Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

The blogosphere today is in collective shock after Google downgraded the pagerank of many leading blogs and news sources. The response tends to fall into several categories: we knew it was coming, pagerank doesn’t matter, and we deserved it. Techcrunch does a pretty good job of examining the evidence behind the update:

The only clear change appears to be among large scale blog networks and similar link farms, where each site in the network provides hundreds of outgoing links on each page of the blog to other blogs in the network, in some cases creating tens, even hundred of thousands of cross links. Previously such behavior has been rewarded by Google with high page rank, although it would now appear that this loop hole may now be shut.

Here’s a table of pagerank changes organized by the percent difference:

An interesting tidbit comes from Syntagma who note that “the majority of these decreases happened after a human review.” So, it might not be easy for you to fix your linking strategy and regain Pagerank automatically.

Ironically, this coincides with GOOG hitting $666 today. And, Silicon Valley is calling us “Pagerankled.” For you people out there running blogs, an immediate solution is the following:

• Make sure you nofollow any links that you don’t directly control
• Avoid using static link-farms like directories, like linking to every blog in your network from every page
• Don’t let your commenters add links to their sites

Here’s an example of the link distribution of my site after I’ve properly annotated some links with nofollow:

The green areas (header, footer, content, and some meta data) represent regular links, the red areas (advertising, sidebar links, tags, and related stories) are nofollow links, and the blue areas are dynamic links (javascript widgets) which don’t need updating. I am not sure if I want to nofollow anything else–what do you think?

Update: Forbes weighs in, “it could also be Google simply taking into account the growth of the Internet.”

If you search Google for the phrase “miserable failure” you won’t find Bush in the top result anymore:

Google has turned over new algorithms that know how to handle Googlebombing:

By improving our analysis of the link structure of the web, Google has begun minimizing the impact of many Googlebombs. Now we will typically return commentary, discussions, and articles about the Googlebombs instead. The actual scale of this change is pretty small (there are under a hundred well-known Googlebombs).

Wikipedia is fast on the scene, but only noting that:

On January 25th, 2007 Google announced on its official Google Webmaster Central blog that they now have “an algorithm that minimizes the impact of many Googlebombs.”

There’s a bit of an edit war going on to try and decide what this means. How do you detect an intentional Google bomb from simply a newly popular site? This could have an accidental impact on a lot of smaller websites.

As 2006 comes to a close, a number of major search providers have released their top search queries. Even though the results may be heavily doctored, they’re still valuable insights into the PPC industry.

Yahoo: Britney Spears, WWE, Shakira, Jessica Simpson, Paris Hilton, American Idol, Beyonce Knowles, Chris Brown, Pamela Anderson, Lindsay Lohan

Google: bebo , myspace, world cup, metacafe, radioblog, wikipedia, video, rebelde, mininova, wiki

Lycos: Poker, MySpace, RuneScape, Pamela Anderson, Paris Hilton, Pokemon, WWE, Golf, Spyware, Britney Spears

MSN Live: Ronaldinho, Shakira, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Harry Potter, Eminem, Pamela Anderson, Hilary Duff, Rebelde, Angelina Jolie

AOL: Weather, Dictionary, Dogs, American Idol, Maps, Cars, Games, Tattoo, Horoscopes, Lyrics

You can view the Top 10 Searches of 2006 spreadsheet on Google Docs, if you’d like. The data came from the following sources: Yahoo, Google, Lycos, MSN, and AOL.

Initial observation shows that searches are primarily dominated by celebrity terms, and that AOL’s searches are corrupted by their “AOL Keyword” search system. Google’s are likewise corrupted by what I suspect is manual filtering to produce tailored techie terms. Yahoo, MSN Live, and Lycos share 50% of their terms with others’ top terms, while Google and AOL come in last at 20% and 10% respectively, an indication of poor search quality.

Our friends at the Adsense Blog have clarified their official image-placement policy. Basically, don’t put images near ads which could distract your readers into clicking them. One must not “suggest a relationship” between your images, and Google’s ads. Clearly, they want to disassociate themselves with anything unsavory a webmaster might do to increase his or her click-through-rate (CTR).

So, here’s an example of “badsense:”

I’m not sure if any of my blogs use this technique; I’m in the middle of a redesign and I’ll make sure to stay as far away from it in the future as I can.

Be careful when building in automation of any kind into your blogs or websites–it will eventually bite you in the foot! For example, today I got an email from someone concerned that her prize keywords were being violated on a page of mine. It was bizarre, and unrelated to the content of the page, but since I used WP From / Where to automatically gather keywords from search engine visitors, someone visited once on that keyword, and it stuck. Obviously I added a filter to WP From / Where to exclude this word in the future, but I also tried to reduce the overall “spamminess” of the current design.

First, the number of “related posts” at the bottom has been reduced to taking 5 from Google Blog Search, excluding MSN, whose results were spurious at best, entirely. This gives the page a better, sleeker form factor.

Second, the number of links in the sidebar to Google queries on search terms used to get to the site has been reduced on some sites from 30 to 15 or 10. I have no idea why the number was so large–I think it was just to fill out the sidebar, because the content was longer with MSN related posts included. This is much better.

Third, the meta keywords tags that my emailer was so concerned about are now generated from the post tags, so that they are intrinsic to the content, and not the keywords used to get to that post.

This is all just a stopgap measure. My next design for the blog network is radically different, and should minimize or at least localize all external material to a well-defined area of the site. There won’t be any mixing of my content and other content, so impressions of spamminess should be reduced. Rather, the idea is to enrich my content and link it together in such a way that the site adds value within itself, without the need for bringing in more value from the outside.