- How accurate is Google’s backlink-check (link:…)? Are all nofollow backlinks filtered out or why does Yahoo/MSN show quite more backlink results?

- If you have inbound links from reputable sites, but those sites don’t show up in a link:webname.com search, does this mean you aren’t getting any "credit" in Google’s eyes for having inbound links?

The video comes from Google Webmaster Central’s YouTube channel, which is full of useful videos for webmasters. The channel has videos not only from Cutts, but from other knowledgeable Googlers as well. Cutts himself has been posting informative videos on his own in an effort to bring his presentations from various conferences to the audience at home.

Well, maybe. Let’s just say that it might be a good idea, especially if you’re just starting out and haven’t built the credibility and authority yet, to pay close attention to who’s linking to you and how much. It would take a lot, mind you, and your nemesis would have to be pretty determined.

The latest, buzzy topic of conversation in SEO (buzzy because certain forums’ vigorous discussion about it has prompted more investigation and a reply from Matt Cutts) has been surrounding a so-called -60 penalty. The collective obsession with understanding the mathematics of Google’s algorithm has produced a series of collective agreement/myth that there are different levels of penalties, e.g., -10, -20, -60, -250.

Google had to acknowledge one of the penalties recently, the -6 penalty, as an oversight to be corrected, so these guesses at various penalties may be somewhat on the mark.

Cutts entered the conversation about the -60 penalty too, his appearance coming just shy of confirming the penalty’s reality. He suggested to a person that they keep a close eye on their backlinks:

"ShyBoy, have you been collecting backlinks in any unusual ways? It looks like you may have, and I would pay special attention to that. For example, if you had been attempting to get PageRank via paid links on various templates, then when that PageRank stops flowing (e.g. if Google improves its detection in various ways), the fact that you have less PageRank can also mean that a site won’t rank as well. If that applies to you, my advice would be to pay special attention to that issue, in addition to the other good advice you’ve already gotten."
 
One of the commentators in this thread notes that the site in question in that Google Groups thread had some “nasty” backlinks. ShyBoy says he runs a “family business,” so we’ll assume he didn’t do that himself, just for our own piece of mind.

Cutts seems to be implying that a bunch of nasty backlinks makes you look bad, at the very least. Barry Schwartz brings us back around to remind us that once a site has been penalized or dropped, it’s pretty hard to get things back to normal, even if the site itself has been cleaned up, as Google will now watch the site more closely. And that means Google might be even less forgiving of the bad links.

Schwartz cites an explanation from John Web of JLH Design to illustrate why Google pays such close attention to bad links. This is just part of that post:

"[I]f a site has 36,000 links to it and 34,000 links are from theme sponsorships, 1,000 are from keyword rich blog comments, 500 are from web directories, and only 10 are from actual sites giving out an editorial link that would be a pretty good sign that someone was trying to improve their ranking by external methods. If 99% of the links are questionable, then it may give them cause to not only devalue them but devalue the site as a whole as well. "

Schwartz follows that up with the obvious next questions: "Is this fair? Can this be used to hurt your competitors? "

The answer sure seems to be in the affirmative (for the second question), since enough nasty links pointed toward a competitor (which may not be detected immediately and may be difficult to remedy) could ultimately take their site down a few (or 60) notches. It’s like somebody spreading rumors about you in high school. You’ll still be trying to shake that rep at your 10-year reunion. 

What’s more, according to the forum reports, these are organic links, not paid links. Google’s assault on paid linking is well-documented by now, but many webmasters are scratching their heads about this one, considering that links are (assumedly) a large consideration of the Google ranking algorithm.

The reports have been made and echoed by members, some reporting that, coupled with their recent drop in PageRank, have seen a decrease in search traffic by up to 15 percent.

Some suppose that it may be a temporary update and thus, only a fluctuation. Others note that Yahoo is showing all of their backlinks in tact.

"D2002" at DigitalPoint forum says:

One of my websites right now is showing 0 internal/external backlinks in Google Webmaster Tools.

However, when I do a "link:" search in Google, I still get about 1000 results. Yahoo is showing 55,000 links for the entire domain.

Our PR has dropped from 6 to 3 (probably permanently, since we are showing 3s across all datacenters).

Our referral traffic from Google decreased a bit (dropped about 15%) but that could just be a daily fluctuation.

And that report is echoed at Google Groups as well as Webmaster World.

Via SE Roundtable

Improvements include:

• Site owners can now see their own backlinks.
• Verify an IP address is really Googlebot done but by using a reverse+forward DNS lookup.
• An option to easily remove URLs from the index. Google’s URL removal tool has been ported into the webmaster console, and it allows site owners to see and revoke their self-removals.
• Show how many people are subscribed to my website’s feeds in Google Reader: DONE, but not in the console. Google Reader now reports these numbers when fetching feeds. Feedburner will give you even more stats for free.
• Communicate with webmasters in an authenticated way: DONE. Just last week, Google added a webmaster message center provide authenticated communication with site owners. The Webmaster Central team has done of ton of other stuff in the last few months as well.

Upcoming features will be based on the list below:

• More information about penalties or other scoring issues
• Tools for detecting or reporting duplicate content
• Show links on your site that are broken
• Score the crawlability or accessibility of pages
• Tool to help move from one domain to a new domain
• Tell Google the correct country or language for a site
• Show PageRank numbers instead of none/low/medium/high
• Diagnostic wizard for common site problems
• Some type of rank checking
• Show causes of 404 errors
• A way to list supplemental result pages
• Option to "disavow" backlinks from or to a site
• Fetch a page as Googlebot to verify correct behavior
• Tell Google a parameter doesn’t matter
• More documentation and examples
• Ability to show/download all pages from a site (e.g. if your server crashed)
• Integrate "Add URL" feature.

If you have more ideas, post your suggestions at his blog.

Comments

I will compare SEO statistics and information about the age of domain, length of domain registration, domain characteristics, backlinks, Technorati links, .edu links, Alexa Rank, Page Strength, indexed pages, supplemental results, name search on Google, other search terms on Google, and pay-per-click. The order of candidates is listed in order of “rank” within each category of statistics.

Age of Domain

This comes from either Alexa data or WHOIS data. The age of domain is important in SEO because older sites typically hold more credibility and trust with search engines.

Hillary Clinton – 22-Oct-2001
John Edwards – 16-Jul-1998
Barack Obama – 28-Dec-2004
John McCain – 17-Jul-1997
Mitt Romney – 08-Feb-2002
Rudy Giuliani – 17-Nov-2006

Length of Domain Registration

This statistic looks at how many years the domain has been registered for beyond the create date (based on WHOIS data), and the candidates are listed in descending order of year that the domain expires. It’s considered good SEO practice to register a domain for a longer amount of time (5+ years)

John McCain – 15 years, expires 26-Jan-2017
Hillary Clinton – 15 years, expires 22-Oct-2016
Barack Obama – 11 years, expires 28-Dec-2015
John Edwards – 11 years, expires 14-Jul-2009
Mitt Romney – 8 years, expires 08-Feb-2010
Rudy Giuliani – 2 years, expires 17-Nov-2008

Type in Domain

Everyone except Rudy Giuliani has a perfect type in domain for their name, so you can just type in their name, add the .com and you’re at their site. This may hurt Rudy a little, but his last name is hard to remember how to spell for many so perhaps joinrudy2008.com is better in some ways.

Backlinks

Backlinks, or inbound links, are how many sites link to your site. These figures are from Yahoo.

Barack Obama – 119,909
Hillary Clinton – 79,219
Mitt Romney – 39,245
Rudy Giuliani – 38,236
John Edwards – 15,498
John McCain – 7,428

Technorati Links

This is used as a measure of popularity in the blogosphere world. The more the better.

Barack Obama – 6,527
John Edwards – 4,952
Hillary Clinton – 3,710
Mitt Romney – 1,756
John McCain – 670
Rudy Giuliani – 342

.edu links

Links from educational institutions are regarded as passing more weight or confidence as a backlink, and are highly desirable (and hard to get).

Hillary Clinton – 97
Barack Obama – 87
John Edwards – 35
Mitt Romney – 33
Rudy Giuliani – 21
John McCain – 0

Alexa Rank

I know Alexa isn’t perfect, but it’s an interesting comparison. The lower the number, “the better”. The number represents the rank of the website out of the top websites on the Internet in terms of traffic. The most visited site on the Internet is ranked 1. A zero (0) means either an error or not enough traffic to rank.

Barack Obama – 12,581
Hillary Clinton – 18,727
John Edwards – 33,485
Mitt Romney – 129,490
John McCain – 178,788
Rudy Giuliani – 0

Page Strength

John Edwards – 6.5/10
Hillary Clinton – 5.5/10
Barack Obama – 5/0
Mitt Romney – 4/10
Rudy Giuliani – 3.5/10
John McCain – 3.5/10

Indexed Pages

Google and Yahoo both give a different number of pages in their index, so I’ll show both, Google/Yahoo.

John Edwards – 4230/66
John McCain – 457/155
Hillary Clinton – 387/1133
Mitt Romney – 309/157
Barack Obama – 148/525
Rudy Giuliani – 91/34

Supplemental Results

If pages show up as supplemental results (use this query, just change domain) it means they aren’t carrying as much as weight as they could be and their rankings probably suffer. The figure shown below is supplemental/total indexed, as well as what percent of pages are supplemental results out of their total number of indexed pages (both from Google). Lower % is better.

John Edwards – 260/4230 (6%)
Mitt Romney – 71/309 (23%)
John McCain – 104/457 (23%)
Barack Obama – 35/148 (24%)
Rudy Giuliani – 38/91 (42%)
Hillary Clinton – 168/387 (43%)

Name search on Google

If you type in the candidate’s name in Google, where does their “official” election site come up in the SERPs?

Hillary Clinton – 1st result
Barack Obama – 1st result
John Edwards – 1st result
Mitt Romney – 1st result
Rudy Giuliani – 2nd result, 1st is Wikipedia entry
John McCain – 33rd result, 1st is his Senate page

Rankings for name, party, etc

Terms searched for included: presidential election, presidential candidates, 2008 elections, compare candidates, and candidates issues. The top 100 results were checked for each search term. If no ranking is listed below, the candidates site does not rank in the top 100 for that term.

Barack Obama – #35 for presidential candidates, #66 for candidates issues
Hillary Clinton – (none)
John Edwards – (none)
John McCain – (none)
Mitt Romney – (none)
Rudy Giuliani – (none)

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

Terms searched for included: presidential election, presidential candidates, 2008 elections, compare candidates, candidates issues, democrat, democratic party, republican, and republican party. Certainly there are many others I could have typed for but these are ones I thought would be critical to any PPC campaign.

Barack Obama – presidential election, presidential candidates, 2008 elections, democrat, democratic party,
John McCain – presidential election, presidential candidates
Hillary Clinton – (none)
John Edwards – (none)
Mitt Romney – (none)
Rudy Giuliani – (none)

Obviously we are very early on in the elections, but certainly SEO efforts should be underway if they are going to occur at all. In some ways it is evident there are definitely SEO strategies in place, but what about the lack of PPCWhat are some of your observations?

Also check out my post from yesterday about what Analytics programs the Presidential Candidates are using.

Comments

It is slightly old school, but not talked about, in fact most people just talk about doing this in reverse, but both ways can be effective. Take a look at this PR Stunt.

I should also point out it doesn’t only provide links, but also content in raw form, plus hot stories that are news stories that haven’t happened yet.

P.S. I did check out the links, and they do show up in both Yahoo and MSN. I would have expected a Google link to show up as well but I wouldn’t worry too much. It is legit.

Comments

*Originally published at AndyBeard.eu

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What we first need to do is get a bit of history lesson, Sherman set the Wayback Machine to January 18th 2005. Visiting the Google Blog we can see a very public and high profile announcement about the no follow tag Official Google Blog: Preventing comment spam

If you’re a blogger (or a blog reader), you’re painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites’ search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like “Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site.” This is called comment spam, we don’t like it either, and we’ve been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

If you take notice of the title of that page and read through you’ll see plenty of guidance that no-follow is being used to prevent blog spam and should only be used on areas with user generated content. Let’s repeat that because it’s important no follow was implemented to combat blog spam, plain and simple, end of story, period.

So when did no follow get associated with text link advertising? For that we have to go back to the O’Rielly Radar Advertising incident on August 24th 2005 to a comment made by Google Matt Cutts O’Reilly Radar > Search Engine Spam?

As others have noted, if you’re going to sell text links that pass reputation/PageRank, the way to do it is to add rel=nofollow to those links. Tim points out that these these links have been sold for over two years. That’s true. I’ve known about these O’Reilly links since at least 9/3/2003, and parts of perl.com, xml.com, etc. have not been trusted in terms of linkage for months and months. Remember that just because a site shows up for a “link:” command on Google does not mean that it passes PageRank, reputation, or anchortext. Google’s view on this is quite close to Phil Ringnalda’s. Selling links muddies the quality of the web and makes it harder for many search engines (not just Google) to return relevant results. The rel=nofollow attribute is the correct answer: any site can sell links, but a search engine will be able to tell that the source site is not vouching for the destination page. Posted by: Matt Cutts at August 24, 2005 09:31 AM

So exactly what happened in those 8 months that made Google decide to alter a technical specification that was already accepted, who knows? Did Google issue a press release about this change like they did when they introduced the tag, not as far as I can find. Did Google bother to update the Webmaster Guidelines, again the answer is no, but we’ll come back to that a little bit later.

What happened on August 24th was the start of a grass roots campaign by Google to alter the way the web worked to suit it’s own agenda. The main tool in this campaign, creating fear, uncertainty and doubt or FUD in the minds of webmaster and web publishers across the globe. Over the coming months we’d have perfectly orchestrated displays to plant the seed that Google sees and knows all, as webmasters feared hearing the dreaded words “so tell me about your backlinks” (see another version of tell me about your backlinks). This campaign continues taking advantage of Google’s dominance in search, it’s hard to ignore someone when they are responsible for 70% or even 90% of your site’s traffic. This builds momentum and it even gets so bad Google can get away with saying things like “Google Senses Much” and people assume the fetal position in the corner wimpering with fear. Excuse me but exactly when did Google start to know if I’ve been bad or good, did they put Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny on the payroll?

Hey Google if you know so much how come you still haven’t figured out craig’s list is spamming you with 90 subdomains of duplicate content. If you know so much how come you get confused with duplicate meta content instead of actual on page content and only list two pages from a site [threadwatch.org]. If you know so much why are we still having 302 redirect problems in 2007 when Yahoo solved this years ago? It’s simple Google doesn’t know as much as they would have you believe, but instead they want to keep you in the dark, obfuscating data by “breaking the link command” and altering the way the “site:” command works.

Earlier in this post I mentioned the Google Webmaster Guidelines lets revisit that page. Under general guidelines we have the following statement:

Make pages for users, not for search engines.

Except for SEO’s who may have modified their browser settings no one else can see no-follow tags, the only one who cares about them are search engines and their spiders. So in essence what Google is really saying is:

Make pages for users, not for search engines, except when we arbitrarily change the rules without notice and don’t bother to tell you until after the fact, and don’t update our webmaster guidelines to reflect those changes.

OK maybe I’m having a little fun at Google’s expense, but they have fairly well established history of this kind of hypocritical contradictory approach, my particular favorite comes from Google’s Page on SEO where we find this quote:

No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.

Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a “special relationship” with Google, or advertise a “priority submit” to Google.

Later on the exact same page we find this

For your own safety, you should insist on a full and unconditional money-back guarantee.

First they tell me no one can guarantee anything and then they tell me I should make sure I get a guarantee, excuse me if I wrinkle my brow like Mr Spock and inform you that’s highly illogical.

Let’s turn our attention to the review issue, in December of 2006 we have the Ramblings About SEO Blog Archive Weighing in on Link Buying (again!)

Matt Cutts Says: December 20th, 2006 at 1:01 pm I think you put this pretty well, Eric. Search engines want links to be real: editorial votes based on quality and merit. With Yahoo, you’re paying for the reviewing service; Yahoo rejects plenty of submissions.

However just over a month later we get this Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO What did I miss last week?

Yet another “pay-for-blogging” (PFB) business launched, this time by Text Link Brokers. It should be clear from Google’s stance on paid text links, but if you are blogging and being paid by services like Pay Per Post, ReviewMe, or SponsoredReviews, links in those paid-for posts should be made in a way that doesn’t affect search engines. The rel=”nofollow” attribute is one way, but there are numerous other ways to do paid links that won’t affect search engines, e.g. doing an internal redirect through a url that is forbidden from crawling by robots.txt.

Did we get another policy change that nobody told us about or is it just Yahoo who’s allowed to do paid reviews? Confused so am I.

Here’s the kicker want to know what’s really wrong with Google’s stance on reviews, by making a big stink about it they are going to drive it back underground. The way reviews are now they are disclosed in a form that humans can read, understand evaluate and make decisions about on their own. If you can’t figure out sentences like “this has been a sponsored post” or “the following has been a paid review” you’re probably the kind of person who believes headlines like search engineers practice cannibalism. What’s really happeneing is we’ve got another FUD campaign going, this time designed to stamp out paid reviews in an inconsistent, arbitrary and undocumented manor. Some people are allowed to do it, some aren’t, and we don’t know why, rather than take a risk people will just decide not to participate, due to a lack of a clear answer. What happens then, the market goes underground, the disclaimer requirement fades away, and no one, especially the people viewing a page know what editorial forces might be at work behind the scenes influencing that page. Way to go Google and good job of putting the users needs ahead of your own!

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Michael Gray is SEO specialist and publishes a Search Engine Industry blog at www.Wolf-Howl.com. He has over 10 years experience in website development and internet marketing, helping both small and large companies increase their search engine visibility, traffic, and sales. Michael is a current member of Internet Marketing of New York ( IM-NY.org) and a guest speaker on Webmaster Radio. He is also an editor for the popular search engine new website Threadwatch.org.

Blogs have gone missing from Yahoo News reports TW. Steve Rubel notices too and suggests that Yahoo is building a dedicated blog and feed search tool. Maybe something like: reader.yrank.feeds.yahoo.com.

Update: Greg Jarboe offers some interesting insight suggesting that perhaps Yahoo is not permanently taking blogs out of news search results.

Are you into marketing via Wikipedia? Then you’ll be interested in the most popular Wikipedia pages. via Google Blogscoped.

Yahoo issues another Weather Report.

Google is updating backlinks reports Barry.

Cool Web 2.0 sort of shopping recommendation, tagging, and more site. ThisNext.com. Hat tip to Eric.

Bookmark WebProNews:

Lee Odden is President and Founder of
TopRank Online Marketing, specializing in organic SEO, blog
marketing and online public relations. He’s been cited as a search
marketing expert by publications including U.S. News & World Report and
The Economist and has implemented successful search marketing programs
with top BtoB companies of all sizes. Odden shares his marketing
expertise at Online Marketing Blog offering
daily news, interviews and best practices.

1) Subscribe to Tag Feeds
Need something to blog about? Cat got your tongue? Don’t worry, Mama Technorati can take care of you. Simply find some Technorati tags you care about, subscribe to their RSS feeds and stick them in a Firefox menu. You’ll be full of ideas in no time. Every Technorati tag has its own feed.

2) Use Technorati to Search Individual Blogs
Are there certain blogs you visit more than others because they are great connectors or simply because they propagate great ideas? I know I do. The great thing is you can use Technorati to search individual blogs. Click on the search tab and then enter the blog URL you want to search. For example, here’s what a search for Microsoft on Robert Scoble’s blog would generate.

3) It’s All in the Watchlist
Technorati lets you set up as many watchlists as you would like. These are basically persistent searches. Simply register on the site, construct your search and then click on the “Add to Watchlist” button. Each Watchlist also generates an RSS feed.

4) Integrate Technorati Into Your Browser
You can dramatically speed up your Technorati-ing (is that a word?) by adding downloading some Firefox search plug-ins. For example, Firefox users should click here to add Technorati to your Firefox search box. Or click here to add way to search Technorati tags.

Don’t stop with just search plug-ins. Be sure to add a few Technorati bookmarklets.

5) Put Technorati in Your OS
If you love Technorati so much that you can’t stand not getting closer to it, the good news is that you can. Mac OS X users can download this Technorati Dashboard widget. Windows lovers, you achieve the same by downloading Konfabulator and then picking up this widget. Or, try this Goowy widget.

6) Ping Technorati
Everytime you update your blog, tell Uncle Technorati that you want to
show him something. He’ll spider your blog right away. You can do this here or by using a pinging service (definition) like Pingoat. I use ecto, a cros-plaform blogging tool, to ping Technorati every time I post and integrate Technorati tags.

7) Take Technorati to Go
Believe it or not, I spend a fair amount of time away from my ‘puter. That doesn’t stop me from taking T’rati with me. I use their mobile service on my Treo. It works on any browser-capable phone. Just bookmark m.technorati.com on your celly, Nelly.

Put Technorati Backlinks Right Into Your Blog
OK, this one’s geeky. It’s even beyond my TypePad skills. However, some folks put Technorati backlinks into every blog post they write. Here’s some instructions on how to do this pretty much for every platform.

9) Put Technorati Into Your RSS Aggregator
Who here lives in the Kingdom of Greg? In other words, who here uses NetNewsWire or FeedDemon. I do, on occasion. Good news. You can stick some nice Technorati tools right into your reader. For example, Niall Kennedy has a way to check Technorati backlinks with NetNewswire. Not to be outdone, Nick Bradbury has done the same with FeedDemon. If you’re a Sage fan, the basic RSS reader template has backlinks built in.

10) Conduct a Real-time Focus Group
I am interested in what people are pointing to and discussing. It’s a good window into the minds’ eye of the consumer. There’s no better way to do this, perhaps than to see what people are saying when they link to corproate Web sites. For example, a search for links to Dell.com, generates this search. Be sure to sort by authority as well as by date. Journalists, this trick works equally well for you. It can help you track companies and products. PR pros, this is a must if you are working on any brand that is discussed.

Reader Comments…

Steve Rubel is a PR strategist with nearly 16 years of public relations, marketing, journalism and communications experience. He currently serves as a Senior Vice President with Edelman, the largest independent global PR firm.

He authors the Micro Persuasion weblog, which tracks how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the public relations practice.