Google & Matt Cutts Get it Wrong: First Priority Should Be Webmasters
While Matt Cutts promised us that his recent post would be “boring”, I believe that it actually raised one of the most important questions regarding search ethics: Our highest duty has to be to our users, not to an individual webmaster.Matt Cutts Unfortunately, Matt and the Googlers get this one very wrong. All relationships require some form of give and take. For a relationship to be properly functioning, it requires that consent be a prerequisite in that give and take. The balance of give-and-take between users and Google is heavily tilted towards the user. In exchange for the possibility of me clicking on an advertisement at some point, with no promises, I can use Google’s search. The goods being exchanged here are search results and...
Follow-up Data on Org vs Com vs Net
I wanted to release a few more stats regarding the comparison of Google rankings for .org, .com, and .net Unfortunately, I do have a sneaky suspicion that over the last day there has been some fluctuation due to a few factors. Additional noise as this story has spread across the web Google’s unintential indexing of the actual domains and not simply the experimental domains Potential “mention” bias from listings on newly registered domain sites (no links, however) Nevertheless, here are some of the raw numbers coming out of the earliest of reporting. These only include the previously revealed experimental subdomains, and not the other domains / subdomains we are running the test now. We will not reveal those domains until we have completed all...
Smarter Short URLs
As an avid user of tinyurl.com for a long time, I realized how cumbersome the process had gotten. If I wanted to make it easy, I would have to install some sort of extension – most of which did not work on the myriad browsers I use (on any given day, I will use Opera, IE, and Firefox. On a bad day, Ill use Safari too) So, I wrote t1ny.us Let’s say you visit http://www.reddit.com and you want a short url Just type http://t1ny.us/ in front of http://www.reddit.com (http://t1ny.us/http://www.reddit.com) and press enter. You will automatically get a short URL....
Google Indexes Without Links or Sitemaps
I have long been convinced that Google uses its many tools to find and queue urls for indexing, but I believe I have found indisputable proof. After beginning many of our experiments using the our sitemaps technique (using Google Sitemaps to get pages indexed in order to control for the unpredictable weight of individual links), we noticed a trend. When using webmaster tools to get subdomains indexed, the domains themselves kept getting indexed. We painstakingly made sure that no URLs were ever linked to, much less the domains themselves which can and do interrupt the quality of our results. Nevertheless, Google still finds a way. While I think there is no real problem with this practice, it does seem clear that Google will attempt to spider all...
Google Showing Bias Towards .org TLDs
A bit of history: Of the many uses that Google’s webmaster tools offers, I think the most profound use is the ability to get sites easily indexed into Google without the use of links. While Google, like many search engines, has long allowed webmasters to “submit” their sites to be spidered, webmaster tools makes this easier while providing more robust data. Essentially, in our endless quest to uncover what is behind Google’s ranking algorithm we finally have a good way to control “links” in the equation. Links make experimentation difficult. It is nearly impossible to create 2 identically valued links for the purpose of testing. (This is actually possible now, as well; and we will be using a technique to test out the...
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