The Magic SEO Ball

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Did Thumbtack really break Google’s rules?

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Recently a service called Thumbtack was penalized by Google for unnatural links, presumably as a result of this blog post.

In brief: Thumbtack does some fairly aggressive and overt link-building; Google is an investor in Thumbtack. This exposes Google to the criticism that they are allowing a business of which they are a partial owner to violate their rules, while punishing competing sites for the same types of practices.

Thumbtack’s president said: “To be clear, we do not now, nor have we ever, paid for links … We have always strived to work within Google’s guidelines.”

Was Thumbtack really breaking Google’s stated rules about building links?

Magic SEO Ball says: Yes, definitely.

Yes; definitely.

It’s a common myth among inexperienced SEOs and people who don’t know very much about SEO that Google is primarily concerned with preventing people from buying and selling links. While it is true that this practice is extremely bothersome to Google, they will take action against any manipulation of the link graph that they find.

What is the link graph?

The “link graph” is a concept that search engines use to conceptualize and to visualize the connections of all hyperlinks around the web. It’s important for a lot of aspects of how search engines operate: discovery of new domains and pages, crawling them, indexing them and ranking them (as an authority metric and as a relevance metric).

PageRank, famously, was invented by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and was the backbone of what later became Google. It’s a numerical value that can be understood as representing how popular, important, valuable and trustworthy a certain web page is – based on how many other pages link to it, and which pages link to it.

What is manipulation of the link graph?

When search engines’ representatives use terms like “manipulation of the link graph,” they mean the practice of adding a lot of helpful links to a site in order to get it to rank higher, or the practice of adding a lot of harmful links to a site in order to get it to rank lower.

Because of the extreme importance to search engines of the link graph, and to Google in particular of PageRank, anyone who could successfully manipulate the link graph, causing what Google sees as the “wrong” ranking for a query, is pretty directly harming Google.

Hence, their rules:

Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site.

One example they cite is, “Buying or selling links that pass PageRank.” But several other examples include no mention of money whatsoever, such as, “Keyword-rich, hidden or low-quality links embedded in widgets that are distributed across various sites.”

While Thumbtack seems to have known better than to try the automated approach of using an embeddable – and, to Google, easily detectable – widget, their program of asking members for links from their own sites, using exact match commercial anchor text, was the same in effect.

For that reason, this half-assed defense on twitter is pretty weak:

Does Google “cheat” by favoring its own products in search results?

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For many years, we have heard claims from some very smart people and from some less-than-smart people that Google manipulates its own search results, or perhaps its own organic search ranking algorithm, to favor its own sites.

Is this true?

Magic SEO Ball says: Signs point to yes.

Signs point to yes.

We have defended Google for many years – and not just because we make our living as a professional SEO, in an entire ecosystem that exists because Google, and other search engines like it, are both good enough to attract billions of people to use it and because Google, and other search engines like it, are notoriously complex and difficult to game.

In particular, we have been known to cite articles like this one: 5 Times Google Penalized Itself For Breaking Its Own SEO Rules.

To be sure, we often see Google acting like a bully and we often take to Twitter to tell Google to honor its own motto: Don’t be evil…


Still, this article in the Wall Street Journal is just too much to ignore: How Google Skewed Search Results [1].

The article describes an FTC report that nails Google for doing all sorts of unsavory and classless things, like intentionally promoting its own services in organic search results, and intentionally demoting its competitors’ services.

It’s unclear whether Google did this by manipulating the ranking algorithm (that is, by starting with what they wanted the results to be, and then working backwards until they had an algorithm that could reliably produce those results) or by letting the ranking algorithm operate independently and then just manipulating the search results pages when the results themselves weren’t satisfactory. Either way, Googlers like Matt Cutts and John Mueller should be ashamed of themselves.

Google is just a company. They act in the interests of their shareholders and their employees and their users, and when the interests of the third group are in conflict with the interests of the first group, it’s not a surprise that the second group is tasked with ensuring that the first group’s interests take precedence.

But Google’s mission is quite unlike other companies’ missions, at least insofar as Google is uniquely in a position to turn its dreams into reality. And we should all be scared and concerned at what Google is capable of doing.

References

References
↑1 If you need help accessing the article, try doing a Google search for its headline, and then accessing it through Google News. That’s right: in some cases, Google strong-arms publishers into giving away their articles for free to readers coming from Google searches.

Is Google wrong about robots.txt?

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I saw a search result that said, “A description for this result is not available because of this site’s robots.txt – learn more.” But when I checked that site’s robots.txt, the page was not blocked at all. Did Google just mess this one up?

Magic SEO Ball says: most likely.

Most likely.

I searched for Ray Kurzweil so I could explain to some coworkers that he seriously intends not to die. The fifth and sixth organic results were both from ted.com. The fifth result, but not the sixth, strongly implied that Googlebot had been blocked from crawling the page, and consequently was unable to provide a meta description.

A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more.

But when I looked at ted.com’s robots.txt, I saw only this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /index.php/profiles/browse
Disallow: /index.php/search
Disallow: /search

Google wasn’t blocked from crawling the page at all.

I don’t know what’s going on here – specifically whether TED has used another method to prevent this page from being crawled or whether Google actually thinks that the ted.com robots.txt is blocking that directory – but it seems strangely like a Google mistake.

Can Google tell when a page doesn’t work well in mobile?

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Can Google tell when a page doesn’t work well in mobile?

Magic SEO Ball says: without a doubt.

Without a doubt.

Scroll down to the “User Experience” section they’ve recently added to the Page Speed tool: http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fmagicseoball.com%2Fwill-reconsideration-request-get-reviewed%2F.

They are evaluating the pixel size of page elements and telegraphing a future where a bad user experience on mobile is a ranking factor for mobile search.

This answer was contributed by Tre Jones.