Leaked Google Search Quality Guidelines

October 20, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Google, Internet Marketing, PPC, seo 

You no doubt have heard by now that Google’s most recent search quality guidelines was recently located online.  This new one is dated March 2011 while the previous one found online was from April of 2007.  I had originally heard about it from Search Engine Land who has since been contacted to remove the document.

If you’re not familiar with this document, it is a document that’s given to Google’s Search Quality Raters in order to evaluate a website.  The most recent document runs 125 pages with what begins with instructions to the reader and then moves on into the details.

However, prior to the removal I did read the document and took some notes that I felt were particularly interesting.  I did notice that most of it is plain-old common sense.  If you’re posting content on a website that has little to no value other than to get affiliate sales or clicks on your ads, then you’ll probably get flagged by one of these raters.  This should come as no surprise to anyone.

What follows are my snippets of notes taken while reading this document.

  • “When doing your work use the Firefox browser.”  This is paraphrased but essentially they want those doing the ratings to use Firefox.  Since it’s Google’s own document I don’t understand why they would recommend Firefox instead of Chrome and while this tip is not directly related to the content of a website, it was interesting.  I did later learn that this is because Firefox offers an Add-On called “Web Developer” which is helpful in the rating tasks.

Rating Scales

Perhaps the most written about within the document was that of using rating scales.  In other words, depending upon the site, the raters give it a certain kind of rating which comes in 6 varieties from “Vital” to “Unrateable”.
Essentially, “vital” means that if someone is searching on “Target Stores”  the search results should show the official Target Store website.  If someone is searching on “Pizza Hut” then the official site for Pizza Hut should show up in the results.
Alternatively, if there is a site that, upon a visit, immediately warns you that it is expected to have malware then this would be considered “Unrateable.”  Because the rater should not click through to the site in order to determine its value.
Between these two are four other kinds of ratings which vary and while I won’t add them all here, I will give you the most important things to remember when you’re developing your own website and its contents.
A Good Web Page…

  • Is of high quality and helpful to your readers.
  • Can also be fun to read OR
  • Contain recent news.
  • Be on-topic.

On item I did note was that in a portion of the guidelines it was stated that while evaluating a page it may get a lesser rating if it’s less up-to-date.  Something to keep in mind if you update your site on a very in-frequent basis.

Additionally, your page may get a lower rating if it’s “shallow” or in otherwords, contains little to no helpful content.  We’ve all run across these pages that are nothing more than a paragraph or two and that really doesn’t offer much for the reader.

Of special note was the use of the SPAM flag.  The pages that fell into this category were sites that have copied content or repeated keywords.  Now, regarding copied content. Evidently at least where Google is concerned, as long as the copied content is well-organized and helpful for users this shouldn’t get the lower rating.

In essence, it’s truly left up to the judgement of the person looking at the page.  This could be very subjective in my opinion as one person may think a copied content page is well-organized while another one may not.
Web Spam

While reading over the web spam portion of the document, here are a few things to note:

Hidden text on the page is generally considered spam (this is no surprise).

Keyword stuffing may be considered spam if it’s annoying to the user (again, this can be very subjective; what’s annoying to one person might not be to the next).

Redirects – If a URL redirects to another URL then it might be considered spam but only if the URL that the redirect ends up at is different from the one displayed in the search engine results page.  HOWEVER, it is noted that at times a company will get a new URL and then redirect the old one to the new one.  In order to be sure that this is correct, the rater is encouraged to check out the WHOIS records which shows who owns the domain.  If the WHOIS record is not available or its protected, this could cause your site to be flagged as SPAM even if it’s not and all for such a small mistake.

Additionally, it also went on to talk about those web pages created specifically to get clicks on PPC ads (such as AdSense) on a site and how to determine if the page they’re viewing is a real web page or a spam page.

They do NOT consider the following kinds of pages to be “spammy”:

  • Price comparisons.  Even if the user has to click an affiliate link to go to another site in order to get the product that they want.
  • Product reviews.  This also states that the review content must be original.
  • Recipes;
  • Lyrics, quotes, etc.
  • Coupons and the like.  Again, they mention here coupon or promotional codes, discounts, etc.  This is not considered to be “spammy”.

Another thing to be aware of is that of using copied  content alongside of PPC ads.  Even if a site specifically allows you to use their content and even if you have linked back to the original source, it is still considered “copied” content and will therefore receive a lower rating.

If the site is nothing more than one that uses feeds from any kind of site (think about those sites that use RSS feeds for example), and also uses PPC ads this will also receive a lower rating.
Blogs

Sometimes people will use auto-generated blogs that scrapes information from other sites in order for it to appear as though it’s a real blog – its only purpose however, is to generate clicks on PPC links will be considered “spam”.

On the bright side though, some blogs are truly legitimate but the blog owner hasn’t done a great job of monitoring those who leave comments on their blog and thus, tend to get hit with spam a lot.

If a site like this is found and there are lots of spammy links they don’t want to penalize this blog owner simply because it has been taken advantage of by someone else.

On the other side of the coin however, I noticed that it was stated in these guidelines that those sites that have “commercial intent” or in other words, try to make money from their site are mostly spammers.  While I take great issue with this statement (if this were true then Amazon.com would be considered a most egregious spammer would they not?), you have to take this into consideration yourself as to how to go about creating your own content.
Thin Affiliates

A thin affiliate site is a site that exists solely to make money from affiliate links and offers little to no value to the visitor.

Some examples given of this are:

If a “buy now” button exists but you are taken to the affiliate site on a different domain than the one that you’re on, it’s considered a thin affiliate page.

Image sources having a URL that is different from the page you are on.  TIP:  When you do promote a product and you are using an image from the product site, it’s best to download it to your own computer first and then upload it to your web server.

Again, on the bright side, if you’re offering price comparison’s or reviews even though it uses an affiliate link, that site would not be considered to be a “thin affiliate” site.

In all cases, just keep in mind that if you were to remove ALL advertising on your site how much content would actually be left?  If it’s little to nothing, you should probably get to work creating some helpful and unique content for those pages.

There was quite a bit of information contained within these guidelines but many of the ones I omitted are truly just common-sense and typically can be found in the Quality Guidelines already provided by Google.

All in all, when you’re creating your own websites and pages the best thing for you to do is keep the user in mind.  ”What is best for the user?” because in the end, this will help you far more than just about anything else you can do on a site.

ADVERTISERS
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Google Analytics – Removing Your Own IP Address

October 14, 2011 by · 1 Comment
Filed under: Google, Productivity, Traffic 

Using Google Analytics on your website gives you lots of great information about your site visitors and keywords along with a host of other useful information.  But sometimes that data that you get can be a bit skewed if you haven’t told Analytics to NOT count your own IP address.

Chances are, you visit your own site quite a bit and these visits are being counted in your overall data.

So how do you tell Analytics to stop tracking your own visits?

It’s actually very simple…here’s how:

  1. First you need to find out what your own IP address is.  To do this visit http://www.whatismyip.com/.  When you get there you’ll see in very large letters at the top of the page “Your IP Address Is:” and this will be followed by a series of numbers such as 012.345.678.910.  Copy your IP address down and then head to Google Analytics.
  2. Once you’re logged into your Analytics account you’ll see the website(s) you’re tracking.  Next to each site on the far right-hand side of the page is an “Edit” link.  Click this link next to the site you want to modify.
  3. The next screen will have a section entitled “Filters” – once you find this look for an “Add Filter” link on the upper right hand side of this section and click that link.
  4. Now you’re going to create a new filter.  Choose the radio button that says “Add new Filter for Profile” if it’s not already selected.
  5. Next, give the filter a name that’s easy for you to identify what the filter is for such as “My IP Address”.
  6. Next, choose the “Predefined filter” button if it’s not selected already.
  7. You’ll see various drop down boxes.  In the first box choose “Exclude”.  In the middle box choose “traffic from the IP addresses” and in the third box choose “that are equal to”.  Finally, enter your IP address that you just copied into the boxes.
  8. Click “Save changes”.
Sometimes within a large company there are multiple IP addresses that are used.  If this is the case, you’ll need to apply additional filters and add in these other IP addresses individually.

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How Important is Your URL to Your Site Rankings?

October 11, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Google, Online Marketing, seo, Web Sites 

Your URL, also known as your website address plays a pretty big part in your search engine rankings.  What you’ll learn here today is what that part is and how it might be affecting your own websites.

Let’s start with keywords.  Since the very beginning of SEO time, keywords have always and still do play a very large part in where your website and its web pages get ranked within major search engines.

While the methods have changed drastically over the years, without keywords; the search engines wouldn’t have the faintest idea what to do with your content.  These keywords, no matter how they’ve been used over the years have remained a constant in helping the search engines determine where your web pages should be ranked.

Let’s look at a typical URL structure and how keywords play a role in your sites ranking.

Here’s a typical URL:  http://www.Site.com/subdirectory/filename.html

It hasn’t been a very well-kept secret that keywords in your domain name and in your sub-directories’ names tend to help where your site gets ranked in the search engines.  Depending upon how much significance the search engines’ algorithms place on keywords in these locations will determine where the site should be that day but even with that said, it still seems to be a pretty significant factor in rankings.

As an example, if you do a search for any term that would be considered highly competitive, you’ll likely see results on the first page of URL’s that have that competitive term contained within them.

“Internet Marketing” is a great example.  On this first page you’ll see results where the URL’s contain that exact term either in their domain name or within a sub-domain such as http://internetmarketing.school.com.

Now, there’s a bit of a caveat when it comes to sub-domains because the search engines treat sub-domains differently than they do TLD’s or top level domains (those URL’s that end in .com, .org, .net, .edu, etc.).

Sub Domains

Sub-DOMAINS are treated by the search engines as a completely new website.  For instance, if you owned http://www.school.com – this is your main TLD or top-level domain.  If you created a sub-domain such as http://internetmarketing.school.com this, at least in the eyes of a search engine, is a brand-spanking new website.   This further means that if you want to take advantage of the traffic and reputation that school.com already has, it will be much more difficult to do so.

Instead, it would be more advantageous to you to create a sub-directory instead of a sub-domain.

Sub Directories

If it’s not at all possible to find a domain name that contains the keyword you want to use then your next best option is to create a sub-directory that does contain that keyword.  An example would be http://school.com/internetmarketing.  This sub-directory is NOT treated as a separate domain and thus has a better chance of ranking well.

Your Domain Name

Your domain name, URL, website address or whatever it is you wish to call it, is your main website address.  Using the above example, this would be http://www.school.com.

It’s no secret that keywords contained in a main URL or top-level domain do get a bit of a rankings boost when it comes to the search engines.  But you need to be careful here.  It used to be that if you registered a domain name such as:

http://keyword-keyword-keyword.com that you’d get a rankings boost.  This is no longer true.

Search engines like Google count not only the number of characters in a domain name but also take into account the dashes in a domain name.  When in doubt, do NOT use dashes and instead try to come up with a domain name that contains your keyword such as http://internetmarketingschool.com

File Names

What you name your files is also an important factor.  Let’s say that you wanted to focus a page on local internet marketing within the internet marketing sub-directory.  In this case, you’d use http://school.com/internetmarketing/local-internet-marketing.html.

What you DO want to avoid is something spammy such as http://school.com/internet-marketing/local-online-internet-marketing-for-businesses-all-totally-free.html

Whenever someone comes across this in a search engine results page, they’re likely going to avoid it like the plague simply because it just looks spammy; whether or not this was your intention.

Keep the file name short and to the point.

So all in all, here’s what you’ve learned:

  • If you can use a keyword in your TLD without creating a tremendously long URL, it is advantageous to do so.
  • If you can’t find that perfect domain, instead use that keyword in a sub-directory.
  • Sub-domains are treated like brand new websites.
  • Name your files accurately but keep them short and to the point.
Until next time!  Have a fantastic day!

 

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