27 replies to this topic

[cazint]

Google ought not count advertising links they way they count "editorial" links, otherwise the search rankings will always favor the biggest advertiser, rather than the most useful site.

Intention and implementation can be two different things.

Agreed.

[Michael Martinez]

Well, i've stated clearly why i believe the site went to #1.  Was it the ONLY  thing they did?  Of course not.  Otherwise, there is no way they would have been #8 and 9, as those two positions take a TON of time.

So they obviously did a lot of work, as I know, because i was #5 and 6 all the while.  But the jump to #1 with the aforementioned facts seems to point solely to the internet.com links.  And yes, i do believe they are being counted.

Through all this, you haven't written one word about the other sites competing for that expression. What changes have occurred in the top 10-50 listings overall?

Rankings do not change because of what happens with one site. They change because of what happens with all sites.

[qwerty]

...do you feel google should address this and stop counting those links as votes?

I do, and Google, through Matt Cutts, has expressed their intention not to count such links. What gets me is that rather than coming up with an algorithmic way to do this (at least so far), or at least building a list of domains that sell links and simply discounting any and all links from such sites, they tell site owners to take care of it for them.

[mal4mac]

If Google can't spot 15000 backlinks appearing overnight then they need to get out of the search engine business. So lets assume they spotted this. Their reasoning for giving such sites a boost may be that such sites care enough to pay to get their sites boosted. They might think this is worth a handful of good organic links.

Suggestion - get more natural links from good sites. There are several ways to do this. For instance, write more and better content for your site and wait for the links to appear. In this particular instance you could get more creative.

For instance, you could write an interesting article on the contents of this thread and offer it to good SEO people if they agree to link back to your becalmed page. Also, agree to tell the good SEO people if your site overtakes the "spam" sites. Or not.

[cazint]

Through all this, you haven't written one word about the other sites competing for that expression.  What changes have occurred in the top 10-50 listings overall?

Rankings do not change because of what happens with one site.  They change because of what happens with all sites.

Hey Michael,

I don't know why you would have wanted me to write about the other sites competing for these rankings. But since you ask, there are several noteable points to mention. Namely, when this happened, NONE of the other top 20 sites, ABSOLUTELY NONE of the other sites changed positions. That was one of the red flags that set off when i was trying to figure out how the heck these guys jumped from #8 to #1.

So assuming that there was not a major change in the Google algorithm during that week, the change that happend was indeed a results of the increased backlinks to that site. Google obviously updated its index and saw the 18,000 backlinks, and increased the PR, and the positions accordingly.

Also, someone else asked about other keywords, and if it affected keywords other than the linking text found on the internet.commerce links. And I can give an emphatic yes to that. This website jumped from nowhere on so many different keyword results relating to things they were selling. And of course, this made sense, once i saw that google was, for some reason, counting those links as votes.

So it affected them nicely all across the board, and not only for the keywords found in the specific linking text.

Jonathan

[cazint]

If Google can't spot 15000 backlinks appearing overnight then they need to get out of the search engine business.

Well, i'm not sure if they have those checks in place. I can't think of any major reasons why google would want to have some alert go off when a site increases in quality inbound links all of a sudden, even if the increase was 1000% or more.

For new sites that have very few inbound links and work hard at creating valuable content, links will eventually add up, and perhaps even all of a sudden depending on their efforts.

So it would surprise me if google "spotted" those 18,000 links and red flagged them.

But i still hope they will.

Jonathan

[qwerty]

I can't think of any major reasons why google would want to have some alert go off when a site increases in quality inbound links all of a sudden, even if the increase was 1000% or more.

Sure you can. It's the reason for this thread. That kind of jump in backlinks should raise a red flag with the word "Paid" emblazoned across it. Add to that that all of those links are coming from properties owned by the same company (information Google has as a registrar) and that red flag ought to start flashing and setting off sirens.

There's a difference between creating content that gets attention and recommendations from a large number of independent sites and buying ad space. Google knows that. They talk about it. It's just that they clearly aren't very good at dealing with it.

[torka]

Namely, when this happened, NONE of the other top 20 sites, ABSOLUTELY NONE of the other sites changed positions.

Well, at least one other site had to change positions... I've never seen a "vacant" #1 position in a SERP before, so this page had to displace somebody in order to get there.

So, what you're saying is the relative positions of the others didn't change? i.e. #1 dropped down to #2, the old #2 dropped to #3 and so forth until you get down to #7 dropping into the "hole" created at #8 by the other site moving up, and then everybody else stayed exactly the same?

Or did the old #1 drop totally off the map and the lower-listed pages moved up to fill in the "hole" at #8? Or did the old #1 just swap places with the old #8?

Point is, as MM pointed out, changes don't happen in a vacuum. When one page changes position, at least one other has to change as well, and you can't always be certain you're looking at the right end of the equation to know which one it was that initiated the change and which one is just along for the ride (or whether they both had something to do with it).

Not that I'm disagreeing with your assessment of the situation. I think it's probably likely that those links did have something to do with the other site moving up.

And yes, there are probably quite a few people here who would agree Google shouldn't "count" purchased links such as those toward their organic results. But since we don't own Google, and -- last I checked -- few of us get consulted in advance on policy issues by the folks at the 'Plex, and near as I can tell nobody here's responsible for writing the Google algo (at least, not among the active posters ), unfortunately there's not much we can do about it in any practical sense.

Glad you feel better after venting, though.

--Torka

[cazint]

Well, at least one other site had to change positions... I've never seen a "vacant" #1 position in a SERP before, so this page had to displace somebody in order to get there.

So, what you're saying is the relative positions of the others didn't change? i.e. #1 dropped down to #2, the old #2 dropped to #3 and so forth until you get down to #7 dropping into the "hole" created at #8 by the other site moving up, and then everybody else stayed exactly the same
--Torka

Correct. Glad you knew what i meant. The point was that all pages "stayed the same" in the sense that they obviously went down a notch. The change, if you will, was the one page jumping from 8 to 1. Thanks for pointing that out.

Jonathan

[cazint]

Sure you can. It's the reason for this thread. That kind of jump in backlinks should raise a red flag with the word "Paid" emblazoned across it. Add to that that all of those links are coming from properties owned by the same company (information Google has as a registrar) and that red flag ought to start flashing and setting off sirens.

qwerty, are all of the pages in the internet.com network "owned" by internet.com? I would be surprised if that is the case, as that is a bucketload of pages to own. Rather, i assume, and perhaps wrongly so, that those pages are just sites that have agreed to advertise (key word) the commerce links.

And when i said that i can't think of any reason for google to have spotted those links, is because they did not come from an obvious advertisement such as Adwords or something else. Mind you, once one knows about it, including google, it is TREMENDOUSLY obvious. And if or when Google does decide to address this issue, it should be easy for them. But as mentioned, the sites that benefit are a TINY, TINY fraction of the web. So even if they know about it, it is WAAAY down on their priority list. Now if there were hundreds of thousands of sites using this ad, and all kinds of rankings getting messed up, then that would be a bit different.

I'm not sure if it is that Google does not care. I do believe they would want to fix this. Just a matter of taking care of the more important things first. Just sucks for me for now!

[torka]

qwerty, are all of the pages in the internet.com network "owned" by internet.com?

Actually, internet.com is owned by Jupiter Media. And between all the newsletters they run and all the other content they publish across multiple domains, they do, in fact, own a metric buttload of pages.

Here's their advertising info page, which has more information about the properties they control and on which one can purchase advertising (and, yeah, it does appear that the internet.com network -- all 11 "channels" of it -- is owned entirely by them)...

--Torka

[Michael Martinez]

If the page really jumped up for multiple search expressions and all the other pages in those expressions remained relatively static, then I would tentatively agree with your assessment. Keep in mind that those links could have been out there for a very long time and Google could be looking at something else.

People very often post their conclusions in the forums without telling us the whole story. While some folks will support the intuitive guesswork with variations on "I have seen the same thing myself", if you want someone to actually validate your conclusion, providing as much information about what did or did not change for the competition helps considerably.

Also, the Big Daddy update has generated a growing amount of criticism and discussion. The general consensus so far seems to be that crawling-to-indexing times have slowed (opinions vary on how much -- it may well be that PageRank and Neighborhood affect who is getting crawled and indexed more quickly or slowly).

It is entirely possible that something else, not necessarily intended to impact rankings directly, has kicked in. For example, Google's representative Matt Cutts claimed that one of Big Daddy's priorities was dealing with the URL canonicalization issues that have annoyed Webmasters for years. While most comments regarding canonical URLs seem to be negative, Google changed something. Maybe this site is benefiting from that something, whatever it is.

If so, then if Google concludes there is a problem (as many of us feel there is) and makes another change, this site may roll back to its earlier position (or fall farther).

However, given the implied depth of the Big Daddy revision to Google's infrastructure (which goes well beyond tweaking the ranking algorithm), I suspect it may be late Summer or early Fall before we see a significant revision that addresses the concerns many of us have expressed about Big Daddy.

Disclaimer: Everyone please keep in mind that I am guessing in the dark, based on ignorance. Please do not take that as a reliable estimate of how long things may last or when the next major update will begin.

[Jill]

The problem for the site in question, if their rankings did indeed increase due to their paid ads, is that they're stuck paying for those if they want to maintain that ranking.

I hope they're actually making a positive return on investment out of it. It would be interesting to know if they are.