If you are not subscribed to SE News, then you should be. I read every issue in the first few days of the month. This month’s articles on Supplemental Results and Google Sitelinks are top notch. Mostly I agree with their articles and that’s more-or-less true this month as well, with a couple of exceptions.

In the list of "Top 10 Quality Indicators" there are a number of items presented as fact that I can not back up with actual measurements. Conversely, I don’t yet have the data to disprove them either, so I’ll let all that slide for now.

But there is a non-technical issue that keeps coming up that I will take issue with today. The referenced article [subscribe to read the whole thing as it does provide some good information and food for thought] claims:

"Now that Google has a spider to determine page quality for sites in their ad program, it won’t be long before that data is folded into Google’s organic search results."

In my opinion, this is just plain incorrect. Here’s why.

As one of several forms of actionable "anittrust" or "unfair trade practices" the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has identified the "tying arrangement" whereby use of one product or service is predicated on use of another. This is a very complex area of law loaded with judicial discretion and balancing corporate rights and "public policy" so all bets pre-trial are pretty much off, but I’ll give you mine anyway.

The FTC case against Microsoft vis-a-vis Windows and IE was precisely a "tying arrangement" case where the FTC claimed that Microsoft improperly used its market influence in the PC operating system market to create an (unfair) advantage in the browser market. While this is a classic example of unfair practice, it is not the only one.

With respect to Google, if the paid advertising programs — either Adwords or Adsense — impacted organic ranking in a positive way, this would create a tying arrangement between their "free" search and their paid programs seeking to coerce webmasters to buy advertising in exchange for better ranking.

Conversely, if participation in paid advertising programs created a negative organic ranking influence compared to non-participants, this would constitute contract fraud in as much as a material aspect of the advertising contract was non-disclosed. The FTC might or might not act on this as an unfair trade practice, but you can bet some large firm of attorneys will be happy to take it as a class action lawsuit.

This also came up in my recent review of VEO for OptiSmarts subscribers where the author of VEO claims various similar effects with Adsense. Again, same problem, undisclosed contract terms and tying arrangements.

In all cases, when it comes to tying organic and paid programs together, "there be dragons."

Like most of what is written about SEO, when you don’t know how computers work, everything is a mystery and (worse) impossible garbage sounds totally reasonable. This is not the first time in four and half years that we’ve gone ’round about Google tracking page visit times and it’s no more true this time than it was the last half dozen. Give it another six months and we’ll hear it again.

I knew it was B.S. when I bought it, so I won’t return it, but I’ve just about run a highlighter dry marking up the crap in "Visitor Optimization". As soon as I stop laughing, I’ll post a less hostile, and more informative analysis, but in twenty words or less … the technology that would make VEO possible simply does not exist. This is not an opinion, it is simply about how the web works. Stay tuned, I’ll prove it, as soon as I settle down. 😉

This has come up many times, but a new OptiSmarts subscriber asked…

I have enjoyed your optismarts videos so far and am looking forward to future videos. Your speaking voice and style are very pleasant and I appreciate your ability to speak simultaneously to both novices and more advanced users.

I am in the top 10 for my 4 preferred keywords at Google (thanks to OptiLink) and do not want to do anything to lose my rankings. Is it possible to overdo the usage of the no follow attribute to the point where Google thinks I am overoptimized?"

…so I’ll answer again in greater detail.

"There are theoretically two ways nofollow can be a problem, one I’ve seen, and the other I have not. The first is simple misuse, generally due to lack of complete understanding, and the second is an actual "penalty" which I have never seen. Let’s spend a moment on both of these.

Misuse is really really easy, and the problem starts with not knowing what pages you actually want to have ranked. A classic example is an Adsense site where nofollow is used to push all the PR to the home page. OOPS! It is likely that the internal pages optimized for the low traffic but high conversion search phrases are de-ranked in favor of a page (the home page) that never earned any money. For many sites the wholesale use of Dynamic Linking (via nofollow) is not what you want. These sites should use it very selectively where a site more focused on home page traffic should nofollow more extensively.

But an outright penalty is another matter. I do not think this exists and am not aware of even a single case where nofollow can be objectively construed as the "smoking gun". Moreover, there are many very high ranking sites making effective use of nofollow without any sign of penalty. In a recent OptiSmarts video seminar I show one that is a household name. Others exist as well.

As a general rule, I find that "over-optimization penalties" are actually caused by something unrelated, but I do still keep looking.

Okay, this one comes up a lot, and it came up again today in an email from my good friend Michael Campbell so I thought I’d try to actually blog for a change.

It seems that someone (who shall remain namesless for the momeent at least) is raising all a fuss about how Google is using the Hilltop algo, and you therefore have to have their brand new widget to rank and nothing else will do.

Drivel! Here’s part of my note to Michael:

To suggest that Google is using Hilltop is like saying they use the Meta Keywords tag. Please! Hilltop was never used, and will never be used, because it is totally old news that never out performed Google circa 2000. Moreover, Google gets Hilltop for free, but they paid really money for what Taher brought with him, so if anyone is looking for a new algo at Google, they should look at TSPR and its cousins. We can be certain they are using BlockRank or a kin even now.

Worse, these guys seem to think that "Hubs and Authorities" is synonomous with Hilltop. Wrong again. Hubs and authorities is Kleinberg’s algorithm, which Hilltop references as prior art, but they are not the same.

And finally, always follow the money: why would Google roll out a new logorithm when search quality is not a critical success factor? New revenue streams is what they are about. They already own search, why would they need to "improve" it?

I’ve blogged this before, but…

Google is just sitting on search technology to keep some other pair of grad students from retiring before they grow facial hair. They use maybe one tenth of what they have licensed or patented. But they continue to buy and patent more because it keeps other grad students poor and drives SEOs crazy reading academic papers that don’t matter instead of turning the crank on what does matter.

Ranking is a balance of several factors, the most important being title tag, (inbound) link text, and PageRank. Every page ranks based on its own measures of these factors sorted against all other pages in the index. Theoretically, every single page ranks for every single search query, but the vast majority don’t rank very well, so we never see this aspect.

The title tag is an on-page factor, and the most important of the on-page factors at all the engines, Google included. In fact, at Google I can get a blank page to rank in a competitive search so long as I use a good title tag and work hard on my text links. This would be much harder to pull off at Yahoo, where on-page text factors are more important.

The first of the off-page factors is link text. In their original technical papers the founders of Google told use that they take the link text pointing at a page and store it with the target page. This is huge. What it means is that the query engine has only to look at a page to analyze the links to the page. It also tells us that nothing other than the link text itself mattered in link between pages. There is some current argument that this is no longer true, but we’ll leave that for another day.

This accumulation of link text to a target page did not have a name in the Spring of 2002 when I was completing OptiLink, so we had to come up with a name to tell people what we were doing. We decided to name this analysis of the links Link Reputation to differentiate it from Link Popularity which names the mere counting of links.

Link Reputation, because of the way Google handles links, is not "transitive", that is, a link from page A to page B, adds to the Reputation of page B, but none of the links to page A have any influence on the Reputation of page B. For example, suppose we get a link to our hammock site from a site on gardening and the gardening site has a bazillion links to it that say "gardening". Will our hammock site rank for gardening? No. This is easy to prove for yourself by looking search results and doing some analysis with OptiLink.

But PageRank by contrast is transitive. It assigns a number to every page in the Google index using a recursive computation over the entire link graph of the index — a mathematical implementation of "what goes around, comes around". PageRank is one of "elegant" ideas that takes some thinking to understand. If you are interested, take a look at my publications archive, my Dynamic Linking eBook, or my Mastering PageRank video.

But for now let’s talk some about balance.

We’ve all seen cases where a page with few links can beat a page with many links if it has higher PageRank (from its few links). The converse is also true. So how do we get top ranking? First, we do the best we can on each of the major factors (title, link text, PageRank) and then we go look at the pages we are competing against and look for their weakest aspect. It might that we can create better link text; maybe their title is not as good as it could be; or maybe we have to build more PageRank. Whatever it is, the search results themselves tell us what works, we just have to do better.

Rarely do we want to rank for only one search phrase. Generally there are many different words and phrases that humans might use to get to your pages, different phrases that I refer to here very roughly as "synonyms".

But the notion of synonomy is a "semantic" concept — one that involves meaning — rather than a "syntactic" concept — one that relates only to language. Search engines don’t do semantics, only syntax.

For example, I know that a force transducer is the same thing as a load cell, but these semantically equivalent terms are syntactically disjoint, so ranking for one will not get you ranking for the other in today’s search engines.

This is especially problematic where your company name, which often gets used as link text, does not contain your preferred search. Here’s a concrete example I found to illustrate this point, but you can find many of your own.

A company named Transducer Techniques sells load cells. Totally obvious to me, a total mystery to Google. Many of the links to this firm are from industry directories that use the company name, so they are top ranked for the word "transducer". But according to WordTracker, the real traffic is for "load cell", where this company ranks #4.

Now compare Transducer Techniques to Load Cell Central, the top ranked page for load cell, which is not even in the first 100 results for transducer.

This is entirely a result link text. If links like Transducer Techniques were replaced with links like The Load Cell Experts the rankings would like be very different owing to the difference in PageRanks between these two sites.

The very front end of Google is the spider function which creates a queue of pages visit with content for each. This feeds the indexer which matches these pages to existing pages in the index and either creates a new index entry or updates an existing one with the new content. Originally at least, and probably still true I think, the indexing stage is also where link text is propagated from linking pages to destination pages where it is stored as an augmentation to the target page. This is one of — IMHO — the great ideas inside Google as it essentially reduces a key off-page analysis to one that can instead be conducted entirely on-page.

As an entirely separate process that uses the existing index as input, the PageRank algorithm is run to create a "side file" of PR values indexed by the same unique identifier used to access pages. The architecture makes no demands as to when PR is updated — it can be on any schedule they like.

What normal humans, not to be confused with SEOs :-), call "the search engine" is really the "query engine". This takes the index of content and the PageRank values and performs a computation to rank results as each user query is received and processed. Clearly, there can be no pre-processing of queries — there is just raw data to feed into this engine.

So what happens to a brand new page?

A new page doesn’t actually "exist" as far as Google is concerned until it is spidered nd indexed. Once it is indexed, meaning you can find it at Google using a site: query on your domain, it is my best understanding that all Link Reputation effects are baked into the index and fully affect search queries. Since spidering and indexing is the fastest part of Goolge, this explains the similarly fast positioning changes that can be accomplished through link text alone.

PageRank is another matter and can take any amount of time. There is no requirement in the software architecture that requires any particular schedule. In fact, my research suggests that the way PR is computed and the schedule used to compute it are drastically different today than 3 years ago.

While awaiting PageRank values for a new page, it can be very difficult for that page to rank to any significant searches. Likewise, making significant linking topoloy changes in an existing website, using my Dynamic Linking approach for example, will generally take a quite a while to have a ranking impact because of how long it takes for PR values to be recomputed across your site.