GoogleBowling, Myth Busted?

GoogleBowling:Sending links to your competitor’s web site from bad neighborhoods in order to harm their ranking on Google.

There has always been speculation that this works to tank a competitors site. I ran across a good Google Webmaster Groups discussion where a poster said his site he had proof his site had been hit and that was the reason his rankings tanked. There indeed were a high percentage of shady porn links from shady forums all over the place linking back to his site.

Googler John Mu entered the discussion and basically dismissed the effect of the links, blaming specifically the content on his site as being the culprit:

"Looking at the site that you mentioned, I could imagine that studying
our Google Webmaster Guidelines, in particular the quality guidelines,
would be time well spent. Most of these guidelines involve the content
on the site itself..."

No one was satisfied with that response and it sounded like John was dodging the question, but the reality is that he had pointed out directly what the issue was and completely dismissed the influence of foul backlinks, which is what is really interesting in the whole discussion. His successive responses:

"I think what the original poster is worried about is not links on his
site but rather links to his site from other (bad) sites. In theory, I
can imagine that there might be some borderline situations where that
would be possible, however in all the time I have spend diagnosing
website issues I have not once run into a situation like that."

and:

"There are a lot of factors involved and this is certainly not
something we take lightly. Google is a very data-driven company, so
you can be sure that people are looking at a lot of data about this
kind of problem. When we make adjustments because of issues brought to
our attention, they are generally on an algorithm level: we made over
400 changes last year alone. "

John comments a 4th time, basically tearing the guy's site apart, finding paid links, anti-virus issues. Ultimately the poster would have been better off not saying anything and he hasn't seen anything yet as far as a penalty goes.

GoogleBowling, myth busted? Verdict is still out, but the degree of this case (% of total backlinks that were crap) seemed like a situation which would cause concern for most webmasters and Google easily dismissed it. Though Jonh didnt claim it wasn't possible in theory, it seems like the threashold is much higher than most would have expected.

Post on How Google Measures Search Quality

This is a very good article which would those who are more interested in the technical side of how search works. The article is based on an interview with Googler Peter Norvig, Director of Research and the previous Director of Search Quality . The most intriguing point, usage data is not a good metric for the quality of search results:

Peter confirmed that Google does collect such data, and has scads of it
stashed away on their clusters. However -- and here's the shocker --
these metrics are not very sensitive to new ranking models! When Google
tries new ranking models, these metrics sometimes move, sometimes not,
and never by much. In fact Google does not use such real usage data to
tune their search ranking algorithm. What they really use is a blast
from the past. They employ armies of "raters" who rate search results
for randomly selected "panels" of queries using different ranking
algorithms. These manual ratings form the gold-standard against which
ranking algorithms are measured -- and eventually released into service.

GooHoo, My Thoughts Exactly

Echoing my comments on the Yahoo-Google deal concerning cross platform functionality of instant messaging services, SearchEngineJournal picked up on the same kernel of information that everyone seemed to overlook.

No URL's Ending in '0' Says Google

Thought this was an interesting bit, SEOMoz got a PR 7 page banned from Google for having a number '0' at the end of a URL. This was actually confirmed by Google. The page is their entrance page for the Web 2.0 awards with the URL http://www.seomoz.org/web2.0. It was a 2 year old page and had a PR of 7 which suddenly lost all of its PageRank, showing a PR0 and disappeared from the Google index. The haven't changed the URL yet, but here is the SEOMoz story.

No URL's Ending in '0' Says Google

Thought this was an interesting bit, SEOMoz got a PR 7 page banned from Google for having a number '0' at the end of a URL. This was actually confirmed by Google. The page is their entrance page for the Web 2.0 awards with the URL http://www.seomoz.org/web2.0. It was a 2 year old page and had a PR of 7 which suddenly lost all of its PageRank, showing a PR0 and disappeared from the Google index. The haven't changed the URL yet, but here is the SEOMoz story.

GooHoo, Jerry Yang's Perspective

Jerry Yang did a post on the Yodel Blog commenting on the Yahoo-Google deal.

Jerry says that Yahoo already allows other advertisers to place ads on Yahoo, this is essentially nothing new. Also, they will have complete control over the delivery of the search ads with a non binding agreement.

GooHoo or Comentary on the Google Yahoo Ad Deal

Yahoo has signed and agreement with Google to place Google Adwords on Yahoo search results and in Yahoo content. The agreement is specific to the US and Canadian markets. It also includes cross platform functionality for IM services which I think is huge and has been underrated in the articles.

Here's a list of items worth reading:

Yahoo Google deal press release from Yahoo on SearchEngineWatch

SearchEngineLand summary

Announcement on the Google Blog

SEOBook brief mention

Bloomberg Article

Forbes - 10 Signs Yang Made The Right Move

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