But does it really matter? I have encountered several small business websites that have had a PR drop with absolutely no loss of rankings. One site in particular had a two point drop while we upped the rankings on several terms.
AndyBeard
· 1 year ago
It depends... user perception
If I was sitting here as a PR6, as the Google directory says I should be, maybe
1. I would get more subscribers 2. The perception that when I write an SEO article, or try to sell something based upon SEO, to a layman I might know more than someone with PR3 3. Higher listings in ratings charts using PageRank 4. Maybe the press would have linked to me 5. Maybe the first impression of a Wikipedia editor when they were deciding to delete an entry about me that Igor decided to write wouldn't have been deleted as quickly 6. Maybe I would just get more invites to conferences for free, free product samples, or more beer bought for me.
There is positive or negative side to it as well. I get less visitors from custom search engines and tools used by people looking to drop comments. Now you might not look on that as a bad thing, but anyone interested in SEOing their site, and who might be an "internet marketer" for me just happens to be a good target audience, as long as they are doing it manually.
For Techmeme, I don't know if it matters to that extent, but it would if they have now been given other penalties, maybe no longer pass PageRank, or that such things may happen in the future.
If you have had a penalty for passing PageRank, how doe that affect internal linking, subdomains you link to, or sister sites? Techmeme has other properties that probably do not receive as much link juice as Techmeme, but would be much easier to monetize.
SEO Training - Terry Reeves
· 1 year ago
But does it really matter? I have encountered several small business websites that have had a PR drop with absolutely no loss of rankings. One site in particular had a two point drop while we upped the rankings on several terms.
AndyBeard
· 1 year ago
It depends... user perception
If I was sitting here as a PR6, as the Google directory says I should be, maybe
1. I would get more subscribers 2. The perception that when I write an SEO article, or try to sell something based upon SEO, to a layman I might know more than someone with PR3 3. Higher listings in ratings charts using PageRank 4. Maybe the press would have linked to me 5. Maybe the first impression of a Wikipedia editor when they were deciding to delete an entry about me that Igor decided to write wouldn't have been deleted as quickly 6. Maybe I would just get more invites to conferences for free, free product samples, or more beer bought for me.
There is positive or negative side to it as well. I get less visitors from custom search engines and tools used by people looking to drop comments. Now you might not look on that as a bad thing, but anyone interested in SEOing their site, and who might be an "internet marketer" for me just happens to be a good target audience, as long as they are doing it manually.
For Techmeme, I don't know if it matters to that extent, but it would if they have now been given other penalties, maybe no longer pass PageRank, or that such things may happen in the future.
If you have had a penalty for passing PageRank, how doe that affect internal linking, subdomains you link to, or sister sites? Techmeme has other properties that probably do not receive as much link juice as Techmeme, but would be much easier to monetize.
Gabe
· 1 year ago
Thanks Andy, very interesting. Techmeme used to have a PR7. I've been hearing about this -3 hit for a while.
Do people see the absurdity here that I do? It's like all the web's publisher are now required to internalize a working model of Google's PR algorithms.
Funny how one gets the impression from your post that Techmeme's webmaster acted with consideration of these issues in mind. Nope, I acted obliviously, blissfully so. I didn't disallow /goto to supply pure inputs to Google's PR calculations. I did it because dumb crawlers (not Google's) were hammering that directory, seeking pages that weren't there. My blissful ignorance has ended of course. I now know I'm expected to do more than just clearly mark the links as Sponsor Posts. I did nothing wrong or deceptive, but that's no longer good enough.
Hey Tim Berners-Lee, you once said "hyperlink by enclosing anchor text in an A HREF tag". Hope you don't mind, but Google's amending that with "oh, and make sure to use a nofollow condom on links to entities with which you have commercial relationships, and if your links are redirects, robots.txt disallow the redirect urls...wait, better yet, nofollow those too". Thanks for the simplicity Tim, but this is what progress looks like.
Yes, we all know Google is free to set the rules for its search engine. And I agree with that. But I'd like to submit this: Google wants me to learn these arcane rules, apply them, and then prostrate myself for "reconsideration". Is this a winning long-term strategy for Google?
AndyBeard
· 1 year ago
Gabe - SEO bloggers generally think that Google is going about this the wrong way, but it is difficult to shift opinion when most of the tech industry and world opinion generally have a love affair with Google.
I made sure I stuck a question mark on the end of the title, nothing is 100%, only Google knows, but it is the only possibility I can think of, though it defies a lot of conventional thinking by multiple SEO experts.
The good news is in your case it is quite simple to fix and just submit a reconsideration request from within the Webmaster central, stating that you had the links previous blocked by robots.txt, and that you have now used nofollow.
If you jump back up to PR7 over the next few weeks, it was most likely a penalty, though Google are very unlikely to confirm either way.
Gabe
· 1 year ago
Thanks Andy, very interesting. Techmeme used to have a PR7. I've been hearing about this -3 hit for a while.
Do people see the absurdity here that I do? It's like all the web's publisher are now required to internalize a working model of Google's PR algorithms.
Funny how one gets the impression from your post that Techmeme's webmaster acted with consideration of these issues in mind. Nope, I acted obliviously, blissfully so. I didn't disallow /goto to supply pure inputs to Google's PR calculations. I did it because dumb crawlers (not Google's) were hammering that directory, seeking pages that weren't there. My blissful ignorance has ended of course. I now know I'm expected to do more than just clearly mark the links as Sponsor Posts. I did nothing wrong or deceptive, but that's no longer good enough.
Hey Tim Berners-Lee, you once said "hyperlink by enclosing anchor text in an A HREF tag". Hope you don't mind, but Google's amending that with "oh, and make sure to use a nofollow condom on links to entities with which you have commercial relationships, and if your links are redirects, robots.txt disallow the redirect urls...wait, better yet, nofollow those too". Thanks for the simplicity Tim, but this is what progress looks like.
Yes, we all know Google is free to set the rules for its search engine. And I agree with that. But I'd like to submit this: Google wants me to learn these arcane rules, apply them, and then prostrate myself for "reconsideration". Is this a winning long-term strategy for Google?
AndyBeard
· 1 year ago
Gabe - SEO bloggers generally think that Google is going about this the wrong way, but it is difficult to shift opinion when most of the tech industry and world opinion generally have a love affair with Google.
I made sure I stuck a question mark on the end of the title, nothing is 100%, only Google knows, but it is the only possibility I can think of, though it defies a lot of conventional thinking by multiple SEO experts.
The good news is in your case it is quite simple to fix and just submit a reconsideration request from within the Webmaster central, stating that you had the links previous blocked by robots.txt, and that you have now used nofollow.
If you jump back up to PR7 over the next few weeks, it was most likely a penalty, though Google are very unlikely to confirm either way.
Danny Sullivan
· 1 year ago
Yep, heard this last week, and Gabe and I had a little twitter about it:
"Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file"
So yep again, Gabe looks dinged unfairly. What annoys me most, really, is that the links are clearly labeled as Sponsor Posts. Yes, Google wants Gabe and others to use nofollow or block etc. etc. But I also expect Google to have built up its own intelligence at this point to figure out what's paid even if the "machine readable" signs are missing. Words in a reverse box saying "Sponsored" ought to be just fine.
AndyBeard
· 1 year ago
Sorry it got stuck in moderation Danny, links to Google.com get flagged because so many comment spammers use links to Google.com to try to build up their Karma, or just use Google for redirects.
I wasn't aware you had been in contact on Twitter before I made the post.
As it is, Google have had more links to their webmaster guidelines on this blog than the people who requested a review
I totally agree that Google should be handling all of this in a different way.
The traditional SEO thinking was in reference to my previous post, which extensively references the Matt Cutts / Eric Enge interview. If this is just a glitch in Google's datacenter, it would still be advisable to nofollow those links, because Gabe has tons of them on every single page, and best case scenario the redirects are hanging pages.
Lets think of a hypothetical website
100% horrible flash based site with no redeeming features.
If it was indexable, if you link to it in a paid post, you could get a penalty.
But what would happen if the whole website was blocked by robots.txt?
If you link to a page that is blocked by Robots.txt, it can still accumulate pagerank and get indexed.
Could Google give a blogger a penalty for writing a paid post linking through to a site blocked with robots.txt?
Then there is meant to be a layer of manual review, especially I would think for the larger sites.
Danny Sullivan
· 1 year ago
Yep, heard this last week, and Gabe and I had a little twitter about it:
"Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file"
So yep again, Gabe looks dinged unfairly. What annoys me most, really, is that the links are clearly labeled as Sponsor Posts. Yes, Google wants Gabe and others to use nofollow or block etc. etc. But I also expect Google to have built up its own intelligence at this point to figure out what's paid even if the "machine readable" signs are missing. Words in a reverse box saying "Sponsored" ought to be just fine.
AndyBeard
· 1 year ago
Sorry it got stuck in moderation Danny, links to Google.com get flagged because so many comment spammers use links to Google.com to try to build up their Karma, or just use Google for redirects.
I wasn't aware you had been in contact on Twitter before I made the post.
As it is, Google have had more links to their webmaster guidelines on this blog than the people who requested a review
I totally agree that Google should be handling all of this in a different way.
The traditional SEO thinking was in reference to my previous post, which extensively references the Matt Cutts / Eric Enge interview. If this is just a glitch in Google's datacenter, it would still be advisable to nofollow those links, because Gabe has tons of them on every single page, and best case scenario the redirects are hanging pages.
Lets think of a hypothetical website
100% horrible flash based site with no redeeming features.
If it was indexable, if you link to it in a paid post, you could get a penalty.
But what would happen if the whole website was blocked by robots.txt?
If you link to a page that is blocked by Robots.txt, it can still accumulate pagerank and get indexed.
Could Google give a blogger a penalty for writing a paid post linking through to a site blocked with robots.txt?
Then there is meant to be a layer of manual review, especially I would think for the larger sites.
Patrick Grote
· 1 year ago
One day another search engine will come along with the vaunted "algos" google once claimed to have. My feeling is if you were to peer behind the curtain, so to speak, you would see a google index process with much more wire and spackle than intelligent automation.
The nofollow tag was a perfect mind twist that everyone readily jumped on to avoid comment spam. Hardly anyone at the time considered the ramifications of making everything nofollow. :)
When the agent of record for the internet needs to rely on a human tag to help it do the job, well, we're all in trouble.
Patrick Grote
· 1 year ago
One day another search engine will come along with the vaunted "algos" google once claimed to have. My feeling is if you were to peer behind the curtain, so to speak, you would see a google index process with much more wire and spackle than intelligent automation.
The nofollow tag was a perfect mind twist that everyone readily jumped on to avoid comment spam. Hardly anyone at the time considered the ramifications of making everything nofollow. :)
When the agent of record for the internet needs to rely on a human tag to help it do the job, well, we're all in trouble.
beth in Greensboro
· 1 year ago
I've been trying to get my brain wrapped around the toolbar update for sometime now.... I've never sold links, nor has anyone that I know of in my immediate web community. My assumption is the perceived PageRank does have something to do with 301 redirects though... although I haven't put my finger on it... But some of my other blogger acquaintances never have used a 301... So I'm not sure.
beth in Greensboro
· 1 year ago
I've been trying to get my brain wrapped around the toolbar update for sometime now.... I've never sold links, nor has anyone that I know of in my immediate web community. My assumption is the perceived PageRank does have something to do with 301 redirects though... although I haven't put my finger on it... But some of my other blogger acquaintances never have used a 301... So I'm not sure.
Gabe
· 1 year ago
Thanks for the update Andy. I was contacted by...someone from Google, and much of what was speculated was confirmed. Techmeme was dinged for those links, but should not have been given the disallowed redirects. Google evidently noticed the paid links during the week in 2006 when I did NOT have /goto disallowed, i.e. during the week Techmeme did pass PageRank (whatever that means :-) ). Google resolved to rectify.
I still disagree with Google's approach, but I should note I was treated exceptionally well yesterday. About as good as anyone could expect. I didn't even have to submit a reconsideration thingy, whatever that is.
AndyBeard
· 1 year ago
Gabe good to hear it was resolved. Having a story hanging on the front page of Techmeme might have nudged them to take action a little quicker, or maybe Danny nudging them about it on Twitter.
So much for human verification, and possibly a 2 stage process over a period of time just in case of accidental errors.
Gabe
· 1 year ago
Thanks for the update Andy. I was contacted by...someone from Google, and much of what was speculated was confirmed. Techmeme was dinged for those links, but should not have been given the disallowed redirects. Google evidently noticed the paid links during the week in 2006 when I did NOT have /goto disallowed, i.e. during the week Techmeme did pass PageRank (whatever that means :-) ). Google resolved to rectify.
I still disagree with Google's approach, but I should note I was treated exceptionally well yesterday. About as good as anyone could expect. I didn't even have to submit a reconsideration thingy, whatever that is.
AndyBeard
· 1 year ago
Gabe good to hear it was resolved. Having a story hanging on the front page of Techmeme might have nudged them to take action a little quicker, or maybe Danny nudging them about it on Twitter.
So much for human verification, and possibly a 2 stage process over a period of time just in case of accidental errors.
Danny Sullivan
· 1 year ago
Great to hear, Gabe -- but wow, something from back in 2006 finally shows as kicking in. Wow. Remember, you've probably been prevented from passing link love to people for all this time. It's just that no one publicly could tell that until the penalty.
Danny Sullivan
· 1 year ago
Great to hear, Gabe -- but wow, something from back in 2006 finally shows as kicking in. Wow. Remember, you've probably been prevented from passing link love to people for all this time. It's just that no one publicly could tell that until the penalty.
Sergey Rusak
· 1 year ago
I just checked and their Pagerank is 7 (Internet Explorer)
Sergey Rusak
· 1 year ago
I just checked and their Pagerank is 7 (Internet Explorer)
multippt
· 1 year ago
Well, at least the quick restoration in PageRank shows that Google is fast enough to respond to reconsideration requests.
multippt
· 1 year ago
Well, at least the quick restoration in PageRank shows that Google is fast enough to respond to reconsideration requests.
meDuckie
· 1 year ago
Hi there, Andy .. I note in the screenshot above you have the Page rank Tool and the Alexa Tool together, how were you able to achieve this, please?
Or is this a Firefox add-on
My F-secure program will funnily enough not allow me even to download the Alexa Toolbar for IE .. now that is saying something .. lol
All Comments
If I was sitting here as a PR6, as the Google directory says I should be, maybe
1. I would get more subscribers
2. The perception that when I write an SEO article, or try to sell something based upon SEO, to a layman I might know more than someone with PR3
3. Higher listings in ratings charts using PageRank
4. Maybe the press would have linked to me
5. Maybe the first impression of a Wikipedia editor when they were deciding to delete an entry about me that Igor decided to write wouldn't have been deleted as quickly
6. Maybe I would just get more invites to conferences for free, free product samples, or more beer bought for me.
There is positive or negative side to it as well. I get less visitors from custom search engines and tools used by people looking to drop comments.
Now you might not look on that as a bad thing, but anyone interested in SEOing their site, and who might be an "internet marketer" for me just happens to be a good target audience, as long as they are doing it manually.
For Techmeme, I don't know if it matters to that extent, but it would if they have now been given other penalties, maybe no longer pass PageRank, or that such things may happen in the future.
If you have had a penalty for passing PageRank, how doe that affect internal linking, subdomains you link to, or sister sites? Techmeme has other properties that probably do not receive as much link juice as Techmeme, but would be much easier to monetize.
If I was sitting here as a PR6, as the Google directory says I should be, maybe
1. I would get more subscribers
2. The perception that when I write an SEO article, or try to sell something based upon SEO, to a layman I might know more than someone with PR3
3. Higher listings in ratings charts using PageRank
4. Maybe the press would have linked to me
5. Maybe the first impression of a Wikipedia editor when they were deciding to delete an entry about me that Igor decided to write wouldn't have been deleted as quickly
6. Maybe I would just get more invites to conferences for free, free product samples, or more beer bought for me.
There is positive or negative side to it as well. I get less visitors from custom search engines and tools used by people looking to drop comments.
Now you might not look on that as a bad thing, but anyone interested in SEOing their site, and who might be an "internet marketer" for me just happens to be a good target audience, as long as they are doing it manually.
For Techmeme, I don't know if it matters to that extent, but it would if they have now been given other penalties, maybe no longer pass PageRank, or that such things may happen in the future.
If you have had a penalty for passing PageRank, how doe that affect internal linking, subdomains you link to, or sister sites? Techmeme has other properties that probably do not receive as much link juice as Techmeme, but would be much easier to monetize.
Do people see the absurdity here that I do? It's like all the web's publisher are now required to internalize a working model of Google's PR algorithms.
Funny how one gets the impression from your post that Techmeme's webmaster acted with consideration of these issues in mind. Nope, I acted obliviously, blissfully so. I didn't disallow /goto to supply pure inputs to Google's PR calculations. I did it because dumb crawlers (not Google's) were hammering that directory, seeking pages that weren't there. My blissful ignorance has ended of course. I now know I'm expected to do more than just clearly mark the links as Sponsor Posts. I did nothing wrong or deceptive, but that's no longer good enough.
Hey Tim Berners-Lee, you once said "hyperlink by enclosing anchor text in an A HREF tag". Hope you don't mind, but Google's amending that with "oh, and make sure to use a nofollow condom on links to entities with which you have commercial relationships, and if your links are redirects, robots.txt disallow the redirect urls...wait, better yet, nofollow those too". Thanks for the simplicity Tim, but this is what progress looks like.
Yes, we all know Google is free to set the rules for its search engine. And I agree with that. But I'd like to submit this: Google wants me to learn these arcane rules, apply them, and then prostrate myself for "reconsideration". Is this a winning long-term strategy for Google?
I made sure I stuck a question mark on the end of the title, nothing is 100%, only Google knows, but it is the only possibility I can think of, though it defies a lot of conventional thinking by multiple SEO experts.
The good news is in your case it is quite simple to fix and just submit a reconsideration request from within the Webmaster central, stating that you had the links previous blocked by robots.txt, and that you have now used nofollow.
If you jump back up to PR7 over the next few weeks, it was most likely a penalty, though Google are very unlikely to confirm either way.
Do people see the absurdity here that I do? It's like all the web's publisher are now required to internalize a working model of Google's PR algorithms.
Funny how one gets the impression from your post that Techmeme's webmaster acted with consideration of these issues in mind. Nope, I acted obliviously, blissfully so. I didn't disallow /goto to supply pure inputs to Google's PR calculations. I did it because dumb crawlers (not Google's) were hammering that directory, seeking pages that weren't there. My blissful ignorance has ended of course. I now know I'm expected to do more than just clearly mark the links as Sponsor Posts. I did nothing wrong or deceptive, but that's no longer good enough.
Hey Tim Berners-Lee, you once said "hyperlink by enclosing anchor text in an A HREF tag". Hope you don't mind, but Google's amending that with "oh, and make sure to use a nofollow condom on links to entities with which you have commercial relationships, and if your links are redirects, robots.txt disallow the redirect urls...wait, better yet, nofollow those too". Thanks for the simplicity Tim, but this is what progress looks like.
Yes, we all know Google is free to set the rules for its search engine. And I agree with that. But I'd like to submit this: Google wants me to learn these arcane rules, apply them, and then prostrate myself for "reconsideration". Is this a winning long-term strategy for Google?
I made sure I stuck a question mark on the end of the title, nothing is 100%, only Google knows, but it is the only possibility I can think of, though it defies a lot of conventional thinking by multiple SEO experts.
The good news is in your case it is quite simple to fix and just submit a reconsideration request from within the Webmaster central, stating that you had the links previous blocked by robots.txt, and that you have now used nofollow.
If you jump back up to PR7 over the next few weeks, it was most likely a penalty, though Google are very unlikely to confirm either way.
http://twitter.com/dannysullivan/statuses/63694...
http://twitter.com/gaberivera/statuses/637443512
And yep, the detour though a blocked page in robots.txt should be perfectly safe. It's not traditional SEO thinking. It's exactly what Google says:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/an...
"Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file"
So yep again, Gabe looks dinged unfairly. What annoys me most, really, is that the links are clearly labeled as Sponsor Posts. Yes, Google wants Gabe and others to use nofollow or block etc. etc. But I also expect Google to have built up its own intelligence at this point to figure out what's paid even if the "machine readable" signs are missing. Words in a reverse box saying "Sponsored" ought to be just fine.
I wasn't aware you had been in contact on Twitter before I made the post.
As it is, Google have had more links to their webmaster guidelines on this blog than the people who requested a review
I totally agree that Google should be handling all of this in a different way.
The traditional SEO thinking was in reference to my previous post, which extensively references the Matt Cutts / Eric Enge interview.
If this is just a glitch in Google's datacenter, it would still be advisable to nofollow those links, because Gabe has tons of them on every single page, and best case scenario the redirects are hanging pages.
Lets think of a hypothetical website
100% horrible flash based site with no redeeming features.
If it was indexable, if you link to it in a paid post, you could get a penalty.
But what would happen if the whole website was blocked by robots.txt?
If you link to a page that is blocked by Robots.txt, it can still accumulate pagerank and get indexed.
Could Google give a blogger a penalty for writing a paid post linking through to a site blocked with robots.txt?
Then there is meant to be a layer of manual review, especially I would think for the larger sites.
http://twitter.com/dannysullivan/statuses/63694...
http://twitter.com/gaberivera/statuses/637443512
And yep, the detour though a blocked page in robots.txt should be perfectly safe. It's not traditional SEO thinking. It's exactly what Google says:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/an...
"Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file"
So yep again, Gabe looks dinged unfairly. What annoys me most, really, is that the links are clearly labeled as Sponsor Posts. Yes, Google wants Gabe and others to use nofollow or block etc. etc. But I also expect Google to have built up its own intelligence at this point to figure out what's paid even if the "machine readable" signs are missing. Words in a reverse box saying "Sponsored" ought to be just fine.
I wasn't aware you had been in contact on Twitter before I made the post.
As it is, Google have had more links to their webmaster guidelines on this blog than the people who requested a review
I totally agree that Google should be handling all of this in a different way.
The traditional SEO thinking was in reference to my previous post, which extensively references the Matt Cutts / Eric Enge interview.
If this is just a glitch in Google's datacenter, it would still be advisable to nofollow those links, because Gabe has tons of them on every single page, and best case scenario the redirects are hanging pages.
Lets think of a hypothetical website
100% horrible flash based site with no redeeming features.
If it was indexable, if you link to it in a paid post, you could get a penalty.
But what would happen if the whole website was blocked by robots.txt?
If you link to a page that is blocked by Robots.txt, it can still accumulate pagerank and get indexed.
Could Google give a blogger a penalty for writing a paid post linking through to a site blocked with robots.txt?
Then there is meant to be a layer of manual review, especially I would think for the larger sites.
The nofollow tag was a perfect mind twist that everyone readily jumped on to avoid comment spam. Hardly anyone at the time considered the ramifications of making everything nofollow. :)
When the agent of record for the internet needs to rely on a human tag to help it do the job, well, we're all in trouble.
The nofollow tag was a perfect mind twist that everyone readily jumped on to avoid comment spam. Hardly anyone at the time considered the ramifications of making everything nofollow. :)
When the agent of record for the internet needs to rely on a human tag to help it do the job, well, we're all in trouble.
I still disagree with Google's approach, but I should note I was treated exceptionally well yesterday. About as good as anyone could expect. I didn't even have to submit a reconsideration thingy, whatever that is.
So much for human verification, and possibly a 2 stage process over a period of time just in case of accidental errors.
I still disagree with Google's approach, but I should note I was treated exceptionally well yesterday. About as good as anyone could expect. I didn't even have to submit a reconsideration thingy, whatever that is.
So much for human verification, and possibly a 2 stage process over a period of time just in case of accidental errors.
Or is this a Firefox add-on
My F-secure program will funnily enough not allow me even to download the Alexa Toolbar for IE .. now that is saying something .. lol
Or is this a Firefox add-on
My F-secure program will funnily enough not allow me even to download the Alexa Toolbar for IE .. now that is saying something .. lol