Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.
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Daily Search Forum Recap: July 13, 2010
Posted: July 13th, 2010, 11:00pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Search Forum Recap
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Top SEOs Analyze Glorified Scraper Sites After May Day
Posted: July 13th, 2010, 3:44pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Google Optimization
WebmasterWorld's administrator, Tedster, posted a thread at WebmasterWorld that takes a deeper look at the May Day update by looking at sites that should be impacted by the update and were not.
Tedster does something you rarely see at a WebmasterWorld thread and picks apart a specific site that is doing well. Then you have some really well-known and respected SEOs come in and discuss why those sites are doing well in the May Day update and others are not.
He posted, in part:
When Mayday first dropped on us, there was a sudden INCREASE in rankings for mash-up sites. You can see examples of what I'm talking about at daymix.com, leapfish.com and picdigger.com and Alexa shows their increases in traffic.
These are often sites with some substantial financing, and even relatively famous owners or CEOs. But to my view, they are a plague on the web and in no way offer the "better long tail results" Google was aiming for.
As one example - do a Google search for site:daymix.com webmasterworld - I currently see 297 pages built from bits and pieces of our content. Try it for other domains and you often see much the same thing.
The goal, figure out why these sites are doing well in Google and replicate it so your scraper can do well also.
Here are some, not all, of the responses on what some top SEOs feel is working for these sites:
The site in question does do quite a bit of linking out to other sites that provide additional information within the mashed up content. Clicking the link goes to the site the content was ripped from. All the links are nofollowed so I wonder is this something we need to take another look at.
Adding more outgoing links to provide more information on the subject/product the page is about.
Daymix doesn't just scrape the Google serps pages and lift the titles and descriptions of the highest ranking/most relevant pages for a query, though, the way scrapers used to. It emulates Universal and scrapes the highest ranking/most relevant sources for different types of data that make up a Google serps page.
Daymix displays a mixture of web, news, blogs, images, videos, Twitter content, etc... and it's good enough, eg, to know when Twitter content might be appropriate for a query and when not; and what the most authoritative sites in a given field are to scrape. Apparently, the vocabulary and media mix is attractive to Google.
He then says this is similar to Google Place Pages.
I took a look at the daymmix site, and one thing I noticed is that when I looked at a result that specifically brought up my site, I have a script that displays the user agent of the visitor, and that the user agent is listed as googlebot. So I can confirm that they are scraping Google SERPS, or they are changing their robots names, and not obeying robots.txt.
Finally, Aaron Wall:
They fund a lot of the duplication...and they need to focus more on ways to promote / subsidize the cost of quality & encourage it. Minimizing the role of the scrape and mash game would be a big step in that direction.
But if end users don't know the difference (and don't understand the business connections) does it harm Google to make the media ecosystem weaker and more desperate for negotiations? I see it as the strategy of funding a third party to make a future partner weaker so you have more leverage at the bargaining table. But some might claim that is a cynical way of looking at it :D
This discussion and thread is just going to get better, so keep an eye on it.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Update: I didn't realize that this thread was private. Now that I posted the quotes, removing them doesn't make sense (it is out there in the feeds already). Trust me, there is a ton more discussion in the thread. I only pulled out excerpts from the thread - so this is one reason to become a paid member of WebmasterWorld.
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Google Not Sending Referrer Data Again?
Posted: July 13th, 2010, 3:36pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Google Optimization
A new WebmasterWorld thread reports several webmasters complaining that Google is not sending referrer information for all clicks from a Google search engine.
First reports came from WebmasterWorld yesterday, July 12th. The individual said:
More and more visits from Google in my server log files are without exact referrer information, and have only "http://www.google.com", "http://www.google.com.au", etc. which doesn't allow to find out keyword and SERP page from which this visit was made.
Several other webmasters confirmed seeing the same issue. Zett, a senior member said, "I am seeing that as well. Not too many yet (maybe 2 to 3% of all referrers from Google), but still noticeable."
Another person posted what he thinks it might be:
I can confirm the original observation: more and more accesses just contain a bare "http://www.google.foo/" referrer. It started on July 1st/2nd (a rise from about .1 percent to about 3 percent of all Google referrers), and judging by the HTTP headers and access patterns, these are definitely legit accesses, not bots, in particular as a possible rel=prefetch access (for top-ranked search hits under Mozilla-based browsers) directly preceding the actual user-driven access still _does_ contain the full list of Google search parameters in the referrer.
This happened before when Google switched to testing AJAX based results, which caused an uproar amongst webmasters who were unable to track referrers.
There was some discussion that Google would being back the AJAX results after they figure out a way to pass along the referrer data. Not sure if this is them testing this or something else.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Update: Matt Cutts of Google confirmed an issue when Google was not sending referrer data in the thread. He said:
Hey everybody, I asked folks who would know about this. It turns out there was an issue a couple weeks ago where some code got refactored, and the refactoring affected referrers for links opened in a new tab or window. Right now the team is expecting to have a fix out in the next week or so. Hope that helps.
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Poll: How Important Is Traffic As A Link Buying Factor?
Posted: July 13th, 2010, 3:28pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Link Building
A WebmasterWorld thread asks the question on the most important factors when pricing out a link buy.
The moderator of the forum, martinibuster, makes a clear point to say this is not about the ethics of buying links to influence your rankings but rather, if you did buy links, what factors are most important.
Martinibuster, Roger Montti, brings up traffic metrics when determining the value of a link. He said he isn't a fan of using PageRank as a metric and asks people, how valuable in terms of pricing a link is the traffic metric? I know some link builders who would prefer a high trafficked link versus a link with high PageRank, but some don't always agree.
I have a poll below, please take it and tell your friends to take it.
How Important Is Traffic Metrics In Link Buying?online surveys
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
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Google Israel Wishes Naomi Shemer A Happy 80th Birthday
Posted: July 13th, 2010, 3:14pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Other Google Topics
Google Israel has a beautiful logo up for the birthday of the late Naomi Shemer (נעמי שמר). Here is a picture of the Google Doodle:
Clicking on the logo takes you to a search result for [נעמי שמר] on Google Israel.
Naomi was born on July 13, 1930 and died at the age of 73 on June 26, 2004. She was known as the "first lady of Israeli song," writing very popular Israeli songs. You can see a full list of her works on Wikipedia and if you have good Hebrew skills you can the more detailed Hebrew Wikipedia page.
Forum discussion at Google Blogoscoped Forums.
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Google Maps Reviews Removed? They'll Come Back
Posted: July 13th, 2010, 3:06pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Other Google Topics
Dozens of businesses went to the Google forums to complain that their Google Maps reviews are missing. But a couple of days later, the reviews are now back.
To some business owners, this can be really upsetting. For example, one said "Last week i had 25 reviews. 22 great and 3 bad. Where did they all go? It has taken 2 years to get them. Can i get them back?"
There are dozens more like this.
Mike Blumenthal explained in one Google Places Help thread that typically with Google Maps updates, such as the one from yesterday, the reviews go missing for a bit of time and them come back. Mike explained:
Reviews for some reason often seem to disappear when Google does some sort of upgrade to their system. One assumes that for some reason their indices get misaligned.
You are not the only owner reporting this problem. There has been a recent upgrade and I assume that your reviews will likely return over time.
The issue is, Google is not good at communicating this to people. So we have dozens of threads with complaints.
Forum discussion at (didn't list all) Google Maps Help, Google Places Help & Google Webmaster Help.