Andy Beard - Internet Business Systems Discussion - Latest Comments in Techmeme PageRank Penalty?

Re: Techmeme PageRank Penalty?

AndyBeard — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 06:31:24 -0000

Re: Techmeme PageRank Penalty?

AndyBeard — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 06:31:24 -0000

Re: Techmeme PageRank Penalty?

meDuckie — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 06:15:00 -0000

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

Re: Techmeme PageRank Penalty?

meDuckie — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 06:15:00 -0000

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

Re: Techmeme PageRank Penalty?

multippt — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 07:08:43 -0000

Well, at least the quick restoration in PageRank shows that Google is fast enough to respond to reconsideration requests.

Re: Techmeme PageRank Penalty?

multippt — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 07:08:43 -0000

Well, at least the quick restoration in PageRank shows that Google is fast enough to respond to reconsideration requests.

Re: Techmeme PageRank Penalty?

Sergey Rusak — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 15:17:55 -0000

I just checked and their Pagerank is 7 (Internet Explorer)

Re: Techmeme PageRank Penalty?

Sergey Rusak — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 15:17:55 -0000

I just checked and their Pagerank is 7 (Internet Explorer)

Re: Techmeme PageRank Penalty?

Danny Sullivan — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 14:50:27 -0000

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.

Re: Techmeme PageRank Penalty?

Danny Sullivan — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 14:50:27 -0000

Re: Techmeme PageRank Penalty?

AndyBeard — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 04:06:22 -0000

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.

Re: Techmeme PageRank Penalty?

AndyBeard — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 04:06:22 -0000

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.

Re: Techmeme PageRank Penalty?

Gabe — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 03:59:35 -0000

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.

Re: Techmeme PageRank Penalty?

Gabe — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 03:59:35 -0000

Re: Techmeme PageRank Penalty?

Liv — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 17:08:54 -0000

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.

Re: Techmeme PageRank Penalty?

Liv — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 17:08:54 -0000

Re: Techmeme PageRank Penalty?

Patrick Grote — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 23:22:22 -0000

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.

Re: Techmeme PageRank Penalty?

Patrick Grote — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 23:22:22 -0000

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.

Re: Techmeme PageRank Penalty?

AndyBeard — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 20:29:29 -0000

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.

Re: Techmeme PageRank Penalty?

AndyBeard — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 20:29:29 -0000

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.

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.

Re: Techmeme PageRank Penalty?

Danny Sullivan — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 18:00:36 -0000

Yep, heard this last week, and Gabe and I had a little twitter about it:

http://twitter.com/dannysul...
http://twitter.com/gaberive...

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/suppo...

"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.

Re: Techmeme PageRank Penalty?

Danny Sullivan — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 18:00:36 -0000

Yep, heard this last week, and Gabe and I had a little twitter about it:

http://twitter.com/dannysul...
http://twitter.com/gaberive...

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/suppo...

"Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file"

Re: Techmeme PageRank Penalty?

AndyBeard — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 15:46:30 -0000

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.

Re: Techmeme PageRank Penalty?

AndyBeard — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 15:46:30 -0000

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.

Re: Techmeme PageRank Penalty?

Gabe — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 15:05:37 -0000

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?