the -noblog option or blog tab: can it be done? Options

[Ruud]

For some time I've been reading rumours about Google's attempts to get rid of blog posts showing up very high in searches. A -noblog option is mentioned as is a seperate blog tab, not unlike the images or groups tab.

Now images and usenet groups are uniquely seperate content. Filtering them out into a tab, page, bucket or whatever is as easy as pie. But filtering out *blogs*?

How would they identify a blog? Some pages have tell tale signs. Standard b2 templates will contain a good number of comment lines about this being the start of the b2 engine. Some might identify themselves through meta tags. But that's about it.

I use blogging scripts because they're essentially the leanest, meanest CMS you can have for small to medium sites. Some content remains the same for a long time but I also have sections I update daily. How in the world would Google diffirentiate between a personal bla-bla blog and a valid resource?

Apart from a pure theoretical interest I have a practical one as well; see my mention above that I *use* blogging scripts :-)

ps: what are the likelihoods that what we're observing at Google are in fact attempts to get rid of blognoise while at the same time remaining relevant?

Ruud

[rcjordan]

>what are the likelihoods that what we're observing at Google are in fact attempts to get rid of blognoise while at the same time remaining relevant?

Currently, I can't say that I've seen any concrete attempts to limit blognoise though AOL did recently put pressure on Google to do something in the algo (AOL went in and hand-edited some infamous examples involving G. Bush). Soooo, I would say that blogs are definitely on the yellow-flag list.

Particularly if I were using MoveableType, and largely because of its (A) popularity and (B) vulnerability to comment spam, I'd start eliminating fingerprints --and there are a LOT of them. I don't use a blog, but I do use one or two stock (and quite a few custom) CMS scripts. Before I launch the first page using a stock script, the first thing I do is spend some time renaming and recoding the key phrases; cgi names, file calls, etc.

[cre8pc]

Seems a tad hypocritical and not so cost effective to ban the thing you promote for the company you bought?

Google Options

Kim

[rcjordan]

>to ban the thing you promote for the company you bought?

Note that I didn't use blogger.com as an example. ...But conspiracy theories aside, blogs are drawing a lot of negative attention and SEO and negative attention don't mix over the long term.

[cre8pc]

I'm not into conspiracy theories myself. I'm a blogger.com user who got a free Blogger sweatshirt from Google when they bought Blogger.

I've been bribed to believe. 8)

Kim

[rcjordan]

>I've been bribed to believe.

So have I; adsense.

[bragadocchio]

Hi Ruud,

The genesis of that rumor is in a misinterpretation of a statement made by Google CEO Eric Schmidt. The quote was supposedly:

\"Soon the company will also offer a service for searching Web logs, known as blogs.\"

A reporter for the Register, Andrew Orlowski, reported that this meant that Google would remove blogs from the general search population: Google to fix blog noise problem

A nice retort to the Register Article is here: Andrew Orlowski is a lousy blogger...

How in the world would Google diffirentiate between a personal bla-bla blog and a valid resource?

Exactly. How would it know?

Would it remove a site from its main index. One that has been indexed on Google since the beta days, after realizing that the site added a blog page to keep visitors informed of changes and updates, and to share some expertise with them on the topic of the site?

Funny, some of the most useful information I find on the web these days are on blogs. The web would lose a great amount of relevancy if blogs were isolated from the main index. One example - when I do a search for:

web standards css

and I notice that there are blogs such as http://zeldman.com in the top ten, I count that result as a particularly good one. I'd much rather rely upon the author of that blog for information about web standards then the World Wide Web consortium. Zeldman is much better at explaining the intricacies of standards.

Just because it's a blog, doesn't mean it's noise.


Disclaimer: I've been using blogger for free since July, 2001.

[rcjordan]

AOL: "Given the increase in link spam and the attention on it, we will focus our efforts on working directly with our partner Google on the larger issue rather than attempt to enforce it one link at a time,"

Direct Marketer News

Given a choice, I'd wipe my blog prints.

As to the how to identify, I'd guess that would not be too difficult (assuming we're going above the simplistic example of simply skimming off 'powered by moveabletype' pages).

Though I haven't delved into the details (so this may very well turn out to be a bad example), I did notice recently that Technorati seems to be identifying blog links as a subset of inbound links. If Technorati can do it....

Disclaimer: I installed and tested blosxom once.

[bragadocchio]

The focus of that article is upon google bombing and "link spamming", which may happen upon blogs, but is a failure of a link popularity indexing system.

One solution is to devalue link text, and increase a value based upon themes and links from themed sites. Another might be to remove blogs from general listings.

But I sort of see today's blogs as tomorrow's content management systems for most sites. It makes some sense to build sites that clients have more control managing. Will Google have a role in that? What would you do with Blogger besides context sensitive ads on blogspot?

Are the changes currently taking place in Google's latest updates of the type that makes its index less prone to link spamming? Localrank or Hilltop, or Latent Semantic Indexing, or some similar indexing might help remove that problem.

[rcjordan]

>focus

The delivery mechanism isn't the real problem, so it's of little concern whether we're talking about linkfarms, guestbooks, or blogs. The question for the concerned webmaster is whether any one of the major search engines will someday decide that the damage being done to their serps outweighs the collateral damage they will cause when that SE decides to take defensive action.

Do I think blogs will be eliminated from the serps? No. Do I think that blogs (and backlinks from blogs) are strong candidates for a negatively weighted filter? Yes.

[bragadocchio]

Good points, nicely phrased. We are concerned here about what this might mean to web site owners.

But, I think we need to consider a range of potential approaches.

I can see how you could envision a negatively weighted filter on links from blogs and link farms and guestbooks. That is a reasonable possibility. But, is it the ideal approach? I'm not so sure.

Is the ideal approach obtainable? Maybe.

Do we improve the present system by creating a large series of negative filters? Probably. Until at some point another method is discovered that ends up being better, or at least having the potential to be better, and is possibly less expensive.

A favorite description of what might be described as the pre-Florida update Google, from a Google patent application on usage statistics to be used in retrieving documents:

[0005] People generally surf the web based on its link graph structure, often starting with high quality human-maintained indices or search engines. Human-maintained lists cover popular topics effectively but are subjective, expensive to build and maintain, slow to improve, and do not cover all esoteric topics. 

[0006] Automated search engines, in contrast, locate web sites by matching search terms entered by the user to an indexed corpus of web pages. Generally, the search engine returns a list of web sites sorted based on relevance to the user's search terms. Determining the correct relevance, or importance, of a web page to a user, however, can be a difficult task. For one thing, the importance of a web page to the user is inherently subjective and depends on the user's interests, knowledge, and attitudes. There is, however, much that can be determined objectively about the relative importance of a web page. 

[0007] Conventional methods of determining relevance are based on matching a user's search terms to terms indexed from web pages. More advanced techniques determine the importance of a web page based on more than the content of the web page. For example, one known method, described in the article entitled \"The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Search Engine,\" by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, assigns a degree of importance to a web page based on the link structure of the web page. 

[0008] Each of these conventional methods has shortcomings, however. Term-based methods are biased towards pages whose content or display is carefully chosen towards the given term-based method. Thus, they can be easily manipulated by the designers of the web page. Link-based methods have the problem that relatively new pages have usually fewer hyperlinks pointing to them than older pages, which tends to give a lower score to newer pages. 

[0009] There exists, therefore, a need to develop other techniques for determining the importance of documents.

The idea approach, is creating a system that can provide material and relevant pages, without having a human editor index them. The more determination that can be done before a search is conducted, without significantly increasing a requirement for memory and processing power, the better.

That approach may require that the words used in a link become less important, and the context of the link becomes more important. It really shouldn't matter if a link is from a blog, or a more static page. The more material and relevant result is the one that should show up first. There are times when that result will be on a blog.

A negative filter on links from a blog has the potential of causing more harm than good to search results. Especially if the link from the blog is the better one.

[Ruud]

Very interesting stuff.

I sort of see today's blogs as tomorrow's content management systems for most sites. It makes some sense to build sites that clients have more control managing.

Absolutely. B2 for one has moved towards that. MT does it. What starts as a simple blogging system is hacked up until in the end CMS is a better description. With some major, relevant resources already running purely off a blogging script the delivery mechanism by itself cannot be the way to determine that relevancy.

Do I think that blogs (and backlinks from blogs) are strong candidates for a negatively weighted filter? Yes.

There might be my answer. Not having the mind for algorithms I can't wrap my mind around this as thoroughly as I would like to but we all know, realize, feel that the way bla-bla blogs are (inter)linking is very different from the way content blogs are linking. Therefor it is conceivable to come up with a weighing system, right?

As to the how to identify, I'd guess that would not be too difficult

But it is. If I paste my Notepad handcoded XHTML valid, CSS powered template into a blogging system you can't see where it comes from. Who could see from a webpage if it was coded in notepad or wordpad?

A nice retort to the Register Article is here: Andrew Orlowski is a lousy blogger...

Very good! Thank you!

Funny, some of the most useful information I find on the web these days are on blogs. The web would lose a great amount of relevancy if blogs were isolated from the main index.

Still, to my feeling they have changed something. "Back then" I wasn't "into" SEO so much so I have nothing to back this up but I clearly remember a time when several searches, "current issues" ones for example, would result loads of bla-bla blogs. I can't find bla-bla blogs on the first 20 results in searches for current issues.

Seems a tad hypocritical and not so cost effective to ban the thing you promote for the company you bought?

Not at all. Usenet groups in a Groups tab is not banning, it is relevant. Product searches in Froogle is not banning, it is relevant. Books in a books search is not banning, it is relevant. Personal blogs in a blog search is not banning, it is relevant. And relevant is the name of the game, right?

Now which community has or would have its own search powered by the market's dominant player? Not PHPNuke hack sites, not DVD ripping communties - we're talking personal bla-bla blogs here. That is an honour almost!

So why buy the company?

Powered by Movable Type: 52,700
Powered by B2: 319,000
Powered by WordPress: 101,000
Powered by pMachine: 71,000

Makes for a total of 543,700

Powered by Blogger: 889,000

By buying blogger/blogspot Google has acquired over 60% of identified blog-ware user sites.

Now.... if Google would want to put personal blogs into a seperate search, which a lot of those *users* would find terribly interesting, then it has a major base to start with. From day one that search would be highly relevant. Then offer other bloggers out there a meta tag like <meta name="googleblog" content="index"/> and for sure complete tribes will follow.

I love the brainstorming sessions on the board!

Ruud

[wayne h]

Blog comment spam is not the fault of bloggers. It is a weakness and flaw in the commenting systems. To blame blogs is to misplace the anger with all spamming. I would hope that the same people upset with blog comment spammers are also concerned with all spammy black hat SEO too.

Blogs are doing what the search engines, particularly Google in its own recommendations suggest.

The guidelines say to update regulary. Blogs certainly do that with daily and even multiple times per day.

The guidelines suggest good content being important. Blogs that have been in existance for any length of time have tons of content, neatly archived and linkable from other sites.

The guidelines express the importance of incoming links. Bloggers are free and generous linkers. Blogs constantly link to one another's and static website content without asking for reciprical links.

Blogs are doing what the search engines want. To add a "blog filter" would only penalize blogs for doing what is recommended by Google and other search engines. Such a filter would probably drive out good informational blogs with the much maligned "personal journal or diary" with its "cheese sandwich for lunch" content.

On the other hand, blogs that show up highly in the SERPs tend to have strong theme related content. Isn't that what the search engine user is seeking?

Wayne Hurlbert

[bragadocchio]

On the other hand, blogs that show up highly in the SERPs tend to have strong theme related content. Isn't that what the search engine user is seeking?

Excellent point. Topical blogs can be some of the best sources for information on the subjects taht they cover. Not only are they wonderful places to find links and the latest news, but the person who runs the site is often an expert on the subject, and can add a lot to it.

Google is a failed attempt at building a system to annotate the web. It's very successful as a search engine, but the original intent from Brin and Page was to build some way of allowing people to find the best of the best. Blogs are a much better avenue to that destination than Google. Interestingly, blogs have the potential to help the search engine by allowing "authorities" to point to material and relevan sites on specific subjects.

[rustybrick]

Interestingly, blogs have the potential to help the search engine by allowing \"authorities\" to point to material and relevan sites on specific subjects.

Are you saying that blogs are the authority or that authorities will point to blogs?

Thanks.

[rcjordan]

>authority

The Blogging Iceberg - Of 4.12 Million Hosted Weblogs, Most Little Seen, Quickly Abandoned

[rustybrick]

rcjordan, is that a response to my question?

[rcjordan]

>response

Yes, but pretty much a summation of the 'why' part of this thread as well. Are there useful blogs out there? Sure. There are, ...well were, some good guestbooks out there, too. Same for (mostly on-site) link directories. I can distinctly recall ferreting out good research data from both, along with those old threaded board posts (what was the name of that script? can't recall). At any rate, there were some great individual sites, but their genre as a whole began to destabilize the serps.

>can it be done?

Absolutely. Will the SEs spend a great deal of effort fine-tuning the algo in order to carefully tip-toe through the blogs and examine them on their individual merits? Looking at their existing SEO stop-words and the scroogle hit-list, my guess would be "no."

[Ruud]

In my opinion they are the authority and point to relevant, authorative material and resources.

Ruud

[rustybrick]

i posted this elsewhere.

I am pretty sure there is a big difference between sites that link to other sites and sites that are authorities.

A blog might be an authority because it has a lot of links to it, but it must be within a "hub" to obtain a certain theme.

I have seen tons of confusion at all the forums between authorities and hubs.

An authority is http://www.searchenginewatch.com/

A hub is (this)* Yahoo Directory Link

So with blogs, they might be linked to by an authority or might link to an authority. They might also be linked to by a hub. All these links, in reality make a theme.

By blogs pointing to relevant and authorative materials, it just expands the hub. I don't see how that will help a blog rank better.

[size=9]*<moderator's note - I made the URL shorter by making it a link- It lessens the impact of Barry's point a bit because you can no longer see the directory structure, but it makes it easier to read this thread on a small monitor - the length of the URL was forcing the whole page to need to scroll horizontally. Thanks for your understanding. WJS (Bragadocchio) >