You can read these posts here:

PageRank Sculpting
Matt Cutts Answers PageRank Sculpting Question
PageRank Sculpting Phase Two

Also, here is a new video from Matt on this subject.

There are many (many…) sites on the web that still have a ‘nofollow’ based PageRank sculpting architecture. There is an element of ‘not broke, don’t fix’ about this, but it is worth baring in mind that if you have this environment you are burning a great deal of PageRank that you could be channelling more wisely.

Firstly, what is ‘quality’ in regard to website content? Wholly subjective, isn’t it? Just like the daily newspaper you buy, the ‘quality’ factor is whatever you judge it to be. Far easier to judge ‘quality’ by standards, like a newspaper that is poorly printed, has bad spelling, etc. would be judge as ‘bad quality’. Likewise, a website with copied, badly written, badly formatted content would be judged as ‘bad quality’. Your website’s ‘quality’ is judged by whoever eventually may read it and, crucially, whether they feel it has served them what they wanted or is interesting, inspirational, informative, etc.

Now, frequency and quality with regards to website content can get somewhat blurry when mixed. Is it better to churn out lots of, at best, mediocre content or deliver something good and insightful whenever you feel it is appropriate? Even if you are passing on information, do you pass on everything or only that which has really merit to your readership?

These frequency and quality questions, mainly come down to what is your website for and what are you trying to achieve. Is it for your own interest? Are you trying to sell something? Are you delivering important information? Etc.

Simple stuff, so far? Well, yes until you bring search engines into the equation. Then these pretty basic assumptions change and break up into a fantastically silly guessing game. Does Google like lots of updates? Should I change my home page regularly? Can Google look at my content and see if it is rubbish? Does it care?

Now is a good time to bring in a recent video from Matt Cutts about this subject.

So, is it any clearer? Now, I don’t think for moment that Google or Matt Cutts will ever be transparent enough to tell you the whole story. However, I also think that the steers they give us are never too far away from the direction we should be heading. The information above all else that has been communicated over the past couple of years from Google is that ‘producing great content will give you the best chance of getting good links’ (except they don’t always mention the ‘good links’ part. The rider is that the great content needs to be known about in the first place, which is somewhat of the Catch 22.

Does Google know if your content is good? Well, no not really. It knows if you are on topic, it knows if you have copied your content, it knows if it is link worthy, etc. etc. But, unless they do a hand sort, it does not know if you content is good, even then it won’t be subjective and will only look at the ‘bad quality’ that I mentioned above, but in a search engine’s case they are looking for ‘bad quality’ that tries to cheat them or us. The algorithms will pick up most of the ‘cheating’ Google elements and a great deal of the semantics elements, but will never pick up if your post is fantastic, but then it doesn’t need to, the web will tell it if it is.

So will frequency help me rank well? Yes, it will. For all the reasons Matt says and many others. But will frequency on its own help me? Somewhat, but not in real terms and certainly not without the other ‘trust’ and ‘popularity’ factors that Google puts above all others. More than anything ‘frequency’, as long as it is aligned with good elements of appropriate diversity, will help your ‘long tail’ exposure. For ‘head terms’ there is a much bigger reliance on ‘quality’ mixed with ‘frequency’ to bring link weight to your site as a whole, which will then, in turn, help your site (and it’s targeted key phrases) rank better. Frequency, without quality and diversity will not help you very much and also thin and spread your PageRank/trust weight at the same time.

If you are looking for search engine spiders to visit your site more then, frequency does help, in the same way that individual page improvements help. But, frequency will not help if Google is not really that interested in your site and even though the ‘supplemental index’ has long been forgotten about, the principals still play a part in what Google will and will not index and how it indexes your content.

This post was really meant to look at bit harder at the ‘fresh content’ mantra of SEO, where some people have taken Google’s words and built there own theory. Personally, I agree with certain elements of the theory, but average at best content and average at best links will only get you so far, and there is still a lot of effort and money involved in taking this path.

So is content king? Not in my opinion with regard to better search engine exposure. Google’s fundamental principal has never changed and links and citations are king. However, without quality, popular, authoritative or crucial content, links and citation will always be contrived. And in essence, that can only take you so far and nowhere near far enough in a competitive search engine ranking environment.

The phrase ‘long tail’ when applied to search engine listings describes the countless phrases that are used by us all that fit outside of the ‘head terms’. A ‘head term’ would be something that is used many, many times by lots of different searchers e.g. ‘pizza delivery’, ‘mortgage quote’, etc. The ‘long tail’ are the less used, but multiple search queries that often use more qualifying words e.g. ‘negative equity mortgage advice company’, wheat free pizza bases delivery’, etc.

The (very) basic premise of the ‘long tail’ is that roughly speaking you will get the most of your traffic (or sales if you run a ecommerce shop) from the ‘head terms’, but these head terms from a diversity perspective will be much, much less in number than the multitude of different ‘long tail’ queries. For different niches this weighting can be very different and in fact the ‘long tail’ can be your most important traffic source and the one that leads to most sales.

So how does the ‘May Day’ update relate to the ‘long tail’? Well, Google have decided to tackle this type of query in more of an isolated way and try to more closely match the needs of the searcher in relation to the page(s) that are delivered.

Here is a video from Matt Cutts that talks about this change.

So how does this relate to your site? Well, the best way to evaluate your ‘long tail’ exposure is to run a search query report on your analytics programme from a relevant month and look at all the individual searches that bring traffic to your site that are relatively low in number (but are many when all added together) and contain multiple words. Than you can run a report from around mid May onwards and see if this has changed either positively or negatively.

I am still evaluating what I think the triggers are for this change and how Google is making the judgment call on the relevancy and quality of the results it hopes to delivery for ‘long tail’ queries.

More on this in a future post, but in essence this could be a great directional change for Google. However, I am sensitive to those of you out there who have had a real and negative traffic hit from this change.

Basically, it turns ‘broad match’ into something that is a lot more usable and less at the whim of what Google consider a ‘good’ match for your keyword.

With the new (ish) ‘search query’ reporting you can now get, using broad match has become a little more usable with the ability to modify (or turn off) the extent of your broad match keywords, after maybe using it during some of the initial stages of a campaign. This enables you to get ‘real’ keyword data with the ‘search query’ report and then use this to go after worthwhile AdGroups, etc.

However, some of the ‘broad’ match keyword grouping is somewhat dodgy and even the most scientific use of the match type always left me feeling a bit like I was donating money, relevancy and shedding quality.

Well, the ‘Broad Match Modifier’ really does help in many respects… how does it work? Well, you need to put a ‘+’ sign before one of your broad match words to ‘modify’ it. By modifying it, Google means that it will treat that word somewhat less broad than it used to. Here’s an examples…

The keywords ‘glass desks’ would result in:

* Broad match will probably show for ‘perspex desk’, ‘desk’, ‘black glass descs’, ‘writing table’ etc.
* The modified match ‘glass +desk’ would match all the above apart from ‘writing table’ (yes, including the misspelling and pluralising of ‘desk’
* The modified match ‘+glass +desk’ would match the words ‘glass desk’ (and misspelling and pluralisation) within a sentance e.g. ‘black glas desks’, ‘glass desks’, etc.

Both ‘exact’ and ‘phrase’ matching are not affected and still work in the normal way.

All in all a good addition to the AdWords PPC tool kit and will save a good amount of time and wastage it you need to use broad match for any set of keywords for a specific campaign.

We have know for a long time that the ‘keyword’ Meta tag was not being used by Google. There was also the suspicion that both Yahoo and Microsoft weren’t using it too. As we know the tag had been open to abuse since the early days of search engine importance and because it is hidden from the web viewer it was pretty much fair game for all sorts of SPAM and keyword stuffing.

Here is a video from Matt Cutts explaining the whole thing.

So until Microhoo come out with the same information, it pays to still use the keyword tag sparingly. It is not much of an effort to put the three or four keyphrases your page is trying to be optimised for in the tag. Any more than this is a waste of effort and also Google said ‘we don’t use the keyword in the tag’ it didn’t say that ‘we don’t use all the Meta tag information to help us gauge trust’. So, don’t stuff that Meta tag for old times sake and think it won’t be noted still!

One thing though. Why have Google ‘nofollowed’ the company link from the qualified company/professional profile pages? It wasn’t a nofollow before. Surely with the spend criteria and exams, etc. they can vouch for this link. Was it being abused? If so it wouldn’t have been hard to do a hand check now would it? Or put some rules around the destination of the link?

There is also a theory that this is a legacy thing from the Vince update. I am not so sure. I think Google just underestimated the difficulty in matching the .coms, .nets, etc. to generic queries (and some not so generic ones too… unbelievably) based upon region. However, I think the thought process from what Vince was trying to achieve has played a part.

Looks like they are now taking this a bit more seriously though, so normal service should be resumed soon(ish). I guess all you search marketers with affected sites and actual companies this is affecting will just have to sit on your hands until then! Frustrating eh?

I think that Matt got the wrong end of this question and answered it in a different way than it was possibly posed. I think what many people have been saying is “why are we getting lots of results that include companies who are outside of my region and can’t supply the thing that I have been searching for where I am?”. There are still a few of these knocking around (some have been fixed).

I think the answer here is in what Matt said in that they worked on a changed that expanded the search results to include more (relevant) .coms. Whilst doing this they obviously got the filter somewhat wrong in the first iteration.

As we know the only truly universal top level domain is .com, this means that even though .coms should be associated with America, it is just as likely that the company concerned will be based in another region. Google’s problem is that because of the universal nature of .coms they sit outside of its desired way or delivering regionally based results.

There are many factors that Google looks at for regional based results for generic keywords. To improve their delivery in this respect they have had to add another level of analysis to the algorithm to supplement their long standing geographical determiners (hosting location, top level domain, usage, contact information on site, ownership details, webmaster preference, etc.). This is because it is still possible that the best and most relevant site for your query will not show well in your region because it is a .com and it is hosted in the US for instance.

These changes to improve regional searching for generic keywords seems to have skewed the results and I guess they have had to reappraise their initial approach.

In essence, Google makes hundreds of algorithm tweaks ever year, some go way below the radar and some are a bit more overt. This one obviously fits into the latter category.

Lastly, do you think Google sometimes gets it wrong? Yep, they do. But hey it is their search engine. Also, (could be a very long time coming, if ever) until Microhoo get their act together, when Google do get it wrong, we just have to sit and wait for them to make it all better again…

More to come on this, but my three thoughts are:

1. Bing is actually quite a decent search engine (shock!) and if they build on this solid base Microsoft will eventually have something (in some way) to rival Google. Apart from the fact that (more shock!) Bing is more than just a re-brand and Microsoft have actually got some thing right, this thought is based upon the law of diminishing returns (Google can’t make as many leaps and bounds in the search side of the business as Microsoft can at this point in time). Therefore if MS continue on this track they will eventually make enough ground to be a serious contender. Whether anyone (or enough to make it interesting) will use their engine is another matter (see item 2… they just have).

2. Today’s Yahoo and Microsoft announced that they will pair up on the natural search front gives them enough joint searchers to make this a distant but worthwhile contender to Google’s strength. UK wise they still have to make a lot of ground even jointly, but worldwide their combined power is now significant. Like item 1 they now need to build on this to make the alliance a good and seamless one, that way they can develop the offering and seriously market to entice users to switch them from Google.

3. A really little point this, but try http://pagehunt.msrlivelabs.com/PlayPageHunt.aspx. This is the first time I have found something from Microsoft on the search front that overtly tries to go the extra mile. As said it is a small thing (and the current version of this test, isn’t wonderful), but it does show a sign that they have got some people who will try to push things along. If they engender this spirit then the momentum may just mean that they get a group of people who want and believe they can upset the big guys (I know it sounds strange saying that about Microsoft, but in this instance it is very true). Mind set wise this is absolutely crucial and a really difficult one for Microsoft (bearing in mind how arrogant they can be).

So there you go. I will now start to take a bit more interest in Microsoft/Yahoo from a natural search side (PPC wise I always did). Who knows maybe this time next year we will have a slightly different story on our hands. A long way to go though but a least this time they have made a real start.

P.S. to celebrate this I have now added a ‘Bing’ category, who would have thought it!

I found this video regarding checking for back links, etc. Matt also mentions the ‘link:’ search command. I did an article on the Google ‘link:’ command a few days ago and talked about its flakiness. Matt mentioned the Google stance that they only show a few links to give a small overview of the back link profile to protect the link data from prying eyes, etc. I am not saying that this is not on the money, it is just that the ‘weirdness’ of some of the results is puzzling. Also, how exactly do Google get a real randomness to this subsection of results?

Anyway, here is Matt’s video.

Let’s not put too much weight on this analysis. I am sure it is not going to lead us to the Google search holy grail or anything. I have just always thought that it was very strange for the best search company in the world to put its name to flaky results, no matter how they down play it.

“As you may know Google puts a great deal of store in incoming links. We have noticed that your site has very few incoming links according to Google. You can try this for yourself by typing ‘link:www.yourwebite.co.uk’ into Google. This will show you how many incoming links Google can see for your website. As you can see you only have 23!”

The email usually goes on to say what a wonderful job they could do for you and how 23 links is a pretty rubbish effort.

As you probably know Google has always treated the ‘link:’ command in a very lacklustre way. This is the direct opposite to the way it treats literally any other search term. I have always been quite puzzeled by this and thought that Google may as well just pull the facility rather than leave something out there that was, at best, poor and at worst damaging.

So based upon my last post ‘Google Search Operators‘ I thought I would have a small play with the ‘link:’ command mixed in with some other operators. The theory is that any insight you can get into how Google views links must be worth something.

To start with this is what usually happens with the ‘link:’ command in Google. Listed below are the results for this site and some others.

Search Kingdom ‘link:’ results in Google

Search Engine Land ‘link:’ results in Google

Matt Cutts ‘link:’ results in Google

Apart from the fact that both Danny’s and Matt’s sites have infinitely more links than me (boo hoo), you can see the way that Google treats sites with more importance (and links) with the ‘link:’ command.

The results you get usually mimic the ratio of internal links/pages and external links. Both Danny’s and Matt’s sites have thousands of incoming links from a wide variety of websites. So the results the ‘link:’ command returns for their sites are varied and depicts the ratio of incoming and internal links on the sites in question. Try this for yourself on your own site or any sites you mat be working on. Are there many results? Can you see more internal links than external links? Are the internal links/pages at the top of the results? Do you see a site wide external link coming up first? If so how many pages are shown and what pages are they? Do they look pretty random?

Answering some or all of the above may be a small insight into the way that Google looks at link weight and importance of your site or in general.

Now, after mixing the ‘link:’ command with other operators and having a little bit of a play with this it seems in most cases the results go crazy! If you are going to play with this yourself pick websites that have small to medium amounts of links and in contrast also ones that have lots of incoming links. The craziness for a site with a smaller to medium number of links is really interesting and seems to go really off the wall. For instance the ‘link:’ command really breaks down if you use this site (www.searchkingdom.co.uk) as an example and then add the ‘-site:www.searchkingdom.co.uk’ operator to the search command. For example:

Weird incoming ‘link:’ search results for www.searchkingdom.co.uk

The results really expand from the palty ’3′ for the ‘link:’ command without any operators. As you can see the thread works for some of the time through the results, but Google also decides to mix in some results for the term ‘search kingdom’ and include pages that do not link to this website and seem to be about Kingdom Hearts. There are lots of references on the web to ‘search Kingdom Hearts’ and for some reason Google decided to mix these results in with my ‘link:’ command. Does this mean that the operator has ‘broken’ the results here or just made them more interesting?

Try this on your own site and also test this out with some more operators. Also, have a look at the ‘related:’ command. Both of these commands mixed with other operators spit out some really interesting results that are worth examining.

Overall, there is a definite possibility that the ‘link:’ command in Google is just a broken and forgotten about thing that no one pays much attention towards. This is certainly the reputation the command has built up. However, it is worth having a closer look at the craziness that some of these results throw up and seeing if these can give us even a small insight into how Google views some of its link structure, the weight it places on some links and how it deals with unique links.

Now we all know that a good link is one that is relevant, not bought, intrinsic and valid. These are the links you need to find to give your site the importance and exposure you would like it to have. The quality of your content and the way you market that content will give you more reward than anything else. However, Google hold the cards in this particular game, so shedding any light on what hand they have  is always useful.

I would be interested to hear from anyone who has discovered some more interesting results. This will help to see whether it will be valid and useful to take this analysis further.

Here is a basic helpsheet on Google search operators that will get you started. There are lots of other reference sheets on the web that will go into more detail on all of them.

Here is one tip to be going on with…

We all know that the title tag of any given page is a crucial on-page SEO factor. So a page that can be found for the term you are working on that doesn’t have that term in its title could be an undiscovered authoritative page. The theory is that there is a good possibility that the page might just be a good page on the subject that hasn’t been SEOed to extremes. Worth checking out eh?

By using Google search operators this is easy, just type this in your Google search box:

your term -intitle:your term

Want to get rid of some more of the results that have related words in the page’s title? Try this:

your term -intitle:your term *

Google is not great at listing these type of results in a direct order of popularity so you will have to sift through some dodgy sites/pages (but hey, this is the Internet!). However, you will discover a few gems that may have gone below your radar otherwise.

This is just one of the many ways you can use Google’s search operators to help you in your SEO link building. There are lot more. Which ones do you use?

Great article from Danny Sullivan today on PageRank sculpting. Saves me a lot of work, thanks Danny. Also, included is a video from Matt Cutts from May (I will include below in any case), which unfortunately I missed the first time around (if I had seen this and really thought about it and combined it with the data I was seeing from some old JavaScript links, I might have been well ahead of the game on the big two recent developments).

So, it looks like sparse internal linking, not linking out, turning comments off and iFrames will now be the order of the day! I hope not. Here are a few (white hat) things that you might want to try.

1. Combining your ‘legals’ and ‘privacy’ pages in to one page and linking to it more intelligently. I have no idea on the legal ease of where these pages should be linked from on your site (maybe someone could comment), so do this at you own risk. I am also absolutely certain that Google has factored in some weighting to these pages already, so don’t sweat this one too much.
2. Think about your other navigational links and make them better for users and Google (how many ‘about us’ pages do you really need?). In this I mean think about if you really need to link to a page or if you really need that site wide link to an unprofitable area. As we know ‘nofollowing’ no longer works and in some ways this is a good excuse to get your house in order from a usability, ‘weight’ flow and ‘weight’ wastasge perspective.
3. Remember a good website should embrace what the ‘web’ is about. Linking to sites and pages is a good thing if done for the right reasons and well. So all you ‘nofollow’ addicts should think a little about the trust your site developes by being an authority site. Authority sites do link to other sites (and give PageRank away). Rather than delete all of your outbound links that you previously ‘nofollowed’, open some of them up and ‘dofollow’ the ones that add value.

There will be a million takes on this new news and I am waiting to see what the fall out is. Either way Google makes the rule and we have to follow (no pun intended) them. Didn’t you know that? If you were Google would you do it any other way? Remember they own the search engine and we choose to use it.

Firstly, here is Matt Cutts’ latest post on PageRank sculpting.

Now rather than write a whole new article on this, here is my comment on Matt’s blog.

*******

Matt,

Before I start this, I am using the term ‘PageRank’ as a general term fully knowing that this is not a simple issue and ‘PageRank’ and the way it is calculated (and the other numerous methods Google use) are multidimensional and complex. However, if you use PageRank to imply ‘weight’ it make it a lot simpler. Also, ‘PageRank sculpting’ (in my view) is meant to mean ‘passing weight you can control’. Now… on with the comment!

As I have always said, Google makes the rules and needs to make those rules fit with what it wants to do and also change them when needed to fit with the changes that happen on the web.

Just like the new structure on JavaScript links and them now carrying weight and being crawlable, the PageRank sculpting change is understandable. Google now can and wants to index more of the web (JavaScript link change). Google wants to reverse a method that can only help people in the know (PageRank sculpting change). Logically, all is very understandable.

However, where the JavaScript link change is evolution, the PageRank sculpting change in not. Let me explain.

Using ‘nofollow’ on untrusted (or unknown trust) outbound links is sensible and I think that in general this is a good idea. Like wise using it on paid links is cool (the fact that all those people are now going to have to change from JavaScript to this method is another story…). I also believe that using ‘nofollow’ on ‘perfunctory’ pages is also good. How many times in the past did you search for your company name and get you home page at number one and your ‘legals’ page at number two. Now, I know that Google changed some things and now this is less prominent, but it still happens. As much as you say that these pages are ‘worthy’, I don’t agree that they are in terms of search engine listings. Most of these type of pages (along with the privacy policy page) are legal ease that just need to be on the site. I am not saying they are not important, they are (privacy policies are really important for instance), but, they are not what you site is about. Because they are structurally important they are usually linked from every pages on the site and as such gather a lot of importance and weight. Now, I know that Google must have looked at this, but I can still find lots of examples where these type of pages get too much exposure on the search listings. This is apart from the duplicate content issues (anyone ever legally or illegally ‘lifted’ some legals or privacy words from another site?).

In my view there is nothing wrong with saying ‘hey Google, these pages are not important from a search engine perspective, let me not give them so much weight’. Regardless of how Google now views these type of pages from a weight perspective, doing the above as a webmaster should be logical and encouraged. You have said this yourself at least a few times in the past.

Likewise, ‘nofollowing’ your archive pages on your blog. Is this really a bad thing? You can get to the pages from the ‘tag’ index or the ‘category’ index, why put weight to a page that is truly navigational. At least the tag and category pages are themed. Giving weight to a page that is only themed by the date is crazy and does not really help search engines deliver ‘good’ results (totally leaving aside the duplicate content issues for now).

To finish, I guess I want to make two points (which do have some embedded questions too), namely:

1. Now that we know that weight/PageRank/whatever will disappear (outside of the intrinsic wastage method that Google applies) when we use a ‘nofollow’ link, what do you think this will do to linking patterns? This is really a can of worms from an outbound linking and internal linking perspective. Will people still link to their ‘legals’ page from every page on their site? Turning comments ‘off’ will also be pretty tempting. I know this will devalue the sites in general, but we are not always dealing with logic here are we? (if we were you (as head of the web spam team) wouldn’t of had to change many things in the past. Changing the PageRank sculpting thing just being one of them).

2. Was there really a need to make this change? I know all sites should be equally capable of being listed in search engines without esoteric methods playing a part. But does this really happen anyway (in search engines or life in general)? If you hire the best accountant you will probably pay less tax than the other guy. Is that really fair? Also, if nobody noticed the change for a year (I did have an inkling, but was totally and completely in denial) then does that mean the change didn’t have to be made in the first place? As said, we now have a situation where people will probably make bigger and more damaging changes to their site and structure, rather than add a little ‘nofollow’ to a few links.

All in all, PageRank sculpting (or whatever we should call it) didn’t really rule my world. But, I did think that it was a totally legitimate method to use. Now that we know the ‘weight’ leaks, this will put a totally new (and more damaging) spin on things. Could we not have just left the ‘weight’ with the parent page? This is what I thought would happen most of the time anyway.

Still, I guess all of this keeps us all in a job, so we should not complain too much! However, I think you guys have got this one wrong and we will see in the next weeks and months how people jump on this.

P.S. having turned on the ‘nofollow’ indicator plug in on Firefox a long time ago, I have seen some of the abuse on this. However, I still don’t think that this way is the best method to combat this. You could of just ‘downgraded’ the trust score on sites that had abused the ‘nofollow’ thing to silly levels.

*******

In essence, I think this is just the start on some changes on this and let’s see how this develops in the next few weeks. Four things are sure in my mind, namely:

1. The ‘dofollow’ tag will come to the fore (if I am going to lose the ‘weight’ you might as well have it!).
2. The linking to ‘legals’, ‘privacy’, etc. pages will now be more sporadic.
3. Google have made a change that will affect website structure. This is either what they intended or a by-product.
4. Sites will link less.

Fun times… things have been a bit boring or late and this spice things up quite nicely!