Not exactly important SEO news, but I thought I would complement the Google logo today.
I think there are 4 logos in total but my favourite is by Daniel Thorne, aged 15, from Howard of Effingham School
The others are:
Joseph Compton (aged 5) (I can’t even draw this well at aged 26!):
Sheza Rani (aged 11):
Daisy Pearson (aged 13):
Over the past year I have read Dave Naylor’s blog quite frequently, he is regarded very highly in the Search Marketing world and is arguably one of the most experienced search marketers out there. His blog has a large readership and many high profile SEMs comment on there, even Matt Cutts has been known to comment.
Recently Dave announced that he was closing down the blog due to a large Google penalty. Some said it could be a publicity thing, but it does look like a genuine threat.
The root of the problem appears to be the server was compromised and some cloaked links were placed on the site.
The scary thing is that it has taken Dave quite a lot of work to try and resolve what the problem maybe. He has tried to use Google’s Webmaster Tools to identify the issues, and he has tried contacting Google.
There was absolutely no help from Google what so ever. I think this is a serious cause for concern as a lot of people online manage everything themselves and if a guy with extensive experience with websites and Google can have such a hard time with a penalty then everyone else is pretty much screwed.
If Google provided even a small amount of feedback it would make life so much easier, letting someone know there is a penalty or issue with the site at least gives you a chance to fix it! Also they have all you incoming links, and internal links, maybe they should list your external links too? So then any cloaked links would be listed in WMTs. You would also be able to manage links a lot better, I am sure there are cases where people miss off a nofollow where they should be one. If Google listed all the links and their attributes we could identify problems so much easier.
In January this year GoCompare was hit with a penalty from Google for what would appear to be paid links. Once they had cleaned up some of the backlinks they the penalty was lifted in March.
The cause of the problem appeared to be latitude, the SEO company they employed, were paying for blog posts with links back to their clients sites. The quality of these posts was reported to be awful with the following snippet of a paid post:
“It needs insurance plans? That such to know Kwik-fit Insurance? There you it will be able to find one infinity of products and services that will become its more easy life. If you have a car,”
You would think GoCompare may want to tred a lightly after being Google slapped for questionable links. However yesterday I received the following email to one of my sites:
Hello. I`m Alex Jones, Website Manager at gocompare. com. We are one of the UK`s leading insurance comparison sites, with over 70 insurance companies on our panel.
We have an idea which I hope you will find useful - we originally found xxxxxx.co.uk by searching for terms related to home design but in fact we also have an expanding range of information and advice relating to motoring in general, together with household, buildings and content insurance. As such we are looking for good quality partners that have a motoring, automotive, general household or lifestyle theme.We would like to have our editorial team research and hand write some content for you to add to a page on xxxxxx.co.uk. We will agree a subject with you that is relevant to both of our sites (it won`t be a sales pitch for us!) and will include a single simple text link back to a relevant content page on our site. The content will be uniquely written for you and will not be re-used elsewhere. It should be helpful to your visitors and of course the search engines, as will the presence of a relevant link back to us. Hopefully we will also benefit from the link in the longer term. We are not currently in the position of being able to exchange or return links so we thought this could be a good alternative.
Naturally there are no costs whatsoever for you.
If this isn`t appropriate for you, please accept my sincere apologies for having troubled you.Hope to hear back.
Kind Regards - Alex Jones
Website Manager
gocompare .com
Now I realise this is not exactly the same as pay per post and in theory I would get some good content for the sake of one link. Unfortunately Google does not see it like that, this would not be editorial link as I have not chosen to link out to GoCompare and therefore would break Google’s guidelines.
To make matters worse the web site they contacted was a web design company and absolutely nothing to do with "home design". I am assuming this is an automated email so I can understand how this can happen however GoCompare are quite a large company I am sure it can’t be that hard to employ some student to vet the domains they contact to make sure it is reasonably on topic?
If they can’t even email the correct niche then what will the quality of the article they proposed be like!?
I am not sure if GoCompare are with Latitude anymore but the email was from gocompare@contentnowclients.co.uk which appears to belong to ContentNow.co.uk who offer link building via reciprocal links and Content-for-links and this company appears to be owned by UK Offer Media Limited
A couple of months ago I had a couple of sites that seemed to receive the dreaded -30 penalty. To be fair they arguably deserved it as I had bent the rules slightly on what would be classed as an acceptable link building strategy. Basically too many links, similar anchor texts, low quality etc etc.
Rather foolishly of me I thought I could get away with some dodgy links on the side as I presumed the worst would happen would be that the links would be devalued, I would drop a little in rankings but nothing major. However I ended up with a drop of 30+ places across all key terms, which is a little more serious!
On further investigation the sites all had other minor little issues so I obviously cannot say that the penalty was 100% applied to the sites for the links, but I am pretty sure they are the root cause of the issue. One possible theory I came up with was the links triggered some alarms with the Google Algorithm and then it applied the penalty for the other minor issues which by all accounts had been around for years.
However over at Google groups I got involved in a discussion about a website called Sonic Shack receiving a penalty. One of the common responses on Google Groups is that the site probably doesn’t have a penalty and they are just not ranking as well as they should, but in this case the website wasn’t even ranking in the top 30 for its own name and website’s with blogs or articles about this site were ranking on page one. This therefore gives me the impression it is a little more than the site just not ranking as well.
As with my sites this site has a few issues, slightly spammy titles, duplicate meta descriptions, canonicalization issues etc. It also had quite a large number of links from blog posts, and most of these blog were un-related and also using the same anchor text in the links. Also there were some sidebar links looking quite like paid links. It did however have a few decent links including one from Download Squad.
So anyway my reason for them receiving the penalty was for the links, I told them to try and remove the low quality paid for links, and get a few new higher quality links then file for reconsideration. This view point was apparently not shared amongst most of the other people in the discussion.
I was told that:
“If it would be 1% more effective/easier/cheaper to gain rankings by
bowling your competitors out than doing your own job well everybody
would start it and SERPs would be ruined in days.”“I’m still quite sure that Google Bowling does not exist in this
way.”“A figment of your imagination. Out of MILLIONS of webmasters out there, only two have ever suggested it is possible. Dead simple - if "Google bowling" actually worked, it would overnight become the most exploited opportunity on the planet.!”
“What a load of rubbish!”
“Forget it. It’s an escapist avenue.”
“I’m referring to TODAY - end of Augiust, 2008. Neither here nor anywhere else relevant are there any mass complaints about "Google bowling". Whether or not it ever worked, it certainly doesn’t now.” (I stupidly posted some out of date examples)
“As to Yossarian’s comment that Google might manually apply a penalty to random sites, this is nonsense - not only would this require way to much human time to do, it goes against Google’s basic philosphy that they want their algo to be able to spot things - the best example of this is the famous ‘total failure’ Google bomb that had a link to the White House site of George Bush as the #1 result - Google had an AdWords link explaining this and explaining the reason they had not manually removed the link was because they feel it is more important to update their algo to be able to detect this sort of thing.” (I had commented I would hope it would be a human that applied a penalty for link building rather than the algo as a human probably could tell if someone is building he links themselves or a competitor)"
So I guess I made some friends with that one.
JohnMu also got involved saying
“Hi welcome to the groups!
It might be that the links to your site are not counting the way they might have in the past. In general, it is important to us that links are not just exchanged, bought/sold or otherwise used in an attempt to manipulate rankings, as we have detailed in our help center article at
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66356
If you find that your site has issues with regards to our Webmaster Guidelines that can be resolved, I would recommend doing that and then submitting a reconsideration request, detailing the changes that you have made.
Hope it helps!
John”
From this I would like to think that means the links are just devalued, I did respond asking that but I have had no response as of yet.
So from this it looks like I am a complete moron and know nothing. However I am pretty sure that quite a few other people believe incoming links can hurt a website.
Matt Cutts confirmed that Google bowling is theoretically possible in a Forbes article, though this was a year ago
“Matt Cutts, a senior software engineer for Google, says that piling links onto a competitor’s site to reduce its search rank isn’t impossible, but it’s extremely difficult. "We try to be mindful of when a technique can be abused and make our algorithm robust against it," he says. "I won’t go out on a limb and say it’s impossible. But Google bowling is much more inviting as an idea than it is in practice."
He also commented on a popular thread regarding the penalty of Faraway Furniture
Saying:
“ShyBoy, have you been collecting backlinks in any unusual ways? It looks like you may have, and I would pay special attention to that. For example, if you had been attempting to get PageRank via paid links on various templates, then when that PageRank stops flowing (e.g. if Google improves its detection in various ways), the fact that you have less PageRank can also mean that a site won’t rank as well.
If that applies to you, my advice would be to pay special attention to that issue, in addition to the other good advice you’ve already gotten.”
SE Roundtable did a poll on whether most minus X Google drops are associated with backlinks the results being:
106 responses probably isn’t classed as a acceptable number considering the number of webmasters/SEOs out there.
And another post from SE Roundtable advising to check your backlinks
Go Compare was also penalised in January for what would seem questionable links building
JustSayHi appeared to receive a penalty for Widgetbait for link building
Slightlyshadyseo made a nice post on Negative SEO which includes comments about link spam
And well the list goes on..
Competitor Can Sabotage Your Website Rankings In Google!
Can Quality Sites Be Google Bowled & Hurt in Google’s Search Results?
Help! I’ve Been SEO Sabotaged!
In fact it seems well known enough to of acquired its own acronym:
Ok so it is not important AT ALL, but we still all love a bit of page rank.
It looks like PR has been updated for most the sites I am checking. Quite a few PR5s have dropped. It certainly seems hard to break past PR5 nowadays.
Though the important thing to realise is that PR generally means sweet FA. It has no bearing on rankings or traffic. At best it may have some indication on the authority/importance of a site, though it is only one factor in evaluating this as a lot of website can have a high PR and still be crap / spammy etc
I put up a new site a couple of weeks ago, not planning on doing anything with it just yet but I wanted to get a few pages of content on there, get it indexed and get a handful of links.
I put the site on w3csites.com as it is a quick and easy link that should get the site indexed.
I checked the indexed pages today and Google has indexed 1 page which is normal, but it has chosen the index the About us page first!!
The link is obviously to the domain name so surely the homepage should be indexed first?
Right well we have discussed Google using search logs to catch out webspam (source), how to clean up your cookies and the various privacy options available.
In this post I am going to discuss how to set up FoxyProxy (recommended by Dave Naylor) with either Tor or a normal Proxy.
If you are planning on using Tor first of all you should install the Tor/Vidalia/Privoxy software bundle. The installation procedure should be quite easy if you follow the instructions from that link. Once installed your system will be able to use Tor as a client (meaning your traffic can go through Tor), you can also set it up to work as a relay (allowing other peoples encrypted traffic to pass through your computer).
Once installed you need to install the FoxyProxy plugin if you have not done so already. Once installed it should start the Tor setup wizard. If not then single click on FoxyProxy in your status bar on Firefox - File - Tor Wizard. Then:
Now you need to define the URL patterns to use. This will basically tell FoxyProxy when it should use the Proxy/Tor and when it should not.
As the main cause for concern is Google, and in my case Google.co.uk then this is the main domain we need to route through Tor.
The URL pattern used above tells FoxyProxy to use Tor when the URL string contains www.google.co.uk/ regardless of what is before or after it. You could also use *google.co.uk/* and a second rule *google.com/* regular expressions to be a little more accurate with the rules though I suck at regular expressions so it is easier just to use the Wildcard rules.
If you wish to route all of Google’s services through Tor or your proxy then I would recommend setting up patters for:
To check FoxyProxy was working correct and what my current IP was when using Tor I also created a pattern for ip-lookip.net so I would be routed through Tor when visiting this site.
One word of caution as mentioned in the previous post. You are sending your traffic via someone else’s computer. I personally would not recommend logging into any services when on the tor network, certainly any sites that contain important data like bank accounts / adwords / adsense. Again I am not expert so you could be safe but it is just a word of warning.
If you want to setup FoxyProxy using a Proxy instead of Tor you first must find the Proxy you would like to use. The following sites will get you started
Setting up the Proxy is quite easy:
That’s it, you should now in theory be able to avoid Google’s prying eyes. Though don’t forget all the above is pretty much useless if you stay logged into your Google account while doing all your keyword searches.
I am not sure how needed all the above is really either. If you are very pro WhiteHat then maybe it is not worth it. If you are creating hundreds of MFA sites a week or buying millions of links then yes it probably is worthwhile. If you are somewhere in between then the paranoid voice in my head would still say it is probably worth it, after all there is no need to give Google any more ammunition when it comes down to penalising people.
Google recently announced that they use data from search logs to fight webspam
Data from search logs is one tool we use to fight webspam and return cleaner and more relevant results. Logs data such as IP address and cookie information make it possible to create and use metrics that measure the different aspects of our search quality (such as index size and coverage, results “freshness,” and spam).
Whenever we create a new metric, it’s essential to be able to go over our logs data and compute new spam metrics using previous queries or results. We use our search logs to go “back in time” and see how well Google did on queries from months before. When we create a metric that measures a new type of spam more accurately, we not only start tracking our spam success going forward, but we also use logs data to see how we were doing on that type of spam in previous months and years.
The IP and cookie information is important for helping us apply this method only to searches that are from legitimate users as opposed to those that were generated by bots and other false searches. For example, if a bot sends the same queries to Google over and over again, those queries should really be discarded before we measure how much spam our users see. All of this–log data, IP addresses, and cookie information–makes your search results cleaner and more relevant.
Source: Google Blog Post via: Dave Naylor
In Dave Naylor’ post he pointed out some techniques to try and avoid detection these included
The first part is quite easy you just need to go into the Firefox options - Privacy Tab - Then keep cookies until I close Firefox. Also I would recommend that your clear your private data when closing Firefox (this can include cookies as well). I typically clear my cache, cookies and authenticated sessions.
Dave also mentioned you can block Google altogether from Cookies but this prevents you using some of the Google services so I would not bother too much with it.
The next step is preventing Google from obtaining your IP freely. I am not a privacy expert and I am relatively new to the whole proxy / vpn game so the following information may be a little inaccurate or there are probably better services out there.
One of the services I have used over the past 12+ months is Xerobank. This is an encrypted virtual private network that is designed to completely hide your identity from the Internet. It basically works by you connecting to their network (via OpenVPN)and all the traffic is routed through them. Unlike proxies it actually routes all your data through their network rather than just your browser requests. It is not the cheapest option out there at $35 a month but I find it has excellent performance. I can enable the VPN and browse the Internet with little if any noticeable difference in speed. Apart from just using the OpenVPN software they also offer the xB Browser which is a free open-source anonymous web browser, that can be installed on your PC or run directly from a USB drive. I have not really used the xB Browser but if I remember correctly it is a modded version of Firefox that incorporates all the Xerobank privacy feature. I think it is also allows you to use Tor.
The next option is Tor (The onion router). This is typically implemented via plugins such as FoxyProxy and Torbutton. Tor seems to be quite a popular option, and I can see why it is free and very secure (depending on who’s viewpoint you believe). Tor basically operates by using each computer on the network to route encrypted traffic from the start node to the end node. The traffic takes a random route across the network and to any observer the traffic will appear to originate from the end node. I the problem I personally find with Tor is that it’s greatest strength is also is greatest weakness. The onion routers are operated by volunteers using their own bandwidth at their own cost and the performance of Tor is reliant on the routers your traffic is passed across. If any one of them routers is running very slowly then the performance will be greatly reduced. I am unsure how many routers the traffic passes across but it only takes one router to make browsing the net run very very very slow. Which it frequently does.
**Edit** I have just installed Tor and tried it out for the first time in ages. It is not exactly blazing fast but it appears to be running at an acceptable speed. FoxyProxy does warn that if the pages don’t load it will be the Tor network being slow/down so I expect it will still have issues.
Another option is to use a normal proxy server, these can be set up again with FoxyProxy, QuickProxy, SwitchProxy or you can input the settings directly into Firefox via Options - Advanced - Network - Connection Settings. There will be similar options for IE and Opera. If you are using Firefox I would recommend one of the plugins as it will allow you to switch the proxy on and off quickly and easily. Proxies work more or less the same as the above 2 techniques, though only your web traffic is routed through the proxy unlike the VPN option and it is normally only routed through one server/router unlike Tor.
There is a large number of proxies available to use, many/most of them being free. Proxies can provide different levels of anonymity with some being classed as transparent, anonymous, or high anonymity. Anonymous and High Anonymity should be the ones to chose if you are trying to hide your IP. As with Tor the large problem with Proxies is that the free ones are susceptible to run very slow, or go completely down. This is because they typically have a large volume of traffic passing through them while only having limited bandwidth. There are also paid for proxy services which should offer more reliable and faster performance however I have not tried any of these so can not recommend any specific ones.
There are some other issues that need you need to be aware of with all the above solutions. Your traffic is being routed via another machine so if you are based in the UK like myself then Google or whoever looks at your IP may perceived you as being located somewhere else. In the case of Xerobank I believe the IP address will be located in Germany. With Tor I think your IP could end up being located absolutely anywhere, and with the proxy the location is dependant on the proxy you choose. Then there is the issue of the actual security of the data. It is impossible to know if the proxy you are using is spying on your data themselves and for this reason I would only recommend using proxy services for normal browsing habits. Anything you log into I would recommend just going through your ISP. I believe Tor is a little safer as someone looking at the traffic does not actually know where the traffic originated from, however I would still not recommend logging onto your bank account while on Tor. Finally there is also the issue of Google tracking you via the proxy/vpn you are actually using. I am not 100% if Xerobank issues different IPs each time but if it is the same IP every time then there is only limited benefit to routing your traffic via the VPN. With a proxy I would recommend keeping a list of reliable proxies and using different ones on different days. FoxyProxy should allow you to use multiple proxies.
In my next post I will explain how to set Tor/Vidalia and setting up FoxyProxy
