First, have a look at some results:
http://trends.google.com/websites?q=yahoo.com&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
Done? Good.

One of the things people are worrying about is that their keywords are being given away.
The column headed “Also searched for” would appear to be *other things the user searched for*, NOT *the keywords used to reach this site*
If I am interpreting the label correctly, it is a completely different critter than most people are worrying about.

Secondly, we’ve always been dubious about putting GA on money sites haven’t we? And here we seem justified – except… it says “aggregated opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data”. Note the “opt-in”. My data’s not up there, because I didn’t opt in when offered.

I’m not really sure how valuable this info is at all, apart from a general ooh-ahh
I looked at the report for one of my sites and saw one of my major competitors there as another site my visitors visit. Yes! I thought, raw data on the competition! But… the mathematics doesn’t agree that its useful. An unscaled graph comparing the two doesn’t really tell you anything.
Even if I compare my traffic to theirs using a base line of a 3rd site which visitors to both our sites visit I still don’t have a valid baseline, because I can’t assume our two (overlapping) pools of visitors both visit site 3 at the same frequency.
So….
Nice try on Google’s part, but its really only for fun.

Andy has been badly hit by page rank reductions because he writes paid reviews with followed links. We aren’t talking 5 minute crappy reviews here, Andy tells us he puts hours of work into each review and is very discriminating in what reviews he takes on. One would have thought he would be the ideal subject for some Google love, but apparently those little $-signs worry the Googlites, and they can’t look past them to see the quality.

Andy’s answer is to block Google from his site. Because of the odd way that Google interprets robots.txt (a robots.txt block will stop them crawling, but not indexing your site) he expects to still have traffic – he thinks it will increase – rather than be removed from the index. This is because his strong link profile means the internet thinks well of him. Page Rank is a measure of link strength – by cutting it anyway, Google is disputing the value of those links.

The only thing I am not clear on is if Andy will cloak his robots.txt to allow other bots in, or if he is blocking all bots – I would have thought the main tactic of this target would be Google?
I’ll have to post a comment and ask him.
(Ah, I see – he’s specifying googlebot in the robots and only to the ‘articles in question’ – he is live with this now, btw)

Overall – interesting times. I will follow his progress with interest.

But good times never last.

It started in late ‘07, when the largest search engine, with the funny name ‘Google’ decided that they had more right to traffic than the sites they were indexing. They made a new rule that you couldn’t pay someone to link to your site without telling Google (admittedly, you didn’t have to fill in a form, or anything bureaucratic like that – they couldn’t have handled the work load of billions of pages anyway – you only needed to add extra markup to the page, called ‘nofollowing links’). You had to declare that you thought the link was worthless, because you had been paid for it, no matter what your actual opinion.

It wasn’t too bad, until they really got serious. When they actually stopped sending traffic to sites they arbitrarily decided had been selling links, a huge furore hit. Initially only the cognoscenti, the people who worked on websites knew about it, but pretty soon the mom and pop sites heard that you could lose your google traffic if they suspected you were selling links.

Of course everyone started nofollowing all their outbound links, whether or not they were paid links, rather than fall foul of the engines and lose their traffic. No one said that was what they were doing – everyone was hoping to gain some advantage over their competitors. Critical viewing of source while surfing the ‘net would have shown what was happening, but the few people who voiced concerns out loud were dismissed as spammers who were just trying to manipulate the algo.

Its all so obvious in hindsight, but I assure you WE DIDN’T KNOW WHAT WOULD HAPPEN!

Pretty soon the bots were crawling less and less, as there were fewer followable links.
Traffic started dropping as there were fewer and fewer results in the SERPs.
Eventually the engineers at the search engines realised what was happening and removed the nofollow requirements. But it was too little, too late. They had indulged in too much FUD in the past, and no one believed them this time – we were all so caught up, and no one could afford to ‘risk’ losing traffic.

Pretty soon the search engines failed, naively unwilling to break their own guidelines of not following nofollowed links and a deafening silence was heard across the Internet.

But worse – we didn’t realise how dependant we had become. The economic collapse that followed was worldwide. Stockmarkets closed. I still wonder how much of the world starved to death, but I’ll never know now that we have no communications.

Would you pass me another stick for the fire? Tomorrow I think we will hunt deer in what was the National Park.

• h1
• h2
• b
• strong
• em

I have created 4 pages using a particular phrase for each of these tags. The tags that the search engines actually use to weight words should appear in the top results. If there is no preference then the distribution should be random.

The pages are:

• H1 – A
• H1 – B
• H1 – C
• H1 – D
• H2 -A
• H2 – B
• H2 – C
• H2 – D
• Bold – A
• Bold – B
• Bold – C
• Bold – D
• Strong – A
• Strong – B
• Strong – C
• Strong – D
• Em – A
• Em – B
• Em – C
• Em – D

View results at:

• Google
• MSN
• Yahoo
• Ask

Conclusions

Google

Google has crawled and indexed all 20 pages. From here, I see the following order in the SERP:

1. H1 (A)
2. H1 (D)
3. H1 (B)
4. H1 (C)
5. Em (C)
6. H2 (B)
7. Strong (A)
8. Em (D)
9. Bold (B)
10. Bold (C)
11. Bold (A)
12. Bold (D)
13. H2 (D)
14. H2 (A)
15. Strong (B)
16. Strong (C)
17. Strong (D)
18. H2 (C)
19. Em (A)
20. Em (B )

This gives somewhat mixed results – clearly H1 is given preference over the other options, so that is reassuring for those of us interested in the semantic web. (But note how this contrasts with my previous tests!) Bold is clearly preferred over strong, which is disappointing. Beyond that, the results seem very mixed.

Yahoo

Slurp has spidered the pages but Yahoo has not yet indexed the pages

MSN

Interestingly, MSN has not spidered the pages with its known Bot, but some of the pages are in its index.

ASK

Ask is yet to touch the pages.

Colophon

Text on these pages was created in the Lorem Ipsum Generator

Page names were taken from the hebrew alphabet, listed at Judaism 101 just for something to name the pages that had no real meaning

I have created 10 pages.

Page One applies markup to The Phrase with a H1 tag

Page Two applies markup to The Phrase with a H2 tag

Page Three applies markup to The Phrase with a H3 tag

Page Four applies markup to The Phrase with a H4 tag

Page Five applies markup to The Phrase with a H5 tag

Pages Six through Ten include The Phrase in a P tag.

If Google recognises the Heading tags as giving more weight to a phrase than Paragraph tag, then we should see the pages one through five listed above the pages six through ten. If Google does not, then we should see a random distribution of pages.

If you look at the pages, The Phrase should be obvious. Clearly I don’t want to mention it here..

The pages are:

• One (H1)
• Two (H2)
• Three (H3)
• Four (H4)
• Five (H5)
• Six (P)
• Seven (P)
• Eight (P)
• Nine (P)
• Ten (P)

To check the results, look at google.

Text on these pages was created in the Lorem Ipsum Generator

I have created 5 pairs of pages. 5 have The Phrase in a cite tag, and 5 don’t. Pages labelled B have The Phrase inside a cite tag, while pages labelled A just have The Phrase as part of a paragraph.

If Google recognises the cite tag as giving some special weight to a phrase, then we should see the B pages listed above the A pages. If Google does not, then we should see a random distribution of pages.

If you look at the pages, The Phrase should be obvious. Clearly I don’t want to mention it here, at this point.

The pages are:

• Test 1A
• Test 1B
• Test 2B
• Test 2A
• Test 3A
• Test 3B
• Test 4B
• Test 4A
• Test 5A
• Test 5B

Text on these pages was created in the Lorem Ipsum Generator

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