your own. I do NOT want to see results from pages of that ilk when I google for things. Google made the right choice to de-index it.