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December 19, 2007

Supplemental Index, We Hardly Knew Ye

The Google Webmaster Central Blog put another nail (the final one?) in the coffin of Google's infamous Supplemental Index just now by declaring it fully immersed into the main index:

We improved the crawl frequency and decoupled it from which index a document was stored in, and once these "supplementalization effects" were gone, the "supplemental result" tag itself -- which only served to suggest that otherwise good documents were somehow suspect -- was eliminated a few months ago. Now we're coming to the next major milestone in the elimination of the artificial difference between indices: rather than searching some part of our index in more depth for obscure queries, we're now searching the whole index for every query.

This is, in my opinion, much more significant than the prior act of simply removing the "Supplemental Index" label. The main problem has never been the label applied (or not applied) to URLs, but the fact (or at least the fear) that SI pages were being given short shrift in their efforts to contend for queries. So what's the intended result?

From a user perspective, this means that you'll be seeing more relevant documents and a much deeper slice of the web, especially for non-English queries. For webmasters, this means that good-quality pages that were less visible in our index are more likely to come up for queries.

Of course the onus doesn't fall entirely on Google here. SI pages were SI for a reason. If you think they're worth ranking for, the old rules still apply. Make sure you remove any obstacles to crawling and indexing that may remain, and try to get some additional links -- internal and external -- pointing to them.

Posted by erik at 12:29 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

December 14, 2007

Big Update at Google Analytics

Late yesterday, the Google Analytics team announced a major update to its free analytics package.

Taking full advantage of the upgrade requires something that I'm sure that the GA team wishes didn't have to happen -- the modification of the tracking codes on every page of your site. Basically, you'll need to change the small snippet of code that used to refer to urchin.js so that it now will reference ga.js -- Google's new JavaScript tracking file.

But not to worry. The team has assembled a 22-page Tracking Code Migration Guide (PDF) designed to, um, walk you through the process.

Beyond a simply explaining how to update your code (which shouldn't be a problem if you input the original code in the first place), the guide explains the benefits of the new system by showing additional features, such as:

• Tracking virtual page views
• Tracking downloaded files
• Tracking a page in multiple accounts
• Tracking subdomains
• Track a visitor across domains using a link
• Track a visitor across domains using a form
• E-commerce transactions
• Adding organic sources
• Segmenting visitor types
• Restrict cookie data to a subdirectory
• Control data collection settings
• Control session timeout
• Control campaign conversion timeout
• Custom campaign fields
• Using the anchor (#) with campaign data
• Setting keyword ignore preferences
• Control the data sampling rate

Some of these features already exist in one form or the other. For example, you can track file downloads by defining one of your conversions as such. But the new iteration promises more simplicity, which is never a bad thing.

Remember, as always, this is a beta release. (But you knew that, didn't you?) I haven't updated the code on our sites yet, so I can't vouch for any particular improvements. But I am eager to get into it and will certainly post any interesting tidbits right here.

Posted by erik at 08:40 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

December 13, 2007

The Mitchell Report - Baseball's Bad Neighborhood

The path to Cooperstown is beset on all sides by exceptional links. The player must put up link worthy numbers (hits, home runs, RBI's, wins, strike outs, saves . . . ) in his campaign to attain the right links (Golden Gloves, Cy Youngs, MVPs, All-Star games . . .). If he gets enough of those links over a long enough period of time, he just might find himself a HOFer.

Now in Link Building, I have seen many incredible links and many horrible links, but I have never seen a single link that makes or breaks a site in pursuit of SERPS. So here is the question: Is the Mitchell Report such a bad neighborhood that a link from it kills all other links?

I know how Kenesaw Mountain Landis, or even Paul Giamatti's dad would probably answer that question, but I can't wait to see how Bud Selig answers it.

Posted by tom at 02:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 06, 2007

Old Media Quote of the Day

I just love it when Old Media can't adapt to Web 2.0 and tries to pass the buck while hubris prevents them from admitting they are passing the buck:

...the Motion Picture Association of America has asked ISPs to act as monitors of movie piracy. MPAA head Dan Glickman says ISPs need to take on that role if they are hoping for any sort of future support from Hollywood.

Actual buck-passing-disguised-as-responsible-parenting quote from Dan Glickman, head of the MPAA:

The ISP community is going to be at the forefront of this in the future because they have everything to lose and nothing to gain by not seeing that the content is being properly protected.

Posted by john at 02:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 05, 2007

Google Poisoning

I remember back in the late 90's when I was first cutting my teeth in SEO, Google was in its infancy and merely a project for Brin & Page. Back then, the major players in search were AltaVista, Infoseek, HotBot, Yahoo! (when it was a crappy arduous directory) and DirectHit. In the mid-to-late 90's, SEO was not en vogue and black hat SEO techniques such as doorway pages, sneaky server side redirects, spider spoofing and a slew of other controversial techniques ran amuck. Of course, search engine guidelines for SEO didn’t exist nor “Best Practices SEO” for that matter in those days. Come 2000-2001, that all changed when sites were getting banned left and right for using those sort of "black hat SEO" techniques.

Here we are in December 2007 and black hat techniques are still running strong. Just the other day, I read an article about some crazy folks deploying thousands of sites with incestuous linking between them for instantaneously increasing link popularity at Google primarily, but certainly would affect any search engine with link popularity as a part of it’s algorithmic flavor.

Hell, even as I write this post I can smell a 302 hijack taking place somewhere in Google SERP’s!!!

Read about one of the latest Google poisoning articles here.

This sort of thing makes me sick and really doesn’t help the image of SEO for SEO’s who only follow best-practices SEO guidelines as set forth by the search engines. But come to think of it, it does help those of us who do the right thing; the white hat thing. It helps in that companies such as Intrapromote or other reputable SEO’s out there who follow SE guidelines will NEVER have bad press like this nor have to explain to clients why their site's PR went from a 6 to a 0 and why their site was completely dropped out of Google Index simultaneously. We will never have to explain this to clients as white hat SEO's because we do what we are told by the search engines themselves and therefore have nothing to worry about.

So, for those black hatters out there, we’ll be seeing you in a damning article again sometime in the near future and for you white hatters, keep on keepin’ on, baby!!!

Posted by sean at 05:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack