What the Heck is Google Hell?
Monday, April 30th, 2007;
-- Andy Beal |
Ok, I have to admit that I didn’t realize we had labeled Google’s supplemental results as “Google Hell” - well actually Jim Boykin gave it the label - I must have been building my Zwinky avatar at the time.
Anyway, Boykin joins Aaron Wall and Michael Gray in explaining Google’s supplemental results to Forbes.
Two observations from the article.
- How can a consultant take a company’s $35k and “mistakenly” create duplicate content?
- If you’re hired as a company’s “vice president of search marketing” and you got burned by you link-building practices - costing your company $250k in sales - why would you want to tell the world and shouldn’t you be looking for a new career?
(in case you don’t read the article, neither of the two cases above are about Boykin, Wall or Gray).
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May 1st, 2007 at 3:56 am
[…] I thought Andy Beal had an interesting take on the Forbes piece as well. […]
May 1st, 2007 at 4:29 am
[…] I thought Andy Beal had an interesting take on the Forbes piece as well. […]
May 1st, 2007 at 5:06 am
[…] According to Andy Beal, it was Jim Boykin who gave the label. […]
May 1st, 2007 at 9:30 am
[…] Condemned To Google Hell - Ganz netter Artikel über die Supplemental Results und die Probleme die es mit sich bringt. Matt Cutts zeigt sich etwas unzufrieden mit dem Artikel und hat daher auch gleich mal gebloggt. Bei Suchmaschinentricks gibt man dann wiederum seinen Senf zu der Meinung von Matt Cutts. Die wirklich wichtigen Fragen stellt dann allerdings Andy Beal: 1. How can a consultant take a company’s $35k and “mistakenly†create duplicate content? 2. If you’re hired as a company’s “vice president of search marketing†and you got burned by you link-building practices - costing your company $250k in sales - why would you want to tell the world and shouldn’t you be looking for a new career? […]
May 1st, 2007 at 10:35 am
[…] I thought Andy Beal had an interesting take on the Forbes piece as well. […]
May 1st, 2007 at 3:30 pm
shouldn’t they atleast get their $35k back from the ‘consultant’?
my site’s been up for 2 months and its PR5 already.
Quality rules - don’t need a $35k consultant to tell me that!
May 1st, 2007 at 10:32 pm
a little laugh to see looking for new careers.. should I ?
I wouldn’t do that, just follow the rule this term is Google …
May 1st, 2007 at 10:33 pm
[…] Matt Cutts also directly responded to this post here, reiterating the fact that the supplental index really isn’t a hell, at least not as Dante would describe it. Andy Beal has a short outtake. […]
May 2nd, 2007 at 7:25 am
3 people link to this post with the same anchor? *cough* duplicate content *cough*
May 15th, 2007 at 4:27 am
Right, duplicate content was a mistake - but the situation is not bad either, if the site delivers what it promises, it will regain it’s position. I do not think Google is anyone’s enemy (except maybe YHO or MS!). Losing $500,000 is an insider’s view - something the employer and employee has to sit and discuss.
Cheers!
Sagar
May 17th, 2007 at 8:45 am
Not quite sure on Matt Cutts view on “The approach I’d recommend in that case is to use solid white-hat SEO to get high-quality links (e.g. editorially given by other sites on the basis of merit).â€
May 17th, 2007 at 11:23 am
[…] I thought Andy Beal had an interesting take on the Forbes piece as well. […]
May 23rd, 2007 at 9:42 am
[…] I thought Andy Beal had an interesting take on the Forbes piece as well. […]
June 12th, 2007 at 8:26 am
[…] Andy Greenberg wrote an article for Forbes entitled Condemned To Google Hell about supplemental results… It’s easy to read the article and come away with the impression that Google’s supplemental results are some sort of search engine dungeon where bad pages go and sit in limbo forever, and that’s just not true. I did some quick searching, and this post from January includes a pretty good rebuttal of the “you get into supplemental results for spamming or duplicate content, and then your pages stay there for a long time” idea. I’ll quote the most relevant paragraph: As a reminder, supplemental results aren’t something to be afraid of; I’ve got pages from my site in the supplemental results, for example. A complete software rewrite of the infrastructure for supplemental results launched in Summer o’ 2005, and the supplemental results continue to get fresher. Having urls in the supplemental results doesn’t mean that you have some sort of penalty at all; the main determinant of whether a url is in our main web index or in the supplemental index is PageRank. If you used to have pages in our main web index and now they’re in the supplemental results, a good hypothesis is that we might not be counting links to your pages with the same weight as we have in the past. The approach I’d recommend in that case is to use solid white-hat SEO to get high-quality links (e.g. editorially given by other sites on the basis of merit).That statement still holds. It’s perfectly normal for a website to have pages in our main web index and our supplemental index. If a page doesn’t have enough PageRank to be included in our main web index, the supplemental results represent an additional chance for users to find that page, as opposed to Google not indexing the page. Okay, so that’s the general advice I’d highlight. It can also be the case that links that used to carry more weight for a website might not be counting as much. Let’s see if we can find an example of that in the article. Here’s a quote: MySolitaire.com, another online diamond business, spent January to June of 2006 in the supplemental index. Amit Jhalani, the site’s vice president of search marketing, says he figures that cost his business $250,000 in sales, and he says he still doesn’t know why the site’s pages got Google’s thumbs-down. “So many of the rules are vague,” Jhalani says. But he admits that he tried gray-area tactics like buying links from more established sites to juice his traffic.Okay, so the VP of SEM for this site mentions that they tried buying links; maybe those links started to count for less. I decided to check into mysolitaire.com and see if I could find any other links that might have started counting for less. I did find a spam report where someone forwarded an email that appeared to be from mysolitaire.com… A quick Google search finds similar emails that were sent to mailing lists. Reciprocal links by themselves aren’t automatically bad, but we’ve communicated before that there is such a thing as excessive reciprocal linking. … As Google changes algorithms over time, excessive reciprocal links will probably carry less weight. That could also account for a site having more pages in supplemental results if excessive reciprocal links (or other link-building techniques) begin to be counted less. As I said in January: “The approach I’d recommend in that case is to use solid white-hat SEO to get high-quality links (e.g., editorially given by other sites on the basis of merit).” I thought Andy Beal had an interesting take on the Forbes piece as well. __________________ PsychLinks Psychology Self-Help & Support Forum Psychology, Mental Illness, Mental Health, and Self-Help Directory […]