Greatest Living American And Colbert, Why Did He Drop off/ Options

[projectphp]

For those that reaed SEOMoz (and if you are here, why don;t you?), you probably know that, at one time, Mr Steven Coklbert was ranked number one for Greatest Living American, before being recently dethroned.

And I was wondering how/why.

Some ideas I have, and some questions on what everyone thinks:
1. Words not on the page - Maybe oogle have started not allowing suites without a word on it to rank well?
2. Threshold - too many links with the same thing is a sign they are all to be discounted?
3. Historical data - If links count for a short period of time, drop in value before slowly regaining value, that would account for this sort of thing (and linkbait), as all the links would arrive in a short period of time, and then stop.

So, I was wwondering, does anyone else have any ideas on this one?

[Shanada]

To the best of my knowledge it's the effect of Google's new anti-googlebombing algorithm.

[projectphp]

Which is what?

[JohnMu]

Maybe they're just setting an example (manual "fix" in the results) -- since this was being used by the SEO community as an example of how you could game Google. Of course Google would never do something like this manually, but tweaking the algorithm to catch this particular case as well is just about the same . Seriously, what use is that result with that query? (and more so: what result should it return instead?)

Looking at the brief re-appearance of internet's "miserable failure" (due to those words briefly appearing on the site in question) I would guess that inclusion of the search terms works against a Google-Bomb filter. (I haven't played with those kinds of things lately so I can't say for sure, just a wild guess.)

John

[rustybrick]

A comment in Danny's Google Says Stephen Colbert Is No Longer The Greatest Living American might be of interest.

Matt Cutts said:

Here's what I said over at digg: "it's not a manual change; it's just a fresh push of our Googlebomb data. The algorithm doesn't run every day."

Not that you need me to stop by, since Adam and Vanessa have already weighed in.

[A.N.Onym]

And Adam Lasnik said it was a google-bombing algo tweak

At any rate, that's algorithmic and not a manual tweak. Some may doubt that, of course, as long as they don't believe Matt and Adam.

[JohnMu]

Where is the difference between a manual change and an algorithm tweak to specifically include this one as well? Details, details

I don't think Google would manually influence these details, they're not public enough to merit doing so, only a handful of people even know to try that keyword.

Just curious though, what should Google now return as top result for that query? If you could make a choice, which URLs would you include?

John

[eKstreme]

Just curious though, what should Google now return as top result for that query?

It should geotarget the answer to be "you"

[slojo]

I don't understand this algo - when Matt Cutts says "googlebomb data" what exactly does he mean? A manually created list of reported Googlebombs? And isn't manually pushing data the same as a manual tweak?

It does maybe give some insight as to how Google's SERPs are generated though - initial algorithms create base rankings before later steps filter some out.

And it also suggests that the original tweak shouldn't have a more wide-ranging effect on backlink profiles.

BTW - Apparently Colbert is still the Greatest American Alive though - LOL

[projectphp]

My question exactly

The fact an algo exists isn;t really an answer.

BTW - Apparently Colbert is still the Greatest American Alive though - LOL

And the greatest american living and the living greatest american, but not the greatest living american colbert nation colbertnation which seems to inxdicate that the words need to be in a specific order.

[A.N.Onym]

Data push is something that the algorithm has analyzed before, but what was only recently put in the main index, I believe.

Given that all the links were with "Greatest Living American" anchor text, I'd imagine only that exact phrase not to be triggering the Google Bomb. Not that bright, but I guess it is needed to prevent news and great content from being wrongly diffused.

This post has been edited by A.N.Onym: May 14 2007, 07:31 PM

[projectphp]

An algorithm is simply a set of criteria. What are they? "All anchor text using a word" seems VERy crude to me, and I doubt that would be it, simply because what percentage of people link to www.google.com with the word Google?

There would have to be more to it than that, surely.

[Halfdeck]

Hey Danny, interesting article! I figured maybe I should clarify my quote from yesterday to prevent any misunderstandings. I said "It's not a manual change; it's just a fresh push of our Googlebomb data. The algorithm doesn't run every day."

That comment meant that the change for [greatest living american] was due to a data push, not a new algorithm. (I believe) all we did was re-run the existing algorithm and push the resulting data. We don't run the Googlebomb algorithm as part of our daily indexing, and the Colbert phenomenon was detected the first time the algorithm ran again. We didn't do anything manual for Colbert just like we didn't for any other link bombs.

Okay, now I'll let everyone resume discussing whether SEO is/isn't rocket science, whether we should/shouldn't sweat the small stuff, and whether SEO will/won't die.

- Matt Cutts

I buy his explanation.

[projectphp]

Yeh but he didn't say anything. "An algorithm" is like saying "my jacket is a colour". Sure it is, but what colour.