10 replies to this topic

[bwelford]

Until recent times there has been a somewhat antagonistic relationship between Google and webmasters. This was somewhat anomalous since without webmasters there would be no Google.

An indication of a change in the Google mentality is provided by a recent Matt Cutts post. He seems to have become the official Googler on all matters SEO. He tells us that Google is now Notifying Webmasters Of Penalties. You can get the message via Google Sitemaps. This is a service any serious webmaster just has to be using.

[Aaron Pratt]

Google has always been a friend of webmasters.

[eKstreme]

Google has always been a friend of webmasters.

That's a generous definition of "friend" you got there, Aaron. Not to be cynical or grumpy, but I think Google has a long way to go before calling it a friend...

[Wit]

They've certainly always been a friend of very clever webmasters LOL

[multilab.biz]

Dear Bwelford,

Thanks for the Comment on my other topic, can you tell me the location of link for webmasters notification by google for site penalization

[bwelford]

As I indicated, multilab.biz, you sign up for Google Sitemaps and as you check the information for your website I presume the message on problems would come up.

[Ruud]

That's a nice upsell. Probably should just finish my first coffee of the day and stop grumbling but it would have been nice if they send one anyway.

Then again, their problem is informing enough while not providing a testing platform for SEO.

With enough time gone by the model might one day change, I suspect. A regular index and a high quality premium one. The premium one, free to users, will be favored by people because it is relevant. The difference would be that a site owner has to sign up for it, provide contact and payment details. A clickwrap agreement warns you that failure to comply costs you money. Get links the wrong way? You pay a "fine" and eventually can get thrown out.

It would be excellent value for site owners, if the price is right, great value for searchers, and a nice additional income stream for the SE's.

[swainzy]

You could say they ARE friends of webmasters.
While google's formula for ranking well challenges webmasters, it also creates work for webmasters.
Work = income. It's a google world for now.

I find this thought provoking:

With enough time gone by the model might one day change, I suspect. A regular index and a high quality premium one. The premium one, free to users, will be favored by people because it is relevant. The difference would be that a site owner has to sign up for it, provide contact and payment details. A clickwrap agreement warns you that failure to comply costs you money. Get links the wrong way? You pay a "fine" and eventually can get thrown out.

D

[JohnMu]

Another problem is even more basic: Google generally has to "find" the bad sites before even being able to analyze them and react to their "badness".

- If the software (crawler / search engine) would be able to recognize the bad sites / pages / parts automatically, it could just ignore them.

- The fact that they have to penalize the sites, means that these tricks still work. You CAN fool Google into bringing you visitors that are not really *that* relevant to your site. Hidden text does work, otherwise Google would not want to fight it.

- Now put that together: Google doesn't recognize it automatically and it works: That's enough motivation to get people out there to try it out. I imagine they put out more sites than Google will ever be able to manually check. Sure, some of that is cross-linked and traceable, but the good "bad" guys don't do that with their good money-making sites.

- Now add the strange mixture that Google is making money off of most of those sites as well. Hmm? Throw out the sites that bring in the Adsense / Adwords revenue? It seems strange. Perhaps they throw out the bad sites, ha ha.

- Then add the even stranger feeling that Google does not share adsense-data with the search team. If they did, they could easily pull out a whole network of a spammers sites (and make them move to lots of smaller accounts). Remember when Matt "found" "Earl Grey"? Wow, he pulled down something like 10-15 of his sites - presumably found through obvious interconnections (easy to find with the available tools). I'm sure Adsense could just pull out a list of 100's of sites with the same Adsense-ID - no problem. But they don't work together - why?

So, in the end: the small fish get fried, the hotels that try to keyword-stuff on an amateur level (somuch that it probably wouldn't make a difference in the serps if they did it or not). Oooh, caught another webmaster following obsolete advice and spamming his meta-tags, followed by hidden text using inline-formatting.

Sure, they need to learn as well, but they probably haven't updated that web-page for years now, don't have the software to do it and hired a teenager to do it in the first place. Really, couldn't they just ignore the obvious spam-attempts? What's the real added value of terrorizing the small-guy who has no idea of what is going on anyway?

(sorry for my rant - just my Google vs Web-Spam feeling ....).

Other than that (and the above doesn't change it) - I just want to second the This is a service any serious webmaster just has to be using.

John

[Ruud]

So, in the end: the small fish get fried, the hotels that try to keyword-stuff on an amateur level (somuch that it probably wouldn't make a difference in the serps if they did it or not). Oooh, caught another webmaster following obsolete advice and spamming his meta-tags, followed by hidden text using inline-formatting.

I don't think the size of the fish matters but what type of fish it is -- and if it is open season for them or not.

If searches for a certain sector get too fuzzy then it is time to do something about it. A certain level of spam and irrelevancy is, I maintain, of the utmost importance to an ad supported search engine. 100% relevant, on-topic, high quality search results are not good for the ad model. But if the results are too bad that is no good either. Keep it 65-75% relevant and both the search and the ads will do just fine.

[JohnMu]

Keep it 65-75% relevant and both the search and the ads will do just fine.

It's always hard to counter the "Google makes more money if it doesn't index my site properly" argument as well (ie not in index = pays for adwords).

What is the general consensus: Will / does Google take advantage of websites knowingly in this way? Personally, in the long run, I see bad or mediocre search results as the wrong strategy - anything that takes away users from search will take away views and possible clicks on the ads. But with Google covering both bases, it's hard to argue against that

John