Google's Cutts: Nofollow Links In Advertorials Or Else!

Yesterday, Google's head of search spam, Matt Cutts posted a video on Google's stance on using advertorials in a way to manipulate Google's search results.

As you can imagine, if you use advertorials and those advertorials have links to your web site - you must nofollow them or Google can take action against your web site.

In February, a major floral company was penalized over advertorials. And now Matt Cutts is making it crystal clear by posting Google's guidelines on it:

I covered this in more detail over at Search Engine Land.

There are folks saying, well - what about video content? Product placement. Do those have to be disclosed for users? I assume Matt would say yes. But product placement in videos do not manipulate Google's algorithms, at least not yet.

Forum discussion at Google+.

Google Shares Insight Into Content Removal: 404s Confirmation & More

A Google Webmaster Help thread has some interesting details from Google's John Mueller about content removal from Google's index and/or search results.

Some of these points you already know but every SEO and webmaster should understand these. Heck, some are even eye opening to me.

Here are the raw points John made and then I'll share what I think is revealing:

• The URL removal tool is not meant to be used for normal site maintenance like this. This is part of the reason why we have a limit there.
• The URL removal tool does not remove URLs from the index, it removes them from our search results. The difference is subtle, but it's a part of the reason why you don't see those submissions affect the indexed URL count.
• The robots.txt file doesn't remove content from our index, but since we won't be able to recrawl it and see the content there, those URLs are generally not as visible in search anymore.
• In order to remove the content from our index, we need to be able to crawl it, and we should see a noindex robots meta tag, or a 404/410 HTTP result code (or a redirect, etc). In order to crawl it, the URL needs to be "not disallowed" by the robots.txt file.
• We generally treat 404 the same as 410, with a tiny difference in that 410 URLs usually don't need to be confirmed by recrawling, so they end up being removed from the index a tiny bit faster. In practice, the difference is not critical, but if you have the ability to use a 410 for content that's really removed, that's a good practice.

I find the 404 versus 410 point very interesting. With a 404 result code, Google will typically recrawl to verify the page is really not found. But if you serve up a 410, Google may not need to recrawl to verify the page is not there. This is an important thing for webmasters to know. It is safer to go with a 404 but seems quicker to go with a 410.

The second item is that Google said the URL removal tool does not remove URLs from the index, it removes them from the Google search results. Many know this, but it is important to point out as well.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Poll: Were You Affected By Google Penguin 2.0?

It has been just under a week since Google Penguin 2.0 (#4) was released and I wanted to gauge in an anonymous poll how SEOs and webmasters were impacted.

With Penguin 1.0, 64% claimed they were hurt by that update. There were very few recoveries since.

The interesting thing, with Penguin 2.0, I barely saw anyone claim a recovery from Penguin 1.0. I've seen a ton of SEOs and webmasters complain they were hit but I don't think I've seen anyone claim a recovery.

So check your analytics, restrict the reporting to only show Google organic traffic. Look to see if you had a major decline in Google traffic after May 22nd (it was pushed out May 22nd at night). Note, there was the Memorial Day weekend, which may impact traffic. But if you were hit by Penguin, you would see a huge decline in traffic. If you recovered, you'd see a huge increase in traffic.

Here is my poll, I beg you, tell your friends and colleague and even enemies to take the poll. I'll share the results with every soon:

Forum discussion continued at Google+, Cre8asite Forums, WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums, Black Hat World and Google Webmaster Help.

Google Penguin 2.0 Goes Deep - But What Does That Mean?

As you know, Penguin 2.0 #4 is live and webmasters and SEOs are buzzing about that. The thing is, some misconceptions about Penguin 2.0 are driving me absolutely crazy.

Matt Cutts, in his video about this update, talks about how Penguin 2.0 will be "more comprehensive," how this version "goes deeper" and will result in "more of an impact" than Penguin 1.0.

The SEO community is translating "goes deeper" to mean that Penguin 1.0 only impacted the home page of a web site. That is absolutely false. Deeper has nothing to do with that. Those who were hit by Penguin 1.0 know all to well that their whole site suffered, not just their home page.

What Matt meant by "deeper" is that Google is going deeper into their index, link graph and more sites will be impacted by this than the previous Penguin 1.0 update. By deeper, Matt does not mean how it impacts a specific web site architecture but rather how it impacts the web in general.

For example, Ross Hudgens tweeted "Penguin 1 targets homepage, 2 goes "much deeper." I said back no and ended at that. But he and others did not get it. The WebmasterWorld thread has webmasters confused about it also, where someone said "I don't understand this idea that Penguin 1.0 just looked at the home page." You are right, it is completely wrong to think that way.

Normally I don't get heated up about misconceptions in the industry - but seriously.

Update: I see now where the confusion comes from, via TWIG, right over here where Matt said Penguin looks at the home page of the site. Matt must mean Penguin only analyzed the links to the home page. But anyone who had a site impacted by Penguin noticed not just their home page ranking suffer. So I think that is the distinction.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google Site Command Temporary Issue Due To Domain Clustering

As I reported yesterday at Search Engine Land, the site command may be a bit buggy for you right now and may not be resolved for about a week.

In short, some SEOs and webmasters began noticing that conducting a site command in Google for large sites would only return 30 results. I personally have not been able to replicate it but I've been getting random complaints about this on Twitter. Justin Briggs has a screen shot showing this in actions, where a site command for amazon.com only returns 30 results.

Google's Matt Cutts told us at Search Engine Land:

This is a temporary side effect of the domain clustering change that I mentioned in my video. We expect that site: will be back to showing lots of results by sometime next week.

The domain clustering change was something Matt announced last week in his ten SEO changes coming to Google.

So don't panic, your site is probably still indexed by Google.

Forum discussion at Google+ and Twitter.

Google Pushed Out The Major Penguin Update (v2.0 #4)

As I reported last night at Search Engine Land, Penguin 2.0 / 4 is now live - this is the next generation Penguin update. As Google's Matt Cutts added, this impacts 2.3% of English queries and also impacts other languages but the percentage depends on the level of spam in those languages.

Matt officially announced it while on This Week In Google see towards the very end of episode 199.

Matt said on his blog:

We started rolling out the next generation of the Penguin webspam algorithm this afternoon (May 22, 2013), and the rollout is now complete. About 2.3% of English-US queries are affected to the degree that a regular user might notice. The change has also finished rolling out for other languages world-wide. The scope of Penguin varies by language, e.g. languages with more webspam will see more impact.

This is the fourth Penguin-related launch Google has done, but because this is an updated algorithm (not just a data refresh), we’ve been referring to this change as Penguin 2.0 internally.

As you know, we've been expecting this for some time, since its been over 6 months since the previous Penguin data refresh. Again, this is not just a refresh, but an algorithmic update.

Here are the previous updates:

• Penguin 1 on April 24, 2012
• Penguin 2 on May 24, 2012
• Penguin 3 on October 5, 2012

There are lots of people complaining about ranking declines and some about boosts. It is too early to tell and I do expect to post a poll next week asking you if you were impacted or not.

I deeply hope you only were positively impacted by this update.

Forum discussion at Google+, Cre8asite Forums, WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums, Black Hat World and Google Webmaster Help.

Update: Matt Cutts tweeted that you can submit feedback to Google via this form about spammy sites this update missed.

Video: Google Conversational Search In Action

As Danny Sullivan reported earlier, Google's Conversational Search is now live on the Google desktop at Google.com.

Basically, it lets you talk your query to Google and Google will respond back with a response, depending on the query. This was a feature available on Google's Android phones and also available via the Google Search App on iOS. It is also like Apple's Siri and similar products. Now, it is available on the desktop.

Here is a video of my playing with it:

As you can see, there is a random bug where Google will return a "no internet connection" error.

This was also reported in a Google Web Search Help thread.

Note, as you can see, it is not perfect. I did have a cold but it does work pretty well.

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

Google Slaps Sprint For Spammy Community Forum

The next large brand to be penalized by Google is Sprint, the large U.S. wireless provider.

A Google Webmaster Help thread has Kent Van Deusen, the Sprint website support representative, asking where is this "user-generated spam" on Sprint.com?

Before you get all excited that Sprint.com is penalized and banned from Google, stop. They are not.

This is exactly like Mozilla's penalty and the BBC penalty. All three of these sites had/have very granular penalties, in the Mozilla and BBC case, only one specific page was penalized out of all their millions and billions of pages.

With Sprint's web site, it is likely the community discussion forum that was hit and probably only very specific forum threads.

Google has not responded to Sprint about this penalty and I am not sure if they will.

Clearly this continues to show how scary and misdirected some of these Google Webmaster Tools notifications can be. That being said, Google does say they will improve them this year. So hang tight on that.

What should Sprint do? They should probably nofollow any links that were generated by non-official reps. Or hire an SEO company to dig into the details here.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Update: Google's Matt Cutts did reply in the forum thread saying:

Hi Kent, when you see a message like this, it's a good idea to check around for various forums, bulletin boards, and community areas where users can leave comments. We typically send this message when we see a lot of spam in those areas. Rather than Google removing those pages from our index, it's usually better if you can remove the pages on your side so that they don't show up in other search engines either.

I just took a quick look; try doing a Google search like [site:community.sprint.com/baw/message/ watch] to see some examples where spammers are posting a bunch of messages. I noticed that older pages with this sort of spam are mostly gone or removed--which is great. You might just look into some ways to try to catch the spam a little faster or see if there are some ways to make it a bit harder for the spammers to post a large amount of messages on the community pages.

Hope that helps, Matt

Are Social Media and Technology Ruining Your Life?

Social media and technology have changed the way we do everything. Most aspects of our lives are touched by social media and technology and it keeps us connected like never before. There are great benefits to social media and technology, but have you thought about the negatives? Can social media and technology have a negative affect on our lives? Is it possible that the convenience, quickness and overload of data could be hurting us and preventing us from truly living our lives?

Can social media and technology have a negative effect on our lives?

Have you ever thought that the things meant to help you are actually hurting your productivity. We have all dealt with technology problems that consume our time and hurt our productivity. The bigger problems are the not so obvious ways technology and social media are negatively affecting our lives. Some use social media as a diversion or procrastination technique. Ask yourself these questions:

• Do you play games before your work is done?
• 
  
• Do you use online games or mindless internet surfing to avoid other tasks?
• Do you check for social media posts frequently?
• 
  

Using social media as a diversion is not healthy. If you have a “need” to update your status or check for friends updates than it is possible that social media is negatively affecting your life.

Using social media in a unhealthy way also leads us to become physically unhealthy by prolonged times of being seated and eating more. Social media makes us a feel good. That is how we can become addicted and overuse it.

“While a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research finds that just 5 minutes on Facebook can temporarily improve your self-esteem when you focus on close friends, here’s the bad news: Enhanced self-esteem actually reduces your self-control when you make decisions, like choosing a snack, after browsing.” – Today.com

Technology and social media can actually make us feel less satisfied with our lives. While posting and updating you have a happy feeling, but reading others happy posts can cause a social media envy and leave you feeling negative about your own life. The reason is most people do not post their worst moments. Social media posts are more likely to reflect the poster in a positive light.

What are the negative effects of sharing our life via social media and technology?

Sharing our lives and pictures online is a great way to stay connected. You must be conscious of what you are sharing and what you are missing. Of course exposing personal issues is not a good thing. Sometimes it can be hard to decide what is too much information. Some good advice is to write your post and then think about it for awhile before actually posting it. Ask yourself these questions:

• Am I exposing too much?

• Do I want everyone to know this about me?
• 
  
• Could this post be interpreted the wrong way?
• 
  

Other things to consider are what you are loosing in sharing the moment. Are you trying to get the perfect picture or compose the perfect tweet to share where you are instead of enjoying the moment? Do you rely on social media to form your opinion? Are you easily swayed by reviews or others opinions? Be sure to remain yourself while on social media without overexposing yourself.

Can social media and technology change the way your brain works?

Our brains are constantly growing and constant input of data can have an effect on cognitive functions long term. There also is evidence of chemical effects on the brain related to joy, sadness and other emotions we experience while using social media and technology.

Technology and social media can also cause shorter attention spans. In the times of instant information, response and gratification, we can loose patience and become easily restless. We must slow down and learn to let go of our need for social media and technology.

You don’t need to make a radical move, like disconnecting from technology and social media completely. Start by setting aside time, weekends or certain days to disconnect. Think about the long term and not the right now. Slow down and disconnect for awhile.

Gaining Access To The New Google Maps

As we expected, Google introduced the new Google Maps interface and features at Google I/O.

The new maps are no longer a "static map" but now the maps are "immersively interactive" said Google. Try clicking just about anywhere to surface more information and to make the map more relevant to you. Every interaction dynamically changes the map in order to surface information relevant to the location, search topic, and your search history. For example, if you click on a hamburger place on the map, other nearby locations and nearby food will be highlighted as well.

So how do you get access to the new Google Maps? You can request an invite over here, if this is not working for you, like some in the Google Maps Help forum are complaining, Google suggests you try this:

• Make sure you're not using multiple log-ins. Try logging out of all accounts in your browser, then log into only the account to which the email invite was sent. If you were forwarded the email, you'll need to be logged into the account to which the email was sent.
• Make sure the page didn't time out. Try refreshing the page.
• Check if it's your browser. Try opening your opt in email in another browser.
• Try it from the beginning. Clear your cache and cookies, then try re-opening your opt in email.

Here is a video of the new Google Maps features:

Forum discussion at Google Maps Help.

Your Rankings Drop Around May 15th? May Be Due To Link Networks Google Busted

On May 15th, Google's head of search spam, announced on Twitter that Google has taken "action on several thousand linksellers in a paid-link that passes PageRank network."

Google has done this time and time again, and we covered at least two previous cases of this. We do not know which link network - some are asking if SAPE links was hit again, but others are asking about a network named ghost. I am not sure. It seems like it may be several smaller networks.

One thing for sure is that around May 15th, many webmasters started to complain about ranking drops in WebmasterWorld. Here are some quotes:

Also, seeing a significant drop in ranks for a different domain I mentioned in another thread that I was using to test junk links. It's possible we could be seeing a penguin update.

I am also seeing a decent drop on the 14th which seems to be continuing today.

The complaints go on and on.

I am trying to figure out which network(s) were hit but I can't seem to nail it down to any specific one.

The Black Hat World forums are talking about it but no one is mentioning anything specific and concrete outside of some guesses.

Do you know which link network(s) were hit?

Forum discussion at Black Hat World & WebmasterWorld.

Google To Soften The Panda Algorithm

As I covered yesterday, in very brief summary, Google's Matt Cutts told us ten SEO changes coming to Google by the end of this summer. One of those changes is softening the impact of the Panda algorithm for sites that are in the "gray area" or "border" of being impacted by the Panda algorithm.

Matt Cutts, Google's head of search spam, said 5 minutes and 3 seconds into the video that Google is adding additional signals to look for other quality metrics that may lessen the impact of the Panda algorithm for those sites in the gray area. This is with a caveat!

Here is the transcript:

We are looking at Panda and seeing if we can find some additional signals, and we think we've got some to help refine things for sites that are kind of in the border zone, the gray area a little bit, And so if we can soften the affect a little bit, for those sites, that we believe have got some additional signals of quality, that will help sites that were previously affected - to some degree.

The question is, what "degree" will these sites see a benefit in ranking after the Panda algorithm is softened for them? That is the big question.

So I screen captured Matt's facial expression when he said that and see what I mean? Will this have much of an impact or just a very soft impact on those who have been impacted by Panda? I am not sure.

But it will be interesting to follow and see what happens over the next few months.

Matt clearly said the Panda algorithm will be softened for some but the question is, how much so?

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld & Hacker News.

One Year Later, Only 9% Claim Google Penguin Recovery

A few weeks ago was the one year anniversary of the Google Penguin update. As you know, we have not had a Penguin update in well over six months, but we are bracing ourselves for the next big Penguin update coming in the next few weeks.

That being said, in our anniversary post, we asked our readers if they recovered or not. We had just under 500 responses to the poll and I wanted to share the results. Before I do so, in October we did this poll and saw that 94% said they did not recover.

So how about now? Well, it isn't much better. If you remove those who said they were not impacted, only 10% claim they recovered, whereas 90% said in our 2013 poll that they did not recover. Here is the poll results:

As you can see, 61% said they did not recover, 18% said they partially recovered and 9% said they fully recovered. 12% said they were not affected anyway.

Again, the next Penguin update may either cause more issues for webmasters and/or may result in some Penguin causalities to start to do better. Time will tell.

Forum discussion continued at Google Webmaster Help.

Disclaimer: Please see my poll disclaimer post before coming to any conclusions on these results.

Using schema.org markup for organization logos

Today, we’re launching support for the schema.org markup for organization logos, a way to connect your site with an iconic image. We want you to be able to specify which image we use as your logo in Google search results.

Using schema.org Organization markup, you can indicate to our algorithms the location of your preferred logo. For example, a business whose homepage is www.example.com can add the following markup using visible on-page elements on their homepage:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization">

  <a itemprop="url" href="http://www.example.com/">Home</a>

  <img itemprop="logo" src="http://www.example.com/logo.png" />

</div>

This example indicates to Google that this image is designated as the organization’s logo image for the homepage also included in the markup, and, where possible, may be used in Google search results. Markup like this is a strong signal to our algorithms to show this image in preference over others, for example when we show Knowledge Graph on the right hand side based on users’ queries.

As always, please ask us in the Webmaster Help Forum if you have any questions.

57% Don't Fear Google's Disavow Link Tool

A month ago, I posted a poll asking our readers if they fear someone citing your web site in the Google Disavow Tool?

The results are in, with 250 plus votes tallied, that some SEOs do fear it, many are concerned but most say they are not worried by it.

Here is the break down:

• 57% say they do not fear someone citing their web sites in a disavow link request
• 29% say they do not fear it but are somewhat concerned if they learned someone cited their web sites in a disavow link request
• Only 14% fear the idea that someone can cite their web sites in a disavow link request

Why are some concerned? Well, as we covered, some SEOs are using it as a fear tactic.

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld & Cre8asite Forums.

Disclaimer: Please see my poll disclaimer post before coming to any conclusions on these results.

Matt Cutts On 10 New SEO Changes At Google In Next Few Months

Yesterday, Google's Matt Cutts did something he doesn't often do - he pre-announced changes Google will be implementing to the ranking and indexing algorithms in the next few months. Specifically, he mentioned about ten changes coming to Google's search results and algorithms over this summer - in the "next few months" he said.

Of course, Matt, Google's head of search spam, adds a disclaimer that timelines and priorities may change between now and then - but this is what is scheduled currently.

Here is the video:

Now, I go into detail on each of the ten points at Search Engine Land but here is the summary of those details:

1. Major Penguin Update
2. Advertorial Spam
3. Spammy Queries Being Looked At
4. Going Upstream At Link Spammers
5. More Sophisticated Link Analysis
6. Improvements On Hacked Sites
7. Authority Boost In Algorithm
8. Panda To Soften
9. Domain Clusters In SERPs
10. Improved Webmaster Communication

Since I will be offline the next two days, I may do more detailed scheduled blog posts about each one of these. For now, read Search Engine Land and watch Matt's video.

Google's Major Penguin Update Coming In Weeks. It Will Be Big!

On Friday, Google's head of search spam, Matt Cutts announced on Twitter that the Penguin update we are expecting this year, will be coming in the next few weeks.

Matt Cutts said, "we do expect to roll out Penguin 2.0 (next generation of Penguin) sometime in the next few weeks."

This has sent shockwaves through the webmaster and SEO industry over the weekend. We know the next generation Penguin update is a major revision to the existing one. Matt said the previous ones were minor updates. To take you back, we had an update on May 24, 2012 and October 5, 2012. Matt said on Twitter that those were more minor, he would have named them 1.1 and 1.2 and that Google is naming this new update version 2.0.

We are calling it the 4th update to Penguin, but yea, this is expected to be huge. We past the anniversary of the Penguin update and many SEOs and webmasters have yet to recover.

Now with the next generation update, many SEOs are hopeful of recovery but terrified that their efforts will end up being futile. Why? Well, even if they did manage to clean up their sites and do everything to warrant a release of the initial Penguin algorithm, with the new algorithm in place, who knows what else they may have triggered.

Danny Sullivan has an excellent write up on this Penguin release and the history around it.

Trust me, I will be all over this when I see signs in the forums about this update. So stay tuned, brace yourself and trust me - webmasters will survive and grow from this.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help, WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: Here is a video from Matt Cutts where he talks about Penguin 2.0, and many other topics. It was released today:

Do You 404 Or 301 A Web Page?

A HighRankings Forum thread asks what should this webmaster do after he deleted an unwanted page. Should the webmaster 404 the page or 301 the page.

To me the answer is simple. Let's look at the definitions of a 404 vs a 301.

• 404 Not Found: The server has not found anything matching the Request-URI. No indication is given of whether the condition is temporary or permanent. The 410 (Gone) status code SHOULD be used if the server knows, through some internally configurable mechanism, that an old resource is permanently unavailable and has no forwarding address. This status code is commonly used when the server does not wish to reveal exactly why the request has been refused, or when no other response is applicable.

• 301 Moved Permanently: The requested resource has been assigned a new permanent URI and any future references to this resource SHOULD use one of the returned URIs. Clients with link editing capabilities ought to automatically re-link references to the Request-URI to one or more of the new references returned by the server, where possible. This response is cacheable unless indicated otherwise.

In my opinion, if the page you are removing has a suitable alternative page on your web site, then 301 it. Do not always 301 the page to your home page. If there is no suitable, and by suitable I mean, a page that is very similar to the page you are removing, then 404 the page.

301 if there is a related and similar page to the page you are removing. 404 if there is not.

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

Google News Will Index My Content But Not Organic Search?

A WebmasterWorld thread asks a question I've seen pop up fairly often for this site. It seems and appears on some occasions, not always, that Google won't index a page on the organic side but it will do so within Google News.

Now I said, "seems" because Google is technically indexing the content but not showing it in the organic results but rather only the Google News results.

For example, this post from a few days ago seems to be hit with this. A search in Google for the title tag or headline only brings up the page in the news index but not the organic results.

Here is a screen shot:

As you can see, the article shows nice and fine in the news index at the top but no where in the organic listings.

But for other stories, Google indexes them fine in the organic results:

The thing is, what I think what is happening here is that Google has indexed it but is only displaying it once in the search results. So if for some reason Google thinks it is more news oriented, it will show in Google News and if not, it will show in the organic results.

There are other theories in the WebmasterWorld thread, which may or may not be related.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Google Update Is Happening (Working On Confirmation)

An ongoing WebmasterWorld has a huge uptick in chatter around major ranking and search result fluctuation over the night. It seems from this and from all the complaints in the Google Webmaster Help forums that there is indeed some sort of update going on.

Is it Penguin, Panda, EMD, page layout or something else - or is it a wide-spread manual action or Google going after and devaluing a major link network - I do not know. But it does seem something has happened causing tons of webmasters and SEOs to take to the forums to complain.

This is fairly common days after I see an update brewing as I reported on Tuesday. It does seem like something is indeed rolling out and hopefully you guys benefited from it.

SERPs.com, SERP metrics and MozCast have all shown higher than normal Google fluctuation activity over the past few days as well.

Here are some comments from the WebmasterWorld thread over night:

Sure fire sign of a major update...

Seeing GIGANTIC drops this morning, woke up to 200 visitors over night, should be around 1200 by now. Server is fine. Europe appears to be asleep

Plus, as I said, there is a huge number of complaints from individual webmasters in the Google Webmaster Help forums.

So there seems to be a Google update happening. I will ping Google and see if I can get anything on the record. Stay tuned...

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Bad Home Page Links? Google May Boost Rank Pages Instead?

A WebmasterWorld thread has an SEO sharing some experiments he is playing with. Before I summarize his experiment, I want you all to keep in mind that this stuff is hard to test when the Penguin algorithm has not been updated in six months and when there are tons of other variables floating around.

That being said, let's have fun.

This SEO said that he created a new site and pointed a nice number of junky links to the home page. He then waited and noticed that although the links were pointed to the home page, the home page didn't rank for the keywords it targeted. Instead, the internal pages ranked well.

He wrote:

The interesting thing is: google refuses to rank the home page for these terms, they rank deeper pages like widgetexample.com/red

The SEO continues to explain:

Google ranking pages other than the pages being targeted by junk links for the keywords we are targeting. It feels like it's a "loophole" in the algo. Almost like they know that you are creating junk links so they're not going to rank the page for the keyword but then something bigger kicks in and say this site must be about "keyword" so lets find a page to display.

Of course, I see plenty of webmasters complaining about the exact opposite situation as well. :)

Do you think this is a loophole or just the site waiting for the algorithm to catch up to it?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

More On Google Webmaster Tools Possible Outage Message

Trey Coolier shared a Google Webmaster Tools notification he has personally not seen before on Google+ for Google notifying him that there was a possible outage on his site.

This message is not new, we've mentioned it at least a couple times in the past. But what does it mean?

Well, it means when GoogleBot tried to access your site, it couldn't really access those pages. It may mean the pages are soft-404ing or it could mean your site was offline or more likely, there was a database issue with the site when GoogleBot tried to access a specific page.

We've probably all had this on our sites at some points, even I was able to look back and fine one:

If you see a ton of these, over and over again, don't ignore them and do something. Talk to your host, talk to your developers and make a change.

Google's John Mueller commented specifically about this case and he said:

Glad you found it useful! This particular one is a tricky case because based on the HTTP result code it wouldn't be seen as being down (so I imagine most website checkers wouldn't notice). A soft-404 could be just a bad setup in general, but it could also be that your database is returning error messages as content with a "200", which we might even index like that. If this happens sporadically, it's usually really hard to spot.

Forum discussion at Google+.

Google Update Brewing? May 2013

There are some very early signs of a possible Google update brewing as of early this morning. A WebmasterWorld thread has some renewed chatter around an update.

Note, most of the WebmasterWorld thread is about April 15th changes, which people say have to do with the Boston bombings and seasonal traffic changes. But last night, early this morning, two webmasters came in and said they saw major shifts in rankings and traffic.

A preferred WebmasterWorld member said he saw a 77% drop just yesterday. Others said "some thing big is underway," after noting drops in his keyword ranking.

SERPs.com reports pretty significant changes in he Google results on Monday. SERPMetrics.com shows very little change in the search results. MozCast has not yet updated with results from Monday but they showed changes on Sunday, which seem off.

It is very early and nothing is confirmed - but there may be signs of a possible Google update. What exactly, is still unknown and unconfirmed.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

May 2013 Google Webmaster Report

It has been a pretty busy month over at Google, not much in terms of "official" updates but a lot of discussion about changes on both the algorithm side and user interface side. Plus, we learned a lot from Google comments, videos and responses this month.

The ongoing WebmasterWorld thread has the typical chatter around traffic shifts from Google, ranking fluctuations and discussions around seasonal impact of traffic, including the Boston bombing traffic impacts. There is a lot of smaller chatter around minor updates and ranking changes in Google but nothing serious enough to warrant a standalone post about a real update. Maybe borer line.

In any event, you can read last month's recap here and here is a categorized listing of the more important Google Webmaster related topics in the past 30 days or so:

Google Update Related:

• Exact Match Domainers: Are You Switching Or Improving?
• You May Never Recover From Google's Penguin
• Happy Birthday Google's Penguin Update
• A Google Update Brewing?

Google SEO:

• Google Has Manually Penalized Mozilla
• Can User Generated Comments Cause A Google Penalty
• Google Now Treating 20 ccTLDs As Generic TLDs
• Google: Disavow Links Even If Removed As A Best Practice
• Google's Cutts Say Search Flux Not Meant To Trick SEOs?
• Does Google Want SEOs To Overreact?
• Google: We Will Index It If It Is Not Spam
• Google: Stop Repeating The Same Keyword Over & Over Again
• Google: Don't Redirect All Mobile Users To A Single Page
• Google: Pushing Hundreds Of Thousands Of Pages Can Raise A Red Flag
• Google Lists 5 Most Common Canonical Mistakes
• I Yield To Google: My Paid Links Are NoFollow
• My Google Reconsideration Request For Removing Paid Links
• My Google Traffic After My Linking Penalty Was Lifted
• Does Google Allow Links Through Customer Discounts?
• Google: You Don't Want To Dig Yourself Out Of A Hole
• Google's New hreflang For Multilingual & Multinational Sites
• Google: Have Multinational Site Over TLDs? Use hreflang

Google Webmaster Tools:

• Watch Out For Google Rich Snippet Hacking
• Ignore That Last Google Webmaster Tools Notification: Googlebot CAN Access Your Site
• Google's Targeted Penalty Webmaster Tools Notification
• Google Will Send Notifications To WWW & Non-WWW Webmaster Tools Accounts

Google User Interface:

• Google Drops Instant Previews Over Low Usage
• The Google Non-Profit Knowledge Graph
• Google Sub-Sitelinks Are Here
• Google Authorship Snippet Drops More By... Link
• Google Scholar Removes Search By Discipline
• Google: Searches Don't Use The Related Searches Option
• Google: Don't Hide URLs In Search Results. We Don't Like It.
• Google Now Available For iPhone/iPad
• Google Showing "See More Results From..." Less Often Now?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.