I recently saw a spam AdSense site covering just about every angle of the financial category, with
about a half million rented links (many are sitewide on PR8 and PR9 sites)
thousands of pages of near Markov generated quality content
ultra spammy internal site structure
a bad design
ranking for well over 10,000 unique Google search queries
likely making anywhere from $5,000 to $15,000 per day from AdSense
Some high ranking sites can last for years as long as they stay out of the limelight. But when those sites get public scrutiny they need to have enough community influence to make a search engineer fear hand editing them.
As soon as non-corporate sites get mentioned on a popular SEO blog (as a success story or a spammy site) they stand a good chance of getting killed. My site that got hand edited by a Google engineer was nuked after I signed up for Google Webmaster Central and an SEO blogger mentioned the site.
The moral of the story is it is best to not seek exposure as or get categorized as an SEO play unless your brand is strong enough to hurt Google if they try to hurt you.
In the middle of a site upgrade. Stuff might be a bit messy in the next day or two. Comments are back, but you have to create an account to comment. I was getting too many comments from Mr. Penis Pump and Mrs. Dog Collars.
Imagine you are looking for fresh information, and are one of the hundreds of students searching for new scholarships each year. The top result Google shows you is a CNN news article for a $250 white's only scholarship from 2004. It was a stunt to shock people and send a message, and as a side effect anyone searching for new scholarships on Google gets to see that message. Does a speeding ticket make a driver a good driver? No, it just means that he was citation worthy. Some people do despicable things for links and make lots of money from it. It is a flaw of the current relevancy algorithms to assume that a citation makes a business trustworthy. On the commercial parts of the web, most links are an indication of is an ad budget, a public relations budget, nepotism, or controversy.
Where a business runs into issues with bad press is if it ranks for their core brand related terms, but typically that stuff can be drowned out by subdomains, alternate corporate sites, buying out competitors, and using a press page to pump up the good coverage a business gets. Current search algorithms encourage unethical business practices because they can't separate good from bad. They only care about who gets citations, which makes some people do just about anything for a link.
News agencies and other central authoritative systems have always highlighted things that were out of the ordinary, but search makes them stick around, and ranks them for broader topics just because they have a related tangent and were able to garner the most votes.
Perhaps Procter & Gamble doesn't care of their making us into a nation of fat slobs, but there's no reason why programmers and the rest of the startup world need to be so amoral. And no doubt, as pictures of cats with poor spelling on them become all the rage, people are beginning to wonder about where all this idiocy is leaving us. Which is where apologists like Doctorow and Steven Johnson step in, assuring us that Everything Bad is Good For You.
It isn't. YouTube isn't going to save us from an Idiocracy-style future in which everyone sits at home and watches shows like "Ow! My Balls!" (in which a man is repeatedly hit in the balls) -- YouTube's damn-near creating that future. As I write this, YouTube's #1 featured video is titled "Farting in Public".
I just shaved my head, placed a tattoo front and center on my forehead, and ran naked through town with a flag wrapped around my penis. I can't imagine how many organic links will come rolling in, and will love it when the local newspaper page talking about that incident ranks #1 for US Flag. That ought to put me on the map:
Imagine if virtually everything you chose to trust eventually betrayed you. You try to create shifting rules and push your worldview to try to make it manageable, but even in your attempts to do so people call out the self serving nature of your suggestions. Every day thousands of people share free information about how to take advantage of you, and in return you wade through garbage and do everything you can to suppress it, but work for a company with policies that encourage information pollution. Even when you try to stop something, your company will still spread that message to anyone willing to look for it for a dollar or two a click, and affiliates quickly race to fill in the hole your hand edit created. You can't suppress them. You hand edited one company, but is it fair to leave their largest competitor? Will someone call you out on that today? Will it matter when they do?
As it gets less manageable your rule sets are disengaged with reality, and if you look close enough at just about anything you find what you would (or at least could) call spam. Everyone is a cheat. Or is that only in my mind?
Should you hand edit this result? Will anyone care if you do or do not? What does the legal team look like at the company behind this website? How large is their ad budget? How bad is this exploit? Should you write an algorithm that will close off this hole? If you do, what other holes does that open up?
How much longer can we trust links until we move on to usage data? Can we ever really trust usage data? Do our policies actually promote creating and sharing good content? How can we improve them without hurting our revenue numbers? Now the web is filling up with stupid garbage reminiscent of Idiocracy. How much of that am I responsible for? Would the web be cleaner if I just quit my job and let free market forces do as they may?
Running Threadwatch for a little over a year took me from being a fairly positive person to being cynical about everything. Could you imagine how bad it would be if your job was to fight spam day in and day out, especially if your employer sponsored the creation of most of it? Some days at SEO conferences Matt Cutts appears as a star, but could you imagine how demoralizing that job would be to do, looking at the worst parts of the web every day? No matter what you do tomorrow there is more spam waiting just for you.
When a page or section is new and you are competing against older sites that have built authority for nearly a decade one of the easiest ways to gain traction is to pick a specific keyword phrase that is not that competitive and go after trying to rank for it.
Often I find myself making a page title relevant for a wide basket of related keywords, then when I check the rankings the page comes in at #12 or #16. My mom's blog currently ranks at #13 in Google for weight loss calculators and #4 for free weight loss calculators using the page title Free Diet, Calorie, & Weight Loss Calculators. The page also ranks #30 for diet calculators and is deep for calorie calculators.
The best thing to do here is to focus the title on the phrase closest to ranking at the top, and try to get it a few more links. If the page starts picking up organic traction after ranking and eventually grows into a self reinforcing authority status then I could help it get more traffic by including those related phrases that don't make much sense to highlight in the page title right now.
If a site has 100 units of link equity and offers 10 sitewide categories then each category gets 10% of the link equity. If that same site limits its number of sitewide categories to 5 then each category gets 20%. By being a webmaster who tracks results one of your biggest advantages you have over webmaster who do not track results is you can limit your navigational selection to suit your financial goals. Is something hot this season? Rotate in the featured category or featured products. Is a category unprofitable or far beyond the authority needed to rank for it? Place less emphasis on it.
The nice thing about template sites with includes and dynamic websites are that it is easy to quickly change your weightings to place more focus where the revenue is. A few #6 or #10 ranking pages in the good section suddenly going to #1 might mean 3x to 5x the earnings.
I have been noticing with Google recently that if you search for something like seobook video that Google pulls in results for SEO Book video as well. They may have been doing this for a while, but if so it seems like it recently got more aggressive. If you are banking on targeting an unpopular version of a keyword you may actually end up having to compete with some of the most authoritative pages ranking for the alternate more authoritative version.
This feature, spell correction, and toolbar search suggestions eat away at some of the easiest portions of the organic SEO arbitrage market by helping search engines consolidate language usage patterns as best they can.
Sometimes when a Google engineer decides he is pissed off at a site he or she may penalize the site in a way that the company does not rank in the top 30 results for any search query, including branded navigational queries. Imagine if you search for SeoBook and couldn't find this site? How is that a good user experience for searchers using Google? It is their index, so I think it is fair if Google nukes sites that they dislike for non-brand queries, but when they do it for brand related queries too, they make their search results irrelevant and provide a bad user experience. What makes the situation worse than it needs to be?
the definition of relevancy changes depending on Google's business interests
the definition of spam changes depending on Google's business interests
Google is unpredictable in their hand editing
if Google does not like a particular market they may hand edit the leading company while leaving competitors ranking at the top of the search results for the competitor's brand. in some cases they penalize the cleanest services while leaving dirtier market players easily accessible
even if a site is deemed as spam and penalized they can still buy ads on Google, which makes it seem as though it is only spam if Google isn't getting paid
If Google wants to become the default way we access all information can they continue to penalize brands for their official brand names?
Many authoritative tool pages have gobs of link equity, but rank for few keywords beyond their official name because they offer little background information. Providing no background information not only wastes ranking opportunities, but also makes it hard for some people to use the tool. In some cases it makes sense to keep documentation separated from the conversion process, especially if the tool is a for sale item, and especially if you are selling to people looking for an instant autopilot wealth generation system. But if your offering is of value and free, there is no need for the mystery card. You can make the download and/or usage instructions clear at the top of the landing page, and then get deeper into features and benefits as you go further down the page.
Since placing mint code on my tools page about a week ago hundreds of unique search queries landed about a thousand searchers on my keyword suggestion tool. About 10% of that traffic was from core terms, while the rest was long tail.
I could have paid Google $500 for that traffic, but I am fine with getting it for free. :)
One of the things you struggle with when you gain some amount of authority is that people quote you out of context or infer things based on your actions or inaction. Sometimes people sell you as being much smarter than you actually are, while other times they cite you with stuff that is inconsistent with your views.
After I read that, I remembered how Aaron Wall has his SeoBook blog structured. His permalinks look like this: http://www.seobook.com/archives/002447.shtml Aaron Wall is the most respected SEO expert that I know of. So if meaningless numbers in permalinks are good enough for him, then I guess they're good enough for me.
When I initially put numbers in my URLs back in 2003 it was because it was the default setup. I left it that way because I wanted to get in Google News. After seeing what happened to Threadwatch when it was listed in Google News (it was pulled out the same day), I realized that my site was a touch too honest and crass to make it into Google News, even if I were to comply with all of their other guidelines.
Why haven't I changed my URLs since then? I was thinking about changing content management systems at some point and figured I would do it after I changed my CMS platform. I just changed the CMS but am seeing how well it works for a while before I consider changing my older URLs.
The reasons descriptive URLs are important are
some people link to pages using the URL as the anchor text, thus giving you more nice anchor text if your file names are descriptive
A descriptive filename is more likely to be clicked on than a URL which lends no information to the listing.
The closest analogy I can think for a filename is the URL. When I see ads for junky arbitrage sites like e-mail-marketing.name in Gmail I know that they are relying on the URL as a large part of what allows them to beat Google's quality scores.
