Google Downrank Penalty

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One is torn between respect owed to Google for all they’ve done with search and frustration with their insufficient help/info for downranked sites. I know a small number of folks on the web spam team work to keep “collateral damage” low, but I think what bugs me is the ongoing strong implication that there is very little collateral damage when in fact there is a lot.

Ironically this opaque approach to downranking penalties is what spawns a lot of bad information at many forums and leads to the mistrust of Google that is increasingly common among many of the elite SEOs and webmasters.

The big part of my frustration comes from what I think is a lie, or at best a misleading thing that Google tells sites in the standard emails from Google support, which says that because your site is found in the Google index you have no penalty.

I now believe that by any reasonable definition of “penalty” this is a false and unreasonable statement.

What they really mean by this emails is that your site has no “manual penalty”. A manual penalty is invoked in extreme cases where sites are removed from the index. This is generally for things like hidden text, sneaky redirection, or other SEO tricks banned by the Google Webmaster Guidelines. However, if your site has a big downrank it probably has been penalized by the algorithm in a direct way, probably by a subtraction of points that leads to a much lower score for many/all of the pages in your site.

Here’s a good example of the downranking penalty at our Online Highways Travel site:

Searching Google for “Province of Djizak” it would be reasonable for a user to find this page somewhat high among the results: http://www.ohwy.com/uz/z/zdjizak.htm

Why would a user want this page? It’s highly relevant for the search, leads to more info about Uzbekistan, and our Uzbekistan section was created mostly by a leading travel expert from Uzbekistan who publishes the leading travel magazine for the Silk Road region of Asia.

So, why is this page relegated to obscurity, at position of approximately 190 of 193 results listed? Here it is on the last page of the Google results.

I wish I knew, though I’ve been assured by Google in several emails that we have no penalty when clearly … we do.

Google probably has a right to penalize and re-rank however they see fit, but along with this power and responsibility goes an obligation to tell an unvarnished truth about the status of sites. I used to believe that large sites with high advertising spends were not more likely to get special help than small sites, and to Google’s credit they have historically been good listeners/talkers at events like WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Strategies, but I now wonder if the lines are getting blurred between the advertising and ranking realms at Google. Google probably has the right to do things as they see fit, but please don’t tell me that thousands of small and medium-sized sites with relevant pages aren’t getting penalized and downranked when they … clearly are.

Update: Blogging about this has affected the results – on May 11 this blog post is number one for the term “Province of Djizak”! Our subject page remains very low – about 201 in rankings even though it is *referenced* by the number ONE page for the term (and of course is much more relevant to the search).

This, combined with the Chico the Wonder Dog experiments and a lot of reading and talking with SEO people, leads me to think that the downrank penalty really is site wide and that Google really is sacrificing a lot of good pages like our UZ section to punish us for what they see as undesirable cross linking / thin pages / failure in some cases to use nofollow on links / ?

Update 2: Maybe I shouldn’t complain about the rank? Our Djizzak Province page appears, after all, two places above this, um, highly relevant page for that query: Application of defecation lime from sugar industry in Uzbekistan

Update 3: OK, I have now created what I would argue is the world’s best “Province of Djizak” web page, located at the Online Highways blog. Unfortunately I had a problem changing the title but that page should *at least* rise higher than 200 for a query. Why? Because it is quite a bit more relevant than any others for that term and it now has TWO LINKS from this, the top page for the query “Province of Djizak“. If my hypothesis is correct it will not rise up because it will fall under OHWY’s site downranking penalty.

Update 4: Province of Djizak original OHWY page is now number one at Google for “Province of Djizak”. This is NOT at all consistent with my site penalty hypothesis above. It is consistent with the idea that we need to beef up incoming, new links to get pages re-ranked.

Update 5 (June 1). The original OHWY page is again heavily penalized – number 216 from number 1 yesterday. This, alas, is totally consistent with the sitewide penalty hypothesis I describe above.

Go Shenandoah Valley with IPv6

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This story is just in from Business Week about early adoption of new internet protocol IPv6 in Harrisonburg, VA.   That’s great because I’m in Bridgewater / Harrisonburg every other year for our big Glick Family reunion and it’ll be fun to follow the story and maybe check out the service next year when I’m in the lovely Shenandoah Valley.

Microsoft may buy Yahoo = a good idea.

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Wow, I’m liking my Yahoo stock which just jumped over $5 per share,but Microsoft couldn’t you have announced the possible bid to buy Yahoo about a month back when I had my 2000 YHOO 30 calls? With Yahoo at $33.34 I could have sold that 1000 investment for a cool $67,000!

WSJ Story (paywall)

NY Post Story

Henry Blodget thinks it’s important to spin off a new company rather than just suck Yahoo up into the borgness of Microsoft.

But hey, I do think this aquisition/merger is a good idea. Yahoo is very different from Microsoft. However, to the limited extent I interact with MS and Yahoo it seems to me that both of those corporate cultures have become bureaucratic, sluggish, and uninspired when compared to Google’s freewheeling yet very productive approaches. Yet very importantly, the people I meet from Yahoo and MS are often as impressive as those at Google, and certainly capable of great things as all these folks reinvent the online world on a regular basis.

If Microsoft can pool the innovations of the LIVE project with Yahoo’s superb developer support programs, and hire and inspire more people to have the evangelical zeal of Googlers, it could be a whole new online ballgame.

Update:  Om Malik’s reporting that WSJ’s reporting the talks appear to be off already.

Digging Copyright Infringement?

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Today’s excitement at Digg regarding posting codes to override copyright protection on HD DVDs, combined with the pending Google v Viacom showdown, may be referenced for some time to come as the “starting date” of the online revolution against old notions about copyright and intellectual property.

My take on this is, as usual, unusual in that I think two things that everybody is arguing about are actually very clear:

1) Based on existing law, YouTube and DIGG have an obligation to remove offending materials, and probably are in violation themselves for posting those materials, basically ignoring the rights of the copyright holders in favor of community enthusiasm for the coming IP revolution.

2) Existing law is outmoded (perhaps more accurately it should be considered irrelevant and unenforceable, and won’t stand much longer without significant modifications.

Diggers, YouTubers, and other online enthusiasts seem to think that becuase 2 is true, 1 is not true. That’s silly. law is law, and these are violations and everybody knows it. The copyright laws are not outrageous or fundamentally unfair in their *intentions*, and thus they’ll continue to hold up in the courts until we see new laws enacted that are relevant, enforceable, and in line with new sensibilities about what constitutes fair use.

Personally, I’d like to see more experimentation with dramatic expansion of the principle of “fair use” to basically include all non-commercial uses. We see this principle in play in the open source community and even at Google, Yahoo and MSN with many of their web innovations. This openness has arguably done more to foster creativity than any proprietary projects could ever do. Examples: Linux and Firefox to name two of thousands of brilliant and innovative projects that thrive, unencumbered by most old fashioned copyright restrictions.

So, what needs to change here? The law, and thus it’s up to congress to enact new rules that make more sense. Perhaps these could be as simple as suggesting that the commercial benefits of programs and music and other creative stuff should be controlled by the creator of those programs, but that the *societal benefits* should be considered part of the obligation of any artist or creator to contribute to society at large.

Google to Viacom: See YouTube in Court!

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Viacom’s Google suit may actually go to trial, though I think everybody is just blowing smoke right now with Viacom looking for a nice payoff and Google looking to minimize the payoff to keep within the 400 million they allocated in the YouTube sale to copyright infringement payoffs.

Unless Google is lucky enough to get a silicon valley jury with an average age of 25 it seems to me they’d handily lose a lawsuit.   The notion that Google (let alone everybody with a PC and internet connection), didn’t realize YouTube contained vast amounts of copyrighted material and that Google didn’t have the technical capabilities to screen for copyrights is absurd.    I presume they’d make the fairly technical case that they can’t be held responsible for users uploading stuff, only for taking it down when they get complaints, but I think this (reasonable in the future) notion will wear thin under the weight of current (old fashioned) copyright rules.

Yahoo, Right Media, and the right idea about advertising

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Terry Semel, Yahoo CEO, is optimistic about Yahoo’s purchase of Right Media, an advertising network. This, with Google’s recent aquisition of DoubleClick, may be the beginning of the end for agencies specializing in online (and eventually even offline) advertising as it will make it easier for companies large and small to manage their own advertising and relationships. The recent death of Zunch supports this idea although there may have been many other factors in that corporate meltdown.

Semel brings in the concept of *democracy* to advertising and this is a really interesting idea. Historically advertising industry has been driven by aggressive, emotional sales pitches to clients. Even major account activity may be driven less by careful analysis of ROI on campaigns and more by clever cocktail parties and perceptions of brand coolness.

I’d suggest that in most contexts the concept of “branding” is bogus. Sure, there are many global brands have major influence on consumer behavior, but it’s not clear to me that advertising campaigns do a lot to enhance sales based on these brands. There are surprisingly few high quality studies of this, partly because the power of branding is (foolishly) accepted as a maxim in and out of advertising circles. Google, now considered the world’s top brand, hardly spent a dime on branding advertising early on as it was rising to prominence. Google as brand matters a lot, but it’s not clear there is much benefit to *advertising* the brand.

Much of the truth about ads will shake out as these new advertising networks take hold of the marketplace, and it’s going to be a fascinating thing to watch. Using great free tools like Google Analytics, advertisers are already better able to measure campaign success than ever before, and are starting to hold publishers more accountable for results than for throwing good cocktail parties and making hip and cool presentations.

So I’m with Terry Semel – bring on the advertising democracy dudes!

Black Holes = Worm Holes = Dimensional portals to new universe? Maybe….

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You’ve got to love it when highly respectable, real science collides with science fiction as in this recent study suggesting that black holes may actually be worm holes that connect our universe to others.

This appears to be consistent with the provocative ideas in string cosmology that suggest the possibility of many parallel universes existing together without much interaction between them. Some string theorists think that gravity – a very weak force in terms of the universe – may represent a force that exists simultaneously in several universes and thus could possibly be used to communicate between them.

It’s very hard to wrap your head around ideas relating to dimensions in space that are not what we commonly experience as the three physical dimensions plus time, but these extra dimensions are becoming a key part of the way physicists describe the underpinnings of the universe. Perhams more importantly, they are … fun and educational!

Duh…. you believe in Vudu?

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No offense to Vudu but it’s not going to play in Peoria. Vudu appears to be a brilliant innovation in movie downloading, partly because it allows the user to start watching the show immediately and thus offers true “on demand” movies.

However it takes a lot more than being the best of the lot in terms of providing a user with streaming movies on demand to be a successful company. Much of the company’s, mainstream media’s, and blogosphere’s breathless gushing about this product is ridiculous. Mom and pop are NOT going to pay hundreds of dollars for a Vudu box *plus* pay per movie fees so they can have a downloadable movie experience.

This is another of the hundreds of silly silicon valley ideas that seem reasonable to sharp, young tech folks pulling down $10,000 per month who are not intimidated (in fact who like) stylish new gadgets and having a 10th remote control in their living room arsenal. Unfortunately for Vudu and other startups catering to this group, this group is a tiny fraction of all consumers and almost totally non-representative.

Early adopters? Sure, but it’ll be years before people demand the type of experience Vudu is offering.

Vudu, unless they find a way to provide really cheap hardware and really cheap downloads (they won’t find this), will fail as soon as the VC cash burns up.

Fueling the IPOD revolution was free (though often illegal) content. The crackdown on illegal online music distribution has been somewhat successful, and it’s much easier to stop online movie distribution which remains a relatively small problem for the industry.
Instead of too little too late Vudu is offering too much too early at too high a price.

I don’t believe in Vudu.

More from Engadget 

Of Mice and Men … and mouses brains

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IBM has just simulated half of a mouse brain on a supercomputer. The significance of this research cannot be overestimated, as projects like this are very likely to lead to the next state in human evolution itself – human-like artificial intelligence. This does not appear to be directly part of the similar IBM Blue Brain Project, an incredible and ambitious attempt to reverse engineer a human brain.

I think there is less popular interest in these projects than one would expect because for many it’s painful or difficult to accept that all the things we hold very dear – most notable our consciousnesses and our intelligence, will soon be duplicated electronically and probably surpass us in many respects. I’m very optimistic about this state of affairs because I think we do a fairly lousy job of managing resources and providing for our individual and collective welfare. Computers already play a role in managing stuff and as they become conscious it’s very likely they’ll be able to allocate resources far more effectively. Hopefully this will usher in a new era of prosperity for all, though my guess is that it will take humans at least a few generations to start “trusting” the excellent advice we’ll get from the electronic intellectual sector.

Also frustrating to some is to come to grips with the rather insignificant, but interesting, role we play in the cosmic scheme of things. Merging with machines offers a lot of potential to transcend our feeble human intellects and physical limitations, but I suspect this will also cause some consternation, especially with those who prefer 12th century sensibilities.

But technology will prevail and hopefully we humans will have the insight and fortitude to let computers rise to the thing they’ll be able to do much better than we ever will:

Think.

Another victim of Google’s cleverness? Zunch Marketing goes belly up.

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I don’t know Zunch, but I’d argue that it’s generally good riddance when overpriced fancy SEM firms go belly up. As Google creates easier, better, and cheaper ways to do great in-house SEM (e.g. Analytics and PPC management) it’s not surprising places are opting for this approach. For the most part the big SEM firms are dramatically overselling types of SEO that cannot be done at all or are best done in-house or with the greater expertise found in small SEM shops and freelancers. My $9600 bad experience with a fancy SEM firm last year led to a refund, but that was thanks to threatening to blog about it and the written guarantee of increased traffic. I think very few get refunds despite generally poor performance.

After a clever and intense process of selling me on the service it was frustrating to watch them apply generally good but obvious principles of SEO. Also frustrating to note that I knew more about SEO than they did from attending a few Webmaster World Conferences.

So, is Zunch the beginning of a new trend? Perhaps a good trend.