Google’s January 2007 Search Engine Update
January 13th, 2007
Google’s Matt Cutts recently posted his regular “weather report” on Google ranking and indexing issues. Covered in it were news of visible PageRank updates, supplemental listings, filetype command changes, lost home pages in country-specific results, an update on the disappearing sex blogs, concerns that CSS is being spidered to detect hidden text, duplicate content worries, the Minus 30 penalty and what to do if Google thinks you are a malware site.
PageRank Updated
Matts first point of call was PageRank , where he highlighted the now quarterly update of PageRank. For example our PR has gone up from 2-4 (mainly due to some well overdue TLC over the christmas period). It should be highlighted that this shouldn’t impact search rankings too drastically, since Matt says these scores have already been in use there. Some older data centres are also continuing to show PageRank from an older infrastructure.
Links of interest - Google Toolbar
Google Toolbar PageRank Update Being Reported from Search Engine Roundtable
Google Pagerank update or outage from Dave Naylor
Supplemental Results
Matt’s next port of call, was supplemental results. His first point was to allay those fears of people who have supplemental pages on their site. It should be noted that
- Pages in supplemental index haven’t fallen foul of a Google Penalty
- Sites will do well even if they have some of their pages in the supplemental index.
- Supplemental pages can rank and produce traffic.
- Should be noted that pages in the supplemental index, dont carry the same “link weight” as pages in the regular index
It also doesn’t sound reassuring to say, “we’ll check the good stuff first, then the other stuff only if we need to.” What if some good stuff for whatever reason is in the second index? That’s a fear some searchers had in the past — and it will remain with Google’s revival of this system
Danny on his SearchEngineLand website asks the question: Why not simply expand the existing Google index, rather than go to a two tier approach?
“The supplemental is simply a new Google experiment. As you know we’re always trying new and different ways to provide high quality search results,” said Google spokesperson Nate Tyler.
“OK, it’s new, it’s experimental — but Google also says there are currently no plans to eventually integrate it into the main index. Basically, the supplemental index is a way for Google to hit less important pages in specific instances when it can’t find matches in the main index. Trying to search against tens of billions of pages all at once is time consuming and expensive. Far easier to hit just the “best of the web,” exactly as Inktomi used to do — and for exactly the same reasons. But it’s a continuing reminder that Google can’t do it all. No matter how great those machines are, they have to divide up that index. The “best of the web” might still be tens of billions of pages, but divisions still raise concerns.”
Links of interest - Supplemental results
Breaking Out of Google`s Supplemental Index - Matt McGhee
Gone Supplemental? - Matt Cutts
Filetype Command Changing?
Want to know all the .doc documents in Google? The following command in Google will not return the results you expect
Google insist on the command also having a search query term, like this:
Country-Specific Results & Lost Home Pages
Matt Cutts also detailed some issues with .com domains hosted outside of the US. To read about this, follow the link at the bottom of the page.
Duplicate Content drama
There has been a lot of blogs and forum posts regarding duplicated content recently including A Guide To Fixing Google Duplicate Content & Canonical URL Issues from Search Engine Roundtable which covers a WebmasterWorld thread with some advice for those with issues, and More Tidbits on Google’s Duplicate Content Filter covers another thread with a ton of advice from Google’s Adam Lasnik (Thanks Search Engine Land for this one)
There is also the recent interview by Rand Fishkin with Vanessa Fox which highlighted how Google dealt with duplicate content issues, which I posted about recently.
To read more about the update, please feel free to visit the following links
Our very own UK SEO ’s website
Entry Filed under: SEO Industry, Search Engines, SEO
3 Comments Add your own
1. Jim Clouse | January 13th, 2007 at 4:30 am
Your first paragraph states that Matt Cutts discussed the minus 30 penalty in his recent posts. That statement is untrue. Neither Matt nor Adam nor Tom, Dick or Harry at Google will discuss this issue.
As a 56+ week sufferer of this sitewide penalty, I tried to get him to discuss this penalty in his post at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/infrastructure-status-january-2007
He did reply to my comments in that post, but what he said was totally incorrect as it pertains to my site. For example, he said…”Jim Clouse, I’d take your site over to the Google webmaster help group and ask for advice from other users. Expect some tough love though. They may say, “Hey, your entry for Hyatt Regency Lake Las Vegas Resort appears verbatim on 40+ other sites! In fact, you’re not even handling the quoted bullet points correctly on that page. What value are you adding? Why would someone go to your page instead of the other 40 copies of this hotel page?” But that tough love will also give you guidance on what your site could do better.
It made me wonder if he had confused my site with someone else because my hotel pages are not at all like other hotel sites. We use XML to make all 78,000 of them different.
He also mentions the use of bullet points. The hotel page he refers to http://hotelmotelnow.com/hotels.aspx/10204612/ doesn’t even contain bullet points!
This morning I responded to his post asking for clarification and mentioning the above true statements. My post was made at 8:54 am CST and appeared in the thread. Within 30 minutes, my comment had been taken down.
Long story short. Matt is still ducking this minus 30 penalty. It appears he is totally biased against any hotel affiliates, lumping all hotel websites in the same trash dumpster.
He asks what value my site is adding. Well, just try http://hotelmotelnow.com/ and you will see. We are the only website that uses visual search technology. We display the hotel locations on area maps as part of the search routine and allow sorting by price, chain name and hot rates. That is a lot better than providing a generic list like all other websites do and then allow mapping. We have been doing this visual mapping since 2001.
If that isn’t value added to the searcher and unique content, then there are no cows in Texas.
Jim Clouse
http://hotelmotelNOW.com/
2. AlfredMC | February 8th, 2007 at 5:46 pm
Hello, my name is Alfred, i’m a newbie here. I really do like your forum and really interested in things you discuss here, also would like to enter your community, hope it is possible:-)
Cya around, best regards, Alfred!
3. Alexfozdd | February 11th, 2007 at 5:40 pm
Hello, my name is Alex, i’m a newbie here. I really do like your resource and really interested in things you discuss here, also would like to enter your community, hope it is possible:-) Cya around, best regards, Alex!
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