Google Hell?
Andy Greenberg wrote an article for Forbes entitled “Condemned To Google Hell” about supplemental results. I was getting ready to go on vacation, so I didn’t have a chance to talk to Andy, and now I wish that I had. It’s easy to read the article and come away with the impression that Google’s supplemental results are some sort of search engine dungeon where bad pages go and sit in limbo forever, and that’s just not true.
I did some quick searching, and this post from January includes a pretty good rebuttal of the “you get into supplemental results for spamming or duplicate content, and then your pages stay there for a long time” idea. I’ll quote the most relevant paragraph:
As a reminder, supplemental results aren’t something to be afraid of; I’ve got pages from my site in the supplemental results, for example. A complete software rewrite of the infrastructure for supplemental results launched in Summer o’ 2005, and the supplemental results continue to get fresher. Having urls in the supplemental results doesn’t mean that you have some sort of penalty at all; the main determinant of whether a url is in our main web index or in the supplemental index is PageRank. If you used to have pages in our main web index and now they’re in the supplemental results, a good hypothesis is that we might not be counting links to your pages with the same weight as we have in the past. The approach I’d recommend in that case is to use solid white-hat SEO to get high-quality links (e.g. editorially given by other sites on the basis of merit).
That statement still holds. It’s perfectly normal for a website to have pages in our main web index and our supplemental index. If a page doesn’t have enough PageRank to be included in our main web index, the supplemental results represent an additional chance for users to find that page, as opposed to Google not indexing the page.
Okay, so that’s the general advice I’d highlight. It can also be the case that links that used to carry more weight for a website might not be counting as much. Let’s see if we can find an example of that in the article. Here’s a quote:
MySolitaire.com, another online diamond business, spent January to June of 2006 in the supplemental index. Amit Jhalani, the site’s vice president of search marketing, says he figures that cost his business $250,000 in sales, and he says he still doesn’t know why the site’s pages got Google’s thumbs-down.
“So many of the rules are vague,” Jhalani says. But he admits that he tried gray-area tactics like buying links from more established sites to juice his traffic.
Okay, so the VP of SEM for this site mentions that they tried buying links; maybe those links started to count for less. I decided to check into mysolitaire.com and see if I could find any other links that might have started counting for less. I did find a spam report where someone forwarded an email that appeared to be from mysolitaire.com:
>From: “MySolitaire Jewelry” <xxxx@mysolitaire.com>
>To: <xxxxxx @xxxxxxxxxx.org>
>Subject: Link Exchange Request from MySolitaire
>Date: Wed, 4 Jan 2006 11:59:47 -0500
>
>Dear Sir / Madam
>
> I am writing to see if you would be interested
>in setting up reciprocal links.
>
> We offer a unique and extensive line of
>Diamonds and Jewelry. Thousands of brides,
>grooms and other customers view our site every
>month as they plan their weddings, engagements
>and gifting ideas. Our Diamonds and Jewelry
>Links page is a direct link off our home page.
>Currently, we have less than 50 outgoing links
>in each category.
>
> The information and services offered on your
>site would be of great value to our visitors,
>and I believe, your visitors would find great
>value in our site. Because our two web sites are
>complementary rather than competitive, we see
>the synergy here as an opportunity for our
>mutual benefit.
>
> To exchange links with us either enter the code below onto your site:
>
> <a href=’http://www.mysolitaire.com/diamondearrings/’ target=_blank><b>
> Diamond Earrings, Diamond Stud Earrings,
>Diamond Studs, Diamond Hoops, Diamond
> Chandelier Earrings, Diamond Threader Earrings</b><br /> Diamond Earrings,
> Diamond Stud Earrings, Diamond Studs, Diamond Hoops, Diamond Chandelier
> Earrings, Diamond Threader Earrings at a great value. Only available at
> MySolitaire.com
>
> ....
>
> Mxxxx Fxxxxxxxxx
> MySolitaire
> http://www.mysolitaire.com/
> info@mysolitaire.com
> 62 West, 47th St #1409
> New York, NY 10036
> Phone: 866-697-6548 (866-MySolitaire)
> Fax: 212-840-5909
A quick Google search finds similar emails that were sent to mailing lists. Reciprocal links by themselves aren’t automatically bad, but we’ve communicated before that there is such a thing as excessive reciprocal linking. Note that the email above doesn’t say that they have less than 50 outgoing links; nope, it says “Currently, we have less than 50 outgoing links in each category.” I checked out http://www.mysolitaire.com/resources/ and by my count saw 329 different categories offered for link exchanging:
I know a lot about SEO, so I decided to check out the “Search Engine Optimization” category. This was the first entry I saw:
Now I didn’t click through to check out that site; it could be the best SEO site in the world. But the entry doesn’t give great experience for users; heck, it’s not even a complete sentence. And it didn’t look really relevant for users for a diamond ring site to exchange links like this in potentially up to 329 different categories. As Google changes algorithms over time, excessive reciprocal links will probably carry less weight. That could also account for a site having more pages in supplemental results if excessive reciprocal links (or other link-building techniques) begin to be counted less. As I said in January: “The approach I’d recommend in that case is to use solid white-hat SEO to get high-quality links (e.g. editorially given by other sites on the basis of merit).”
I thought Andy Beal had an interesting take on the Forbes piece as well.
Related Posts:- Infrastructure status, January 2007
Okay, it's been a while since my last infrastructure status report, so I'll briefly cover the things that I know are going on. The executive... - A funny reciprocal links image
I thought this was kinda funny. Someone thought that Google was taking stronger action on excessive reciprocal links. So did they ramp down their reciprocal... - Gone Supplemental
Some site owners over at WebmasterWorld have been discussing an issue where on Bigdaddy data centers, the site wouldn't be crawled as much in the...
Peter Scott Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 1:15 am
Interesting thoughts, Matt. Without wishing to foist a “what’s happening to my site” thread on your constructive blog, my Dublin site has been gradually relegated into supps over the past 3-4 weeks. I loose about 5-6 pages (of a 200+ site) every few days. There is no intentional duplicate content although lack of content on picture pages may account for those. The remaining pages are filled with unique content and I can’t see any reason for their demise. No matter what you say about supps, it still feels like an old friend is gradually dying.
At least I don’t have a $250,000 business to screw up - it’s only an engaging hobby for me.
Dr. David Klein Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 1:18 am
That is fascinating Matt.
I especially find it funny after you reviewed my site and pointed out the bad link exchanging I did in the past (before I learned google rules, basically the hundreds of paid link exchanges I had from the past
The advice to blog was a good one, it has created many good, free links!.
I just got done reading a thread at WMW where google was criticized for basically making any rules at all, since Google controls so much of the traffic on the web.
I guess the real dilemma is simply that if google lets the rules be known, then all of us will do whatever we have to do to achive the results of those rules. The second an individual has a concience intention to please the algo, then it becomes more and more grey.
The gradient becomes something on the order of,
Just making good content, and who cares if it gets links or not.
Making good content with the intention of it being link bait.
Asking others to link to you.
Creating some type of exchange to get the link, such as I will build your site if I can put a link on it to my site.
I will pay you to blog about my product or site.
And then the outright, I will pay you to link to my site.
Would you comment on whether that is the approximate order of good to evil from the viewpoint that google is promoting?
There is also a lot of talk on WMW about paid directories such as Yahoo directory or BOTW and whether those will have SEO value, or possibly even just create a penalty.
Again, thanks for the access to both listen to and comunicate to you. I think George W. needs a blog like this where we can all ask him questions, and tell him what we think!
dk
Patrick Altoft Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 1:33 am
I think if a site is going to give a quote to Forbes complaining about a lack of Google love they really need to be prepared for the worst.
I can’t believe this site has a VP of search marketing and they still don’t know what happened. Where is the President of search marketing?
Heads should roll for this.
JohnMu Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 1:45 am
Sigh. Same procedure as last year
Can you tell us some more about having a site “suddenly” rank at #30 and below for all terms? Supplemental results are usually easy to debug.
Peter van der Graaf Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 1:46 am
I read the Forbes article yesterday and thought: “Just another search journalist wanting to use the current anti-Google sentiment (hype) to get exposure!” But even I’m not convinced that Google’s “do no evil” still stands proud.
If you currently write an anti-Google article, you will get noticed and if your arguments are sound, you get published. The arguments in Forbes aren’t bad, but not good enough for a Forbes article in my opinion.
Philipp Lenssen Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 2:01 am
> But the entry doesn’t give great experience for users; heck,
> it’s not even a complete sentence. And it didn’t look really
> relevant for users for a diamond ring site to exchange links
> like this in potentially up to 329 different categories
Google AdSense also often includes nonsense English & irrelevant links:
http://www.dealcafe.com/funnies/searchgame.html
The way AdSense is set up, only humans will be affected, not search bots, so I guess it’s outside the scope of this post. But there are a lot of spam sites out there financing themselves with Google AdSense. I often wonder, in a kind of thought experiment, how Google engineers would react if they found out a significant correlation between sites using > N AdSense blocks, and spam sites. Would they be as ruthless in transforming this find into an algorithm that lowers the ranks of these sites? Or is there a -- subconscious, rather innocent, nevertheless existing -- conflict of interest?
On another note, pages like these also contain incomplete sentences, but in this case you were OK with it:
http://spiderbites.nytimes.com/articles/pay/1980_index.html
I wouldn’t want to see every site with nonsense English be downranked in Google, that’s not it -- but tis NYT page is clearly made for SE’s first, and humans second, and it’s examples like these which may make it harder for webmasters to see the fine line you’re seeing.
Tomaz Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 2:03 am
I’ve heard / read many times these two statements:
1. Reciprocal links by themselves aren’t automatically bad
2. Excessive reciprocal links are bad
What is “excessive”?
Can you give us some numbers?
If I have 40 reciprocal links on a site with 200 content pages, is that trigerring any penalties?
AjiNIMC - Gmail a part of my personal nerve center Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 2:06 am
This is not the first time, we had similar stories where a little less knowledge became a big news article. Here is another example online.wsj.com/public/article/SB117375265591935029-azt3SDR6a_bQwU1WbraemnGSXZ0_20070411.html
(posting it again, may be the previous one hit the spam box due to the active link to wsj.com)
Solidghost Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 2:13 am
Hmmmm....so what you are saying is that reciprocal linking to other (some unrelated) sites is causing the pages to go into supplemental index? But does the site in question having poor content? Are the pages duplicates?
Why I ask? Well, because you guys have been claiming that Content is King all these time. If so, and if the site has good content pages, then those pages shouldn’t be in supplemental in the first place, right? “Devalued” incoming and outgoing links should not play such a part in them going into supplemental.
David Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 3:13 am
I’m with JohnMu - what about some comments on the +30 penalty that I and other webmasters have been in for months and despite seeking feedback, cleaning up etc no change which has cost me thousands.
Harry Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 3:32 am
To get rid of supplemental results I feel its necessary to have a unique meta description and title to all pages of your website. My Blog totally went into supplemental results a few day ago and I have posted about how I got rid of them.
I want to ask Matt a question. How would Google treat a page which has its meta description completely different from the page content? Are such pages handles by Google manually or the bots take care of this?
Halfdeck Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 3:55 am
I wish the guy said “supplemental hell” instead of “Google Hell” (never heard that before), then I’d get some traffic to my site for a change
Dyce Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 4:13 am
Aye.. seen ‘Supplemental Hell’ got one or two in there myself
I believed it wasnt so much to do with PageRank but more to do with how easy it was to be spidered... eg.. pages with tonnes of variables on the URL (non SE friendly) were generally found there... Ive seen pages with little/no PageRank doing quite well...
Also.. dont spose anyone could shed any light on why Google suddenly spat out my verification on a website form the webmaster console.. and now wont verify despite the fact that the page is there.. I can see it, browse to it etc... most odd... if not.. no worries
Halfdeck Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 4:18 am
I think many people aren’t ready to let go of paid links and reciprocal link exchanges. It’s more comforting to believe they still pass some juice and blame meta descriptions and duplicate content for supplemental results than to acknowledge 1) PageRank still has a place in Google’s algorithm and 2) Google’s link analysis will grow more sophisticated over time.
Still, if you search for “we live together” you’ll find a porn spam site ranking #1 with sitelinks. Many backlinks are from off-topic sites with hidden links like http://www.coins2artefacts.co.uk. Spam ranking #1 - no big deal - but with sitelinks? Lol, c’mon...
James Galway Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 4:24 am
Amazing.. Ive never really gotten my head around supplmental index and was of the opinion like many others that it was in fact “hell” :0)
But the following from Matt -
“It’s perfectly normal for a website to have pages in our main web index and our supplemental index. If a page doesn’t have enough PageRank to be included in our main web index, the supplemental results represent an additional chance for users to find that page, as opposed to Google not indexing the page.”
..has spelled it out for me .. thanks again..
Chris Bartow Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 4:38 am
Well, Andy spelled my reference web site wrong. So much for getting some press off the article.
If you get quality links to the individual pages in the supplement index, they will magically get out of the supplemental results. And by magic, I mean it makes complete sense.
This does make things tougher for small businesses. Let’s say you have a small jewelry shop that has a traditional store front but want to sell some of your items online.
So you create a site that organizes your jewelry in categories and sub categories. So to get to any product you have Home Page > Category Page > Sub Category > Product Page.
I’ve noticed that unless you build external links to the Sub Category pages, your product pages will drift into supplemental. It’s very tough to get these links when you are a small business with not a lot of money or time.
graywolf Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 4:41 am
Hmm funny I remember a high profile space that went supplemental and a bunch of webmasters complained about the loss of traffic.
http://www.threadwatch.org/node/10946
Yes Google fixed it but, only after the damage was done and people made a bunch of noise. How often does this happen and webmasters and websites end up collateral damage with nowhere to turn.
Halfdeck Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 5:23 am
“Yes Google fixed it but, only after the damage was done and people made a bunch of noise. How often does this happen and webmasters and websites end up collateral damage with nowhere to turn.”
Ummm... yeah. Graywolf, if SEOs spent more time explaining to clients what to do instead of whining on SEO blogs like an old lady about Google’s hidden agenda maybe people have more places to turn.
Look at that guy’s jewerly site. Lame paid IBLs, TBPR 1 (update’s underway) and the guy has the balls to point his finger at Google? Any $100/hour link builder/viral marketer can fix his problem.
Stefan Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 5:23 am
Hi Matt. What you say makes perfect sense and I suppose thats how the supplemental index should work like.
I believe however that there might be certain flaws connectet to it.
My site songtext.net has a PR of 6 and over 70.000 backlinks according to the webmaster console (all legaly obtained over the years and not paid for or otherwise enforced).
In january, out of a sudden, all of the 300.000-1.000.000 indexed pages (hard to get absolute numbers there as you know) dropped into the supplementary index.
Since then I tried various things: a complete redesign without tables, moving the content further up in the code, shorter and more individual pagetitles, etc.
Don’t get me wrong, I know that not all of our pages have individual content (due to the directory like structure) so I wouldn’t mind if 30-60% where in the supp.-index, but songtext.net was craving with only 900 (!) pages in the main index for the last three months (a little more now). And considering the number of backlinks and our PR, to me that seems like an error.
Thanks for reading all this,
Stefan
graywolf Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 5:45 am
Well why didn’t we have this level of public dissection in the vanishing sex blogs incident ... hmmm ... oh we’ll make some adjustments behind the curtain fix it , sweep it under the carpet and mum’s the word.
JLH Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 6:46 am
I think Adam Lasnik summed up the supplemental index best on Google groups which I completely stole so I could find it again and use for a reference, on just such an occaision.
http://webmastershelp.iblogget.com/2007/03/09/the-skinny-on-supplementals/
Specially interesting, and would have been good investigate journalism to find, is this statement:
“1) Penalty? When your site has pages in our supplemental index, it does *not* indicate that your site has been penalized. In particular, we do not move a site’s pages from our main to our supplemental index in response to any violations of our Webmaster Guidelines.”
Mike Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 7:07 am
I’ve read a number of times on here and on Webmaster Central that being in the supplemental index isn’t a bad thing but try telling that to the thousands of webmasters who find their sites suddenly disappearing off the radar.
Have Google recently changed the way the classify what goes into the supplementals? Also is there a way for this information to be integrated into the Webmaster Tools?
David Cree Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 7:47 am
I agree with Chris, The tough thing with all the spam and the measures Google has to take to “defend” there results end up hurting the small business opportunity to rank. I wish the local results were stronger in the SERPs to give them a chance.
peter lee Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 8:14 am
Supplemental results is bad but how long it gonna stay ?
Martin Spamer Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 8:16 am
It seems to me that these people complaining have change tactics not strategy. The are still trying to game page rank by complaining to Forbes (and getting links from them).
Johnny Mnemonic Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 9:03 am
Chris, you said:
“It’s very tough to get these links when you are a small business with not a lot of money or time.”
Small brick and mortar has trouble competing with large national chains, because it’s out-advertised.
Film at 11.
Maybe the world doesn’t really need another vendor willing to sell me jewelry online? Google, or anyone else for that matter, doesn’t owe this small jewelry shop a living. OTOH if they were to innovate and produce a unique product, then they would be sure to get some individual attention. Until then, though, I’m not sorry that they don’t show up in the search results--who needs ‘em?
Multi-Worded Adam Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 9:07 am
I love how people are always surprised and offended when a mainstream media source screws up coverage of an Internet-related issue. They just can’t get it right to save their lives.
Steve Maich wasn’t even close, the BBC missed the mark, Computer World of all people screwed it up, and now Forbes has.
Mainstream media should either hire dedicated people to cover Internet and/or SEO-related issues or just not bother at all.
Dan Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 9:08 am
The interesting part about this is that the vast majority of people don’t have a problem with how google does things. Its only when the company in question starts to use SEO that is generally labled either black or greyhat SEO that they get into trouble.
While I understand while new freshly launched web sites hang out for a bit before google starts to page rank them, there are legitimate ways to get more traffic, advertising, digg and reddit come immediatly to mind.
All part of the fun of it, the funny part is that the rules are clear, how this works is clear. Its only when someone does something that is against the rules, that they whine.
Sorry mate, no sympathy even less after reading this artcile.
Ray Comstock Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 9:11 am
To be fair to Matt, anyone seeing this links page knows it is there for SEO only. And thats the whole point. Anything done for SEO only with no value (or negative value) to user experience counts as spam. This list is obviously spam. And the “rules” about this have been the same for a long time. The ability of Google to catch this kind of stuff has improved. However, there are a number of Web masters that do get accidently caught in these filters. Having said that, its not like Google owes you anything to begin with...lol. Use unique Page Titles and Meta descriptions on all pages, make sure your URL structure is easy for Google to understand and that each page of your site is linked to with at least one straight html link from within your site (ps. the sitemap is a good place to ensure this link connectivity) and that will solve a lot of supplemental related issues (although obviously not all).
Christopher Ficek Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 9:15 am
We as Daktronics Inc has gotten hit with Google Hell and removed from Google Index a few weeks ago. We didnt know what was happening since Google explaination on the Webmaster Tools is very vague. We have done everything we can to find and fix the problems according to the webmaster’s guidelines. Emails and request forms has been submitted to Google requesting assistance but no response. Thats poor business practice -- Google dont seem to care about companies like us. We are a legitimate company from Brookings, SD -- one of the world’s leader in programmable electronic signs, eletronic and digital displays. http://www.daktronics.com We saw a drop in traffic and sales as a result of removal from Google.
Asia Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 9:21 am
I’ve never had a problem with Supplemental Results, of course my sites are all fairly old websites and yes, I have utilized some “get links quick” software but most of them were due to advice by Search Engine Watch (Many years ago).
We haven’t done much link exchange outside of the clubs and organizations of our industries within the last 3 years. Some of the old links to our sites still appear on Google’s Webmaster Console, but I’ve done my best to offset them with quality links. I have no control over removing them.
We did find ourselves, or rather some of our pages listed as supplemental, but those were https (SSL) listings and it didn’t matter, they’ve been removed and are no longer on Google.
It’s unfortunate that many websites have found themselves with this problem, I looked at the sites myself and found evidence of bad link patterns. What I really disliked about that article however, is that there were no solutions offered and none were requested either. It was attacking in nature, and almost blubberish and immature. waa waa waa Google Hates me! (Sound familiar?)
It’s really simple to fix their listing and rankings, they just have to put effort into finding quality links to offset the bad. I’ve done it, but I started early before the onslaught of “relative links” became a must. It took awhile to find these niche sites, but I will say it didn’t cost me near $500,000 in business because I sat around and cried.
And then came yesterday... When Google took away my shiny 5 PR (sigh..) just kidding Matt! Our hits are up, our internal page rankings are up once again back to top 5 and 10 positions as they should be. So take the PR and bury it, just keep giving me relative rankings and I’ll be happy with my pretty 4. I’m liking the change, and really happy I didn’t get caught up in the PR craze either.
Michael Martinez Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 9:42 am
Kudos on the outing, Matt! Another great treat for us.
But on a more serious note, I don’t think Google is really taking heat because Web sites with questionable content are going Supplemental. You’re taking heat because a great number of perfectly legitimate sites with good, unique content but relatively few inbound links are sinking into the Supplemental Results Index.
And those pages rarely show up in active, well-populated queries because Google favors non-Supplemental content first (totally ignoring relevance and value in favor of link spam) AND because Google does NOT parse the text on Supplemental Pages. There is no way a Supplemental Page will show up in organic search results unless it has at least one non-supplemental link pointing to it.
I’ve performed many site searches on a lot of people’s Web sites that were wholly in the Supplemental Results Index and those pages don’t even come up for their own internally branded site names. This is consistent, easily reproduced behavior.
So you should really make an effort to look at this from the Webmaster’s point of view. Well-linked guys like you and me can blow off the Supplemental Results Index because we get over 1 million visitors a year. Most sites don’t get that kind of traffic.
The smaller sites with fewer inbound links don’t deserve to be relegated to the dungeon of the Supplemental Results Index where the on-page content is not found for very specific, unique term queries. If they cannot be found even for the very unique expressions embedded in their content, it’s completely unreasonable for Google to pretend that they will be found for anything else.
I hope you do have a great vacation, but when you come back, you’re probably going to find you and Google are facing an increased amount of criticism for favoring link spammers over relevant, valuable content that is simply link-poor.
You can continue your crusade against paid links, but you guys created the problem and you can easily fix it by preventing ALL sites from passing link anchor text in your index.
Linda Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 9:55 am
“waa waa waa Google Hates me! (Sound familiar?)”
Sounds real familiar, Asia. I’ve been crying in my coffee over this for months.
It is very insulting when 90% of a seven (7) year old site has been dumped into supplemental hell. I don’t do link exchanges, and if any site that I do link to happens to link back, it is merely a coincidence. For months now the other search engines have been sending 4 to 5 times the traffic that Google now sends. It used to be the other way around.
I’ve even rebuilt the entire site (nearly 900 pages) from the ground up with the hope that things will improve. The rebuild isn’t completed yet but the site is up and running. I have time consuming housekeeping yet to do and I figure that chore will take me months to complete.
Even when I try to find search results on Google I’m having to go far too deep into the results to find a result that fits with my query. More and more often I am now finding myself resorting to other engines that I haven’t had to use in a coon’s age to get to what I’m looking for.
To add insult to insult the PR update clobbered the site as well.
Is there any hope left? I don’t think so, but I’ll just keep trucking along doing my thing and maybe someday down the road all will get fixed.
nerd gone bad Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 10:11 am
Google is still getting gamed and easily when one website can appear in 8 of the top 10 spots for it’s category (and it’s not original content and all spam advertising).
http://mythicalblog.com/blog/2007/04/17/the-porn-of-web20/
martial Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 10:15 am
Any $100/hour link builder/viral marketer can fix his problem.... How?
Peter Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 11:15 am
****
My site songtext.net has a PR of 6 and over 70.000 backlinks according to the webmaster console (all legaly obtained over the years and not paid for or otherwise enforced).
In january, out of a sudden, all of the 300.000-1.000.000 indexed pages (hard to get absolute numbers there as you know) dropped into the supplementary index.
****
Wow - 70k links and only PR6 - a PR6 attempting to hold up 1million pages...........I think you have your own answer.....
Joe Duck Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 11:52 am
Matt -
I’m not getting your objection to the gist of that article, which I think is less about whether it is possible to get out of supplementals, rather about the collateral damage issue.
You seem to be saying that going to supps does not generally involve a dramatic downgrade in rank, and that dramatic ranking changes only affect sites that deserve them?
Though perhaps part of this is a time frame thing - Google fixing a ranking quirk in 6-12 months may seem reasonable to you but for some companies it means ... death or huge losses.
Mike Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 11:53 am
Sometimes I wonder about how Google really thinks. Here’s an example:
Google the phrase “business cards” . You will see on the first page alone, out of all of the pay per click bidders, Vista Print is on there 3 times! Two of them mislead you to think they are other companies (they’re like splash pages). However, when you click them then click anything, you end up on VistaPrint.
Plus, they are number 1 and 2 with a high pagerank. How can anyone compete with a company like that using unethical tactics? Am I just wrong?
I know this fell off topic, but it drives me nutes! Matt, maybe that’s something you can address? I feel that’s a form of spam. I don’t see how that could fit in the white hat category.
Matt Crouch Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 12:04 pm
Like someone else said above, what is excessive? I don’t expect Google to actually give me an answer. But I think in general webmasters are used to seeing link directories with at least 20 categories and 20-30 links per page. Having hundreds of reciprocal links may not seem like a lot to people that look at it all day (who have high aspirations) but maybe Google all along has thought that is a ridiculous number. I realize that even hundreds of links could be a small number in comparison to sites that have thousands of natural links .. but I image Google looks at the % of recip vs. natural when measures a sites link backs. With that being said, say a website has nothing but reciprocal links. Is hundreds of recips bad?
Dr. Pete Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 12:18 pm
I ended up talking to Andy before the article went out because of my recent post on SEOmoz:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-i-escaped-googles-supplemental-hell
I got the distinct impression that he really wanted to hear the more sensational horror stories, and, as I tried to convey in the article, I honestly have come to believe that Google doesn’t intend supplemental as a penalty. The one lesson I learned from getting my client out of supplemental was that we were suffering from dozens of small things we’ve been doing wrong over the past 2-3 years. None of it was black-hat, but much of it made for duplicate content, unfriendly search results, and a bad user experience.
On the other hand, I can certainly vouch that having over 99% of your pages in supplemental has very real consequences. The week after my client got their site out of supplemental, Google searches almost doubled. The vast majority of these were long-tail searches that are driving high-quality traffic. Of course, these searches are good for Google, my client, and our users, as they bypass our own search results and get users straight to the content.
Jeff Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 12:21 pm
Did you ever wonder if part of the link exchange and paid links sites that are out there are actually owned by Google or a front company owned by Google? Google sets up link exchange sites like these to catch spammers? May be even give a “link exchange” site high PR, good search engine rankings and even has ad words ads pointed towards the sites so people sign up and Google catches them?
Very interesting indeed..... I could see Google doing this to catch the spammers....
Of course Matt, I would not expect you to comment on this but I can definitely seeing you do something like this.... That’s sneaky but spammers deserve it.
Halfdeck Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 12:25 pm
Reciprocal links happen naturally all the time. I link to SEL on one post and SEL links to me from another post, for example. Excessive reciprocal exchanged links (ab/abc trades) intended for search results manipulation are what you should be careful with.
“Steve Maich wasn’t even close, the BBC missed the mark, Computer World of all people screwed it up, and now Forbes has.”
Yeah. I don’t mind healthy criticism but I’m seeing alot of baseless anti-Google propaganda lately.
Ideally, a website should rank without any marketing. If it’s a good quality site, it should rank high even if I don’t bother to install a blog and blog on it 24/7 to get a bunch of people to send me links. YouTube is an example of a unique site naturally gaining links but not every site is YouTube.
There are a ton of good quality porn sites, for example, but because there are almost zero natural links in that niche, Google has a hard time deciding what’s a good porn site and what’s spam.
Joel Lesser Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 12:26 pm
Matt,
You said:
“Reciprocal links by themselves aren’t automatically bad, but we’ve communicated before that there is such a thing as excessive reciprocal linking”
Thank you for finally commenting specifically about reciprocal linking!
We’ve been preaching to our thousands of customers for years to make linking decisions for the end users and not for the search engines. Our patended editor based system was designed intentionally to charge per category instead of per link to facilitate relevant link exchange for the end user.
No site needs 329 link categories.. most only need a few dozen at the most.
Relevant link exchange benefits the end user’s experience by providing another knowledge gateway to other sites related to the first site’s product/service/information.
Link exchange can be abused or it can be done right for the end user.
Folks: Avoid full duplex link exchange services and software that guarantee you links overnight. If you do use a software or service to manage link development, use one that is EDITOR BASED so you maintain editorial discretion on making links.
Link as if the search engines did not exist. That means, ask yourself “Is this site I am about to link up with benefit my end user or help my end user learn more about my own product/service/information??”
If the answer is no or you aren’t sure, skip it and move on. Don’t link to sites that don’t offer significant original information (avoid scraper sites).
If the answer is yes, get the link while forgetting about the site’s pagerank or related metrics.
Link exchange has existed since the WWW was invented. Google is rightly working to discern between webmasters who link for the end user and webmasters who abuse this legacy marketing method. Thank you Matt for reminding webmasters to avoid irrelevant high volume link exchange.
Bambarbia Kirkudu Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 12:35 pm
Nice article, nothing goes wrong with “supplemental results”, thanks!
I believe even writers at Google do not know exactly what “supplemental results” are; perhaps this was written few years before so many changes: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34473
Google is big, of course it uses multiple architectural layers. How is it possible that search returns results within 100-200 milliseconds?
First logical layer is fastest “cache” connected to main index. “Supplemental index” should be hthousands times larger. Suppose that user tries to find Bambarbia in Toronto; of course search will return results within milliseconds. Next day/hour/minute, if many users tried to find Bambarbia in Toronto, some more “supplemental results” will be pulled out into fastest cache; at the end of month they will be added to main index too.
Some SEO advice to use “fresh content”, that is because of 2 kinds of Google crawls: one is for main index, and another is for more frequent “supplemental” updates of “fresh content”.
I believe Google implements similar logic...
Asia Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 2:19 pm
@Linda
I’m not trying to make light of the situation, however, I took the opportunity to look at your website. I love the design, but you might want to look through Matt’s Archive as well as Search Engine Land and Neil Patel’s website for some tips on how to wake that site up for Search Engines. SEOmoz has some great stuff too.
I would point them out to you, but Matt would probably cut my hand off for spamming his comments.
I recently read an article a few days ago, by another person who has a cooking/recipe website who gave some great ideas on how to use social networking via Cooking sites to gain traffic. It took her under 30 minutes to make contact with individuals and within a day or so, a natural link via recommendation on another website. I got the link off one of SEL’s Search Day feeds. I highly recommend it, I never sleep until I’ve clicked every link on that particular feed, I learn lots each time I read them.
Merchant Account Guy Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 2:42 pm
People who are still obsessed with PR need to realize it is only a number with a green shiny mark. I know of people who rank higher then others in google and yet have a lower pagerank then their competitor. PR is more of a publicity stunt aimed at earning SEO’s money for getting clients high PR.
Your site can be a PR8 but if it isn’t in the top 10 for its keyphrase it is worth $8.00 CAD.
Marcel Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 2:54 pm
So
1. It’s ok to exchange reciprocal links, with moderation
2. Search engin abuse will be frowned upon
I can deal with moderation factor
Bambarbia Kirkudu Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 2:58 pm
I executed some site: queries. Interestingly, Google shows excellent results (few hundred thousands pages) for some well-known sites, but it does not allow you to browse all pages.
For instance, site:www.bbc.co.uk - 1,940,000 pages
http://www.google.ca/search?q=site:www.bbc.co.uk&hl=en&start=990&sa=N
and it does not allow you to browse next 1000 results
Try start=1000, “Sorry, Google does not serve more than 1000 results for any query. (You asked for results starting from 1000.)”.
For my site, it stops after page number 76 (760 results, from total of 23,500 pages), probably because those Documents are not cached (bad PR, after-1000-results mark, not enough user’s queries, etc.). They will be retrieved after some user’s queries using some specific keywords, in a PR order, and placed into cache (even supplemental results).
Brian White Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 2:58 pm
I think Matt doesn’t like pleas to look into cases in his comments, but I’ll jump in on one.
To Christopher Ficek -- Your case has nothing to do with the content of this post. daktronics.com violated our Quality Guidelines by hiding a few dozen keywords via CSS at the top of the site, which was there as recently as last month (you seem to be acknowledging as much).
We sent you an email to a reasonable set of email addresses to alert you. Within this email were instructions on where to go when the problem was fixed:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reinclusion?hl=en
I would see a reinclusion request queued up with my tools, but I don’t see one for daktronics.com as of yet. That’s your next step.
Alan Rabinowitz Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 3:15 pm
I believe problem here is that we are being shown that all these links can make a site rank #1 for extremely competitive terms like “diamond engagement rings” and a bit of whining can get around any spam penalty?
In the future is a good thought, most of the SEO community already believes reciprocals do not work well and were already devalued long ago. Perhaps after viewing this we could second guess that theory.
I think graywolf made an accurate statement above about having to get your attention to take action may require a bit of screaming. Perhaps a little communications back (a change in your policy) would make webmasters happier. Isn’t the Google’s goal here? Better Communications? When we are looking for help, getting a response would surely make a difference rather then leaving us than feeling like we are “Screaming at a Wall”, which becomes frustrating for any webmaster in any industry.
Food for thought!
spamhound Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 3:27 pm
With sites like this filling up the index, no wonder things are all screwy:
http://www.google.com/search?q=leads2results&hl=en&safe=off&start=0&sa=N
Most of the links back to that are about as spammy as they get.
GilbertZ Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 3:37 pm
Hi Matt,
Just as an aside, I submitted this post of yours to Digg:
http://www.digg.com/tech_news/Google_s_Matt_Cutts_rebuts_Forbes_article_on_Google_Hell
and had an interesting experience. While the Forbes article was submitted almost simultaneously, and got promoted and received tons of Diggs, my post wound up getting promoted only later. However, it didn’t show in the front page. Not even as a popular story in the section I submitted it to:
http://www.digg.com/tech_news
The only thing I can think of is that some commenter posted a HD DVD hack and it was buried per:
http://blog.digg.com/?p=73
I’ve heard some SEOs got buried sometimes, but I’m not an SEO and your blog is an official Google blog...
Oh well. Finally got a non-video story on the front page and it dies right away...haha, easy come easy go...
Beltira Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 3:38 pm
It seems to me people are fogetting two basic things.
1. Search engines exist to help PEOPLE find things. If results of a given search engine return less usefull results than another enging, then people will use that one. As a user of search engines, I dont care who is religate to where, just give me usefull results.
2. Shakespear was wrong. First we shoot all the SEOs.
Why is it that people think they have a right to good rankings?
Why is it no one understands Google and the rest cannot publish the details of how they do rankings. To do so would simple destroy the value to us end users of the search engines.
Why?
Simple, no matter what search temrs we might put in, we will find:
300 pages hawking fake Rolexs
400 pages of sites full of hot lonelly single women just looking for a hook up tonight
500 pages of sites offereing me Viagra without a prescription(I assume to be used with the above sites).
In all fairness I do realize all SEOs are not out to cheat and scam the system. The problem is that the 99% of them that are make the 1% look just as bad as them.
I think the search engines are being very nice in relegating those that manipulated thereselves up in rankings artificially. If it were up to me, I would plain out ban forever the domain from appearing the results at all.
Harsh?
Yes, indeed it is harsh.
The fanancial rewards of getting away with scamming the search engines are so large, the risks need to match.
Instead of criticizing Google, why do we not have blogs of people blogging about how even the cheaters are? Because there are not enough that have never stepped over the line left. So instead they all harp on Google.
And this Google has a conflict of interest crap.
Yes, sure there is potential for them to cheat. So they cheat, the value of the search results to the end users go down. Users flock to another engine that doesnt. People use Google because they like the results it gives. They are not forced there or horded there. If they wore, MicroSoft and Yahoo would be sure to let us all know.
I am not saying Google is perfect and without mistakes. Google is a company of fallable human employees, and they have mnade mistakes, and will make more in the future. As everyone else will whethor individual or a company.
\
Beltira
O, that this too too solid search results would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into spam!
Or that the SEO had not fix’d
His canon ‘gainst supplemental results! O Google! Google!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this SEM!
Fie on’t! ah fie! ’tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to SEM; things ranking and SPAM in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!
But two months dead: nay, not so much, not two:
So excellent a web store; that was, to this,
online pharmacy to an x10.com; so loving to my search results
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit the links too roughly.
Kelly Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 5:01 pm
Hi Matt
Please could you answer the question about number of recip links asked by Tomaz (”If I have 40 reciprocal links on a site with 200 content pages, is that trigerring any penalties?”)
My comment is this - I have religiously turned down every 3 way (ie non-reciprocal) link request believing that I was doing the right thing, because I do not want to “trick” search engines. When I get a reciprocal link request I look at the site and IF I would recommend the site to someone regardless of a link offer, then I agree to the exchange. Now, based on what I am reading here, I am doing the wrong thing and should’ve taken up some of those 3 way link offers. (if the sites were link-worthy of course).
Its very confusing Matt if we are told different things at different times. Are you now saying that we should not reciprocal link and if not, why not if the site is good and fits in with the theme of my site?
Joel Lesser Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 5:22 pm
Kelly and the rest of you asking about “number of recip links” ..
I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect Google to tell you exactly how many link exchanges you can do on a certain day or during a specific time period. Think of how that may be abused if Google stated exactly what is reasonable and what their speed limits may be.
It’s reasonable to conclude that there are many speed limits. Separate speed limits for various types of websites, websites of different age groups and states of development, websites with global as well as national and regional links.
The nature of the links themselves may also be factored into the “speed limit.”
Don’t worry so much about a specific number. If you are obtaining relevant quality links for the end user and maintaining editorial discretion while doing so, it will be practically impossible to bust whatever speed limit may be in place for your market segment. In other words, you won’t bust Google’s limits if you obtain links with editorial discretion and without using full duplex software.
Link to and obtain links from quality sites when it benefits your end user’s experience. Avoid services and software that force you to link in very high volume in a short time period. That means you might obtain one link exchange today, none tomorrow, two the next day, none for the next five days, three the next day, one the following day, none for the next week, then eight the next day and so on... that is natural link exchange activity. Avoid services and software that force you to link in high volume (more than 25-50 a day) to sites you have not reviewed.
Avoid link exchange schemes which includes three way links, four way links, and anything else that appears as chicanery or gamesmanship.
Walkman Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 5:27 pm
Matt,
you say that over time some links may be counted less. Assuming that PR increases from 5 to 6, does it follow that the links being counted less is not an issue?
ogletree Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 7:00 pm
The problem is most companies that hire a VP of SEM look for somebody with a degree in marketing and hire the first one that has been working for a few years and knows what SEM stands for. I have talked to several big companies about doing SEO for them and they are more concerened about non seo things. I was very suprised when looking for an SEO job that actualy good knowledge of SEO was not that important.
agung s Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 7:52 pm
my agreed here in the term for the web pages
like : duplicate content, no content at all, orphaned pages ...
Dave (Original) Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 8:06 pm
To those worried about reciprocal links. IF you have read the Google guidelines and are still uneasy about YOUR reciprocal linking, you probably have good cause. If you are simply linking out when it enhances your users experience on your site, you likely have nothing to fear.
It is extremely unlikley and just as unrealistic, to expect there to be some magic number that trips something. And, if they were and Matt stated it, 99% of those who read it would go exactly to that number. In other words 99% would be linking for SEs, the wrong reason.
Bambarbia Kirkudu Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 8:53 pm
About “reciprocal links”, the main subject...
It’s very easy to automate process. If “density” of different “terms” is the same on same page, - “spam”. Related to [of-topic] in newsgroups, blogs, forums, etc.
From my Apache logs:
[29/Apr/2007:19:34:39 +0000] “GET /adxmlrpc.php HTTP/1.0″ 404 1684 “-” “-”
[29/Apr/2007:19:34:40 +0000] “GET /phpAdsNew/adxmlrpc.php HTTP/1.0″ 404 1684 “-” “-”
Automated software looking for a backdoor to publish smth. Funny, someone still tries to post Emails to newsgroups
Sooner or later users will decide who is who. Via Google Toolbar, Alexa, ...
Do not worry about PR too much! Even if you lost 250k, you didn’t pay anything to lose it
JLH Said,
May 1, 2007 @ 9:39 pm
So the guy dumps his 329 categories and their links of recipricated garbage generated through http://www.linkhelpers.net/add_url.asp?info=mysolitaire.
For example let us say he’s got 10 links in each category or 3290 exchanged links. He of course drops them due to his public outing. Does he now have 3290 non-reciprocated links, generating a strong boost for him? Or does the Google memory remember the previous relationships? If so, for how long?
Now let’s say a site in a similar situation, with thousands of exchanged links on it, but not having the personal attention of the head of the spam team, notices this and then dumps the pages. Does it get said boost?
Obviously not all links on two sites are bad. Matt’s linked to me before, I’ve linked to him many many more times, nothing was exchanged, no arrangement was made, but yet I’d still think a link from thE (long E) Google’s Matt Cutts blog is worth a bunch.
Further speculation also has me wondering if the exchange is really the bad part here but the 329 categories of links not relative to the content they are trying to rank for. It’s a terrible profile; the text of the site says its about one thing, but yet the vast majority of the sites external links are about a million other subjects, the non-relevant links probably don’t add much either as those sites are off subject and probably have the ultra creative anchor text of “www.mysolitaire.com”
(I really don’t expect an answer from you on my speculative questions)
Deb Said,
May 2, 2007 @ 12:26 am
Hi Matt
so reciprocal is not black hat; right? so why some link pages of my site blocked by google? is it for 3 way linking?
Deb
Ray Burn Said,
May 2, 2007 @ 12:50 am
Dave (original):
“To those worried about reciprocal links. IF you have read the Google guidelines and are still uneasy about YOUR reciprocal linking, you probably have good cause. If you are simply linking out when it enhances your users experience on your site, you likely have nothing to fear.”
Exactly!
I am not an SEO, but I am from the school of common sense!
Why is everyone getting burned about about reciprocal link ratios, numbers, categrories and so on?
I mentioned something along these lines in another thread:
If you sell “widgets” in the UK and get enquiries from “widget buyers” in the US you might link to a US based “widget seller” and he might link back to you - cos he gets UK enquiries.
If you sell “recycled widgets” you might link to a guy that sells “recycled teapots” and he might link back - cos you support that communtiy.
These type of links are natural, ADD VALUE for your visitors and is plain common sense.
Thank you and good night!
Dave (Original) Said,
May 2, 2007 @ 3:19 am
I wish more were, seems like “common sense” is not at all common when it comes to SEO or Google.
Gurtie Said,
May 2, 2007 @ 4:23 am
I think most people are approaching this from the wrong direction - afaik a page isn’t in supps because it has a lot of ‘bad’ links, its in supps because it has very few *direct* ‘good’ links (ie; natural deep links to that page)
Not a penalty, just a ‘this page is not valuable’ decision.
That still doesn’t make it a good idea. Like MM said above, if a page won’t appear for a query where it has perfect onpage content, you know that the link based algo has had the dial turned way too far.
Its not normal for most websites to have high volumes of deep links, especially some types of e-commerce. Blogs and news sites naturally get them, information sites will tend to over time, sites selling ‘part #1234 for brand name model #4321′ aren’t going to get many natural links to that page, but provide exactly what searchers for that keyphrase are looking for. Putting that page supplemental is unhelpful and, since it can be fixed by going and getting a few carefully placed links, just makes for more unnatural linking as people figure it out.
Paul Webster Said,
May 2, 2007 @ 5:47 am
Matt,
I’m baffled by the supplemental results thing. My site used to have 99% of its pages in the main index. Over the last few months, I’ve lost about 70% of the pages to the supplemental index, which I know you say isn’t a penalty but it has led to a complete cessation of referrals to those pages from Google search.
The ironic thing is that the pages that have gone supplemental are not the shortest, most copied or poor pages on my site but are in fact the main purpose and the unique content and value given by my site. ALL of these pages have gone supplemental.
I do have reciprocal links (isn’t this part of what the web’s about?) but not excessive - no links to sites off topic and certainly vastly many times fewer reciprocal links than unique pages on the site.
So why has the very best part of my content gone supplemental (and left the rest)?
Aaron Pratt Said,
May 2, 2007 @ 5:48 am
Andy Greenberg from Forbes called me looking for information on Google’s supplemental results. When I said that I believed that SEOs exaggerate what supplemental results are all about he wasn’t interested in discussing the issue further with me.
ted sullivan Said,
May 2, 2007 @ 7:43 am
Paul, that happens to me all the time. What I consider primary pages Google seems to think are secondary and end up in the supplemental index which of course means they never get returned in the SERP.
If I could understand what it takes to make primary pages and secondary pages I would organize the sites that way. Not all my pages have to be in the main index - but some simply have to be or my site is not properly indexed.
If you figure it out please let me know.
Multi-Worded Adam Said,
May 2, 2007 @ 7:47 am
Well what good is telling a journalist something that contradicts his opinion? They never let facts get in the way of a good Internet story.
Bambarbia Kirkudu Said,
May 2, 2007 @ 7:50 am
Just as a sample of not relying on PR:
try to search m7640nr at Google. On my PC located in Canada it shows my site on a second place after FutureShop.ca, marked with “supplemental results”. It was on 3rd place when PR was 0, one month ago. So why search at Google does not return pages even from Hewlett Packard?
Unbelievable! Even search at PriceGrabber and HP itself returns zero results. And someone already performed this search with Google as I know from Webmaster Tools; “m7640nr” is real word-in-mouth.
I need to add more URLs to the crawler, and to tune it, part-time hobby... Thanks!
Aaron Pratt Said,
May 2, 2007 @ 8:46 am
You are the man for keeping it real Adam! Won’t get you much traffic but it’s better to have a soul at the end of the day.
1. “Supplementals” are purgatory for link builders.
2. Supplementals are great for removing things like tags, rss and other duplicates to make the real content count.
I believe if you are bitchin’ about supplementals you are a sucky SEO.
Anyone have anything good to say about supplementals?
Ventrilo Said,
May 2, 2007 @ 9:10 am
Thanks for clearing up some confusion Matt. It is nice to know you have pages in the supplemental index too.
rob Said,
May 2, 2007 @ 9:59 am
Gurtie hits the nail on the top of the cannister.
The whole shebang naturally encourages people to go out and acquire links. Not everyone has marketing nous or is web savvy to the power of blogs and tags and all the other ways of bumping your stuff to where you want it to be.. Least of all the hobbyist with kick arse content - but hey, then again, is there really anything new now under the sun? Perhaps thats the view , the uber meritocracist web, the cream will rise etc blah - Well, not if its stuck in suppsville and no one knows about it won’t.
Aaron Pratt Said,
May 2, 2007 @ 10:25 am
Yeah, the “hobbyist” can now get to position #1 with few relevant, “earned” organic links.
Next question?
(I figure Matt is busy so anyone else want to jump in feel free)
Phil Bader Said,
May 2, 2007 @ 12:11 pm
Speaking of SEO , Dear Matt , Alot of people argue out there that PageRank is no longer OK (Useless) and say it does not effect SERP at all , however , I demand an honest feedback from you just to clear things out.
Phil
Hobbyist Said,
May 2, 2007 @ 12:58 pm
Interesting, PriceGrabber has PR9 with 400,000 links (it goes down to 992 on some servers); CNET has PR9 with 1,440,000. Almost same amount of links has Google, 1,600,000. All links naturally come from everywhere.
According to Alexa CNET is 6 times more popular site than PriceGrabber; according to scientific papers PR reflects probability that average user will find you, and it is easily calculated (in theory).
Bambarbia Kirkudu Said,
May 2, 2007 @ 1:07 pm
PriceGrabber has PR9 with 400,000 links (it goes down to 992 on some servers right now); CNET has PR9 with 1,440,000. Almost same amount of links has Google, 1,600,000. All links naturally come from everywhere.
According to Alexa CNET is 6 times more popular site than PriceGrabber; according to scientific papers PR reflects probability that average user will find you, and it is easily calculated (in theory).
All this Math should help in sorting search results and to put into main index subset of all indexes, limited by 1000 documents per search term. Least recently used might be removed.
(sorry I tried to post under Hobbyist; pls ignore)
Bambarbia Kirkudu Said,
May 2, 2007 @ 1:58 pm
Number of links drops to 999 for CNET, and 998 for Google. Fair enough.
“Exchanged links” where A voted for B, and B for A, and even bigger loops shouldn’t have any impact on PR calcs, isn’t it? If everyone voted for everybody, PR should be the same, 0.
Shii Said,
May 2, 2007 @ 3:03 pm
This is to Peter Scott:
It looks like you designed your Ireland website with the purpose of getting high placement for various Ireland-related search terms. I for one am quite happy that Google has slighted you. People should write their websites for humans, not computers.
Multi-Worded Adam Said,
May 2, 2007 @ 5:11 pm
No, because everything rotates around it, not under it.
Jaan Kanellis Said,
May 2, 2007 @ 5:50 pm
Aaron Pratt,
Andy called me as well. He wanted “real world” examples of websites that are stuck in the SI. I told him if my clients were in there I could not tell him anyways. I appreciate Andy’s efforts to try to bring the SI results to the public as fact, but the way the article came off was like that Google was trying to hurt webmasters. Obviously that is not true, but as Michael Martinez has pointed out Google needs much, much more work on deciding who to put in the SI and who to take out.
Archna Sajwan Said,
May 2, 2007 @ 9:53 pm
I need help in knowing why Supplemental Results affect both new site and old. The reason of asking my website http://www.ecommind.com - this domain was registered in 2005 but full fledged site is launched in 2007 with sub pages.
Still, I see after first Google update few of my back links results are gone to supplement results and another thing which has come to my notice is that if I search with different search engines and online tools available.
Search engine shows links with supplement results and other online tools shows results excluding supplemental results.
When my pages will come out of supplemental results ?
Sagar Grover Said,
May 3, 2007 @ 1:15 am
Hi,
This is the first time I am writing in MattCutts. Just wanted a clarification about supplemental results. I have been working in the Search Engine field for the past 3 years. I have found sites which goes initially in supplemental results and soon if not taken any steps they got penalized. Surely they may be using unethical seo tactics.
But my question is I have seen sites which which are in the google for the past many years, getting lots of users but at the same time using unethical SEO tactics. I mean why google not banned those sites, just because they are reputed sites, deriving lots of traffic and people want to see those sites.
But what about unethical seo tactics they are using. I had this question in my mind so thought should ask this ?
Lee Said,
May 3, 2007 @ 4:06 am
Hi,
Anybody know of a tool that can simply report back counts of indexed pages and pages in the supplemental index?
Thanks,
Lee
Chocolate Boy Said,
May 3, 2007 @ 7:04 am
When I first launched one of my sites I experienced that although google crawled most of the pages, most of them were placed in the supplemental index. After a few strong links, they were put in the main index.
So it’s all about links I guess.
Bambarbia Kirkudu Said,
May 3, 2007 @ 8:13 am
Try to make this simple test: Create a beautiful web page, and add a link to it on a home page. After few days (even next day) you will see this new page in a search results, marked as “supplemental”. After assigning PR and gathering some statistics, this page may move to main index; although I believe there is no such technical concept as “main index”, it is simply cached “top 1000″ documents which Google tries to synchronize around tens of thousands servers (it can’t synchronize all indexed pages!)
May be I am WRONG because I’ve never read this article:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/bigdaddy/
Alex Duffield Said,
May 3, 2007 @ 9:17 am
Matt, isn’t the link exchange that is being done by mysolitaire in direct violation of Google Quality Guidlines??
“Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank.”
I practice White hat, encouraging my clients to get good quality links based on content and quality. I tell them to avoid these sort of link building schemes, as they are against Google guidelines.
The unfortunate reality is these techniques work. My clients argue back that there competitions sites have poor content that is not updated often, has zero content on the home (click to enter) page, but still comes up #1 for most of the searches. The only answer I can see is that they participate in these link building schemes, and have thousands of reciprocal links from sites that are completely irrelevant to there business.
It is becoming hard to stand on the soap box saying “this is the honest way to do it” when the facts show that the other way works better.
Google has to give us White Hat SEO guys some sort of way to fight this or all our clients will go off to black hat SEOs...
Tom Barber Said,
May 3, 2007 @ 9:30 am
With all due respect to Matt and the Google team, hurry up already!
How long do we have to play by Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, building out good content and focusing on our users, only to be outranked by crappy sites with “resource directories” clearly designed only for SEO purposes? In fact, cases where reciprocal links genuinely benefit a website’s users, especially an eCommerce site’s users, are probably very few and far-between...yet websites with entire site sections dedicated to such links consistently rank in the top 5 in Google. People using these tactics can also control the anchor text of the links they place and reciprocate for, allowing them to target their spam.
As long as purchasing and trading links works, people will do it.
Bambarbia Kirkudu Said,
May 3, 2007 @ 1:31 pm
Today someone visited my site using [Sony ICD-470] Google query. Query returns single and the only document!
Sorry guys I was not trying to fool Google (look at cached page too), but sooner or later more and more supplemental results will be returned... for instance, from Mediapartners’ index... Bigdaddy is small...
Classic sample of a query is this:
To be, or not to be
Google has really changed, first time during past decade. And some SEOs ;( still advice to remove stop words from a title
CVOS Said,
May 3, 2007 @ 1:33 pm
From this blog I have read the definition of supplemental results as:
Google’s original stated purpose for their Supplemental Index is to augment the results for obscure queries. So if you are searching for a very particular thing, you may see supplemental results.
It seems Forbes was being deliberately misleading to create an
aura of sensationalism for their article. Whatever their intention, the article succeeded in generating a lot of traffic.
Bambarbia Kirkudu Said,
May 3, 2007 @ 2:41 pm
Last year query To be, or not to be (without double-quotes) returned 1st page “Too hot to be truth” possibly because of stop-words and punctuation removal before query processing (”to”,”or”,”not”,”,”). (although stop words were not removed during indexing as query with quotes showed)
Doug Heil Said,
May 3, 2007 @ 3:27 pm
I think that instead of blaming Google and wondering why sites are going supplemental or pages disappearing, etc, some sites I’ve viewed from “this” thread have very good reasons why things are happening the way they are. I’ll bet many problems have almost nothing to do with incoming links to pages at all.
Christopher of Daktronics; I’m not picking on you, but your’s is one I remember very well:
Your url’s are atrocious and your home links on interior pages go to the index.cfm extension instead of the “root” of your domain. That creates “Two” identical home pages in Google. That’s only one small thing among many, many things.
If sites out there actually looked and tried to learn about what makes se’s tick, etc, you really wouldn’t be wondering what is wrong with your sites. Most problems are easily fixed if you have a designer/programmer who knows what they are doing. Of course, most designers out there don’t have a clue about search engines, so you owners need to learn this stuff or find people who can help you.
Bambarbia Kirkudu Said,
May 3, 2007 @ 5:48 pm
From Google viewpoint, if both queries return the same HTTP response, which one will be automatically banned for similar content?
URL1: http://www.mydomain.com/
URL2: http://www.mydomain.com/index.html
Calculator Said,
May 3, 2007 @ 6:00 pm
Matt, I have a specific question from the real estate industry. Real estate agents have a long history of creating a reciprocal directory of agents by state. Many agents have abused this technique having hundreds of reciprocal links for each state.
This has led Greg Boser and other SEO’s to recommend real estate agents not have any reciprocal links, contrary to your statement that reciprocal links are fine if they are not excessive.
My brother is an agent and I built his website. Over his 20 years in real estate he has met and referred business to several agents in each state. Many SEO advisers to real estate agents are now saying it is excessive if he exchanges links with the agents he has exchanged clients with.
My specific question: is there any reason real estate agents should not have a directory of reciprocal links with agents by state as long as they are not excessive?
This is a major concern for the real estate industry. Given the amount of money the real estate industry spends advertising with Google, the favor of a reply and some guidance would be much appreciated. Thanks!
agung s Said,
May 3, 2007 @ 7:09 pm
@Aaron Pratt : Hi Aaron see you again here ..
just wondering how you moderate and answer most question here as I remark for each of this post by others ...
Much more info I could get here .. thanks
Disconsolate Said,
May 4, 2007 @ 3:06 am
@Aaron Pratt: “Anyone have anything good to say about supplementals”
Hi Aaron, Hi Matt ... Yes I’ve.
First: sorry for my bad english
My site is organized book review collection about italian personages and actors.
I do not sell house, cars, video. I’m not a merchant. I create free content to read ... stop.
Every biographical page is purposely created from our staff with the collaboration of the actors and so on ... We link important and contestual sources like imdb.com, abc.com, and rai.it, for example, for the exclusive convenience of our readers.
For the thoroughness, the originality and the clarity our pages are between the best ones in circulation. The web sites of italian televisions, italian version of wikipedia, and many others, copy our content ... but without linking the source (... and if they link us, they use rel=”nofollow”. For a encyclopedia constructed on the other people’s contents, to cite the source with nofollow is not the maximum of ethics!).
It’s a mentality and a cultural problem, and I cannot doing nothing in order to change it.
But, what can I do if my site have only poor incoming link? Unfortunately little will cite us with a link, but all the world wil copy our content. Then the only way to present our pages is to build a little of popularity by directories, of any bought link.
From 3 month we have loosed many position in google serps. Our carrying section has been penalized dramatically. Today wo have copied our content is on the top. Spam engines with one BL and with a little of my content are in the first 2 pages.
For example if I search literally any spample of my text (composed from 10 - 15 words) in google, my pages are in the supplemental results, but after others that have copied my job.
I have executed some Spam report too, for love towards my job, but with no result. Therefore I have decided that I will not make others spam report, because reporting is expensive activity in terms of time, and is not effective. Sometimes instead some bad site speed up
.
I observe:
1. Fortunately the traffic from Yahoo and Ask has grown (Perhaps in my sector google is less important, because the large amount of spam, and perhaps people watch elsewhere in order to reduce the cost of the searches)
2. Spam blog build around one single key (many of them are build on free blogspot platform) with content copied without to cite the source, become more and more numerous and goes very well in the serps. But they are only made for AdSense.
3. Network sites build on free spaces are increasing their presence in the serp of google. Often are sites build in directory on domains like this one: digilander.libero.it (digilander.libero.it/key1, digilander.libero.it/key2, ..., digilander.libero.it/keyn) and they are over connected. To the eyes of Google, I thing that situation is considered exactly like one single site. But they are independent web sites. But they are only made for AdSense.
4. If I restrict the search in Italian language, I see numerous sites in english, french, Chinese and German language, however! Sorry but I know that there are important italian pages in correspondence of that key. My pages there are not. Are they considered not italian? I do not know.
Best Regards
Clint Said,
May 4, 2007 @ 3:44 am
Hi
So we are still discussing reciprocal links????
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Google-Optimization-Help/Links-Why-They-Are-Of-Little-Value-In-Helping-To-Achieve-Front-Page-Google-Results/
I have been telling people for years they are worthless......when are we going to move forward Matt??
Multi-Worded Adam Said,
May 4, 2007 @ 7:33 am
When we as a collective move forward, not just we as the minority who already have known this for years.
When people like Andy Greenberg can report things accurately and without any bias, making sure to gather information from all sides of a story, rather than posting some sensationalistic piece of crap designed to garner sympathy based on dominant company resentment.
When people like Bob and Sally, the mom and pop website owners, know the things that Doug Heil referred to.
In other words, it will be a cold day in Hell before that happens.
MattKP Said,
May 4, 2007 @ 8:42 am
You know what is funny. We all know the standards of links, content, etc... and all the things we preach as being bad doesn’t mean they don’t work. I’m not talking about spamming but when done with care, reciprocal linking can still benefit sites a lot. Sometimes a site needs a couple hundred well picked recip links and it can help nudge ranks. Saying they are worthless isn’t accurate.
ConveniaCash.com Said,
May 4, 2007 @ 10:43 am
still a NOVICE brand new to all this stuff so hope this is not stupid Q:
okay so what about sites like this one -- i trying not to link to it :
traffic-czar[dot]com
at the very bottom -- obscured white text matching the white background are a TON of very tiny cross-links to other sites. you don’t even see it for some reason i just happened to try to highlight and copy something at the bottom and stumbled on the hidden links by accident.
Isn’t that verboten? Or is it okay since apparently they are all his sites? or what? I thought that was not okay.
Doug Heil Said,
May 4, 2007 @ 11:33 am
Bambarbia; It’s Google’s “CHOICE” at that point if a site does not know to not get both index.html and the mydomain.com in the index at the same time. “You” as the site owner have the choice by not linking to “both” forms on your site.
But like I stated; that’s just a minor problem I see out there compared to many, many other problems “most” sites have with their design/structure.
Matt; “Any” site who somehow gets “200″ incoming from exchanging links is “eventually” going to fade away in Se’s. That’s a fact. I’ve “never” had a client go after link exchanges the way I see many out there doing. Yep; I said never. Most of my clients have just a few incoming links anyhoo. Don’t need to many to begin with.
children’s gifts
If you think being on first page for that term requires MANY incoming links?...... you are mistaken. That’s only one example. Yes; I have a client on the first page for that term along with many other combos of terms.... and has very few incoming links.
Kirby Said,
May 4, 2007 @ 11:47 am
This isn’t about what is worthless. It’s about how Google wants to dictate to webmasters what is and isn’t acceptable to Google based on how Google believes they can divine intent.
Matt, Calculator’s post stems from the recent penalty assessed on several real estate web sites who are guilty of nothing more than linking to colleagues throughout the country. If you understand the real estate niche, you’ll know that networking is an integral part of the business and some basic research will provide evidence that these links do generate real business. This penalty hit many working families hard, effectively shutting down a primary source of revenue.
If it warrants a penalty, then take it across the board, but also clarify the ambiguity of your statements concerning reciprocal links. “Excessive” is a meaningless quantifier and many of these sites had few reciprocal links.
Bambarbia Kirkudu Said,
May 4, 2007 @ 12:40 pm
From Google viewpoint, if both queries return the same HTTP response, which one will be automatically banned for similar content?
URL1: http://www.mydomain.com/
URL2: http://www.mydomain.com/index.html
There is some specific terminology which we need to follow, and the correct answer is:
- No any “Page” is banned
- Some “URL” may disappear from search results, but not a “page”
- Page is associated with one single URL.
The index page will be shown in SERP, but URL will be either URL1 or URL2 (whichever was crawled first with 200 response code; may be after some redirects)
“Page” - either HTML content, HTTP content, parsed data, raw bytes, - depends on search engine implementation. Usually associated with Primary Key which is calculated value (MD5 etc.; two different pages may have same MD5! probability is low...) (BTW, how Google implements EQUALS() method for pages? by comparing hash-value?)
“URL” - initial URL finally providing us with this “Page” (part of HTTP response), possibly after some redirects.
Single “page” may be associated with different URLs, and only one lucky URL will be shown in a search results. Suppose URL1 & Page1 is included in SERP. And Page003 has a link to URL2 (in a human-readable words).
In more correct (unhuman) terminology: Page003 has a link to an indexed Page1 which is associated with URL1.
Different urls within same domain with exactly the same content should not hurt at all, even with 301/302.
Bambarbia Kirkudu Said,
May 4, 2007 @ 1:12 pm
http://www.voelspriet2.nl/PageRank.pdf
http://labs.google.com/papers.html
(I’ve never read it...)
PR is nothing. Google uses 100 times more algorithms...
I am not a human, sorry...
Bambarbia Kirkudu Said,
May 4, 2007 @ 1:18 pm
Different URLs with similar content, recently published:
http://www2007.org/papers/paper194.pdf
Jay Griffin Said,
May 4, 2007 @ 1:54 pm
Matt,
Calculator raises a question that has been asked on here numerous times but no clear answer has ever been given. Your example of mysolitaire.com obviously points out what you consider to be excessive reciprocal linking and of course this has gotten lot of people talking about what is too much or what is ok.
The fact is there are almost as many differing opinions as there are people discussing it. No one really knows at this time except Google. Even though mysolitaire.com has been singled out as of today (May 4th) it does not appear to have been penalized. They are ranking #1 for at least 2 of their most important keywords. Maybe your using them as an example is just YOUR way of warning them before a penalty is invoked? If so, my hat off to you.
With that said on April 15th several dozen real estate agent sites were hand picked and penalized by Google for reciprocal agent to agent linking and the confirmation(?) that these sites had been penalized was relayed to them by someone other than a Google employee. Yes these sites all had reciprocal links but NOTHING even remotely close to the degree of your example. And the links they (do) did have were to other real estate agents, not to unrelated industry sites.
In order to clear this “penalty” they have been told they must first file a reinclusion request even though none have been excluded from the index. These hand picked sites are all owned by “moms and pops” and some, if not all, are suffering from the effects of a penalty that was implemented with not even a hint of warning “directly” from Google.
My question is how can Google invoke a penalty on these in light of the fact that for the past 2 years on numerous occasions people have been asking on here what is Google’s position on this subject? Several times when this issue has been brought up URL’s of real estate agent sites were provided as examples to help make a determination. To the best of my recollection no answer was ever given. In addition, some of these same people who participate here also asked you for clarification and provided examples whether this kind of linking was acceptable or not in the same get together at Pubcon when “Big Daddy” was named. Your answer was something to the effect that you saw nothing wrong with linking to others within your own industry. Who better to link to? Maybe you remember the example that was given by the photographer who was linking to other photographers and vice-versa?
These penalized agent sites have dropped 30-50 spots from where they did rank and what is sad is the vast majority of sites that have not been penalized and are ranking above them have reciprocal agent to agent links. Why? Because they don’t think they are doing anything wrong. Are they wrong?
If the answer is yes and your goal for penalizing these sites is to get the ball rolling to “clean up” what you consider excessive reciprocal linking, by YOU stating that here the word will spread like wildfire. The result is it’s likely you will see more undesirable links deleted in one month than have been deleted since the Internet was born. Mission accomplished?
Lori Said,
May 4, 2007 @ 2:45 pm
Whether Google tells me my links are worthy or not is not an issue for me. They benefit my visitor, plain and simple. No schemes, no three-ways, no paid or bought. A simple exchange between two sites who appreciate each other as a resource, and that is it.
Google can put that in their pipe and smoke it.
Doug Heil Said,
May 4, 2007 @ 3:34 pm
Hi Bam, That paper is “someone else’s” algo on what they may do. I thought you asked what does Google do? I answered that question. Your particular question involved SAME page with different url’s, which means Exact content. It’s not “similar”, but it’s exact.
Dave (Original) Said,
May 4, 2007 @ 7:12 pm