Masterlink Interactive Blog

Google recently announced another big change in how they will be presenting search results. They are extending their Personalized Search to everyone, this means all Google users, whether logged in or not, will start seeing personalized results.

Google explains Personalized Search:

For example, since I always search for [recipes] and often click on results from epicurious.com, Google might rank epicurious.com higher on the results page the next time I look for recipes. Other times, when I’m looking for news about Cornell University’s sports teams, I search for [big red]. Because I frequently click on www.cornellbigred.com, Google might show me this result first, instead of the Big Red soda company or others.

The customized search results are based upon 180 days of search activity linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser. And you can tell when customized results are being shown because a “View customizations” link will appear on the top right of the search results page. Clicking the link will let you see how Google customized your search results and also let you turn off the customization. But I’m guessing the average “Joe web surfer” won’t know about the personalizations or how to turn them off.

Previously Personalized Search was only provided to users who were logged into a Google account and had Web history enabled (Google has it turned on by default when creating a new account).  This caused some confusion with many of our Dallas SEO clients as they began to see their own site rankings fall in the search results pages for their major keywords. Clients would call in a panic about their rankings and I would explain about Personalized Search and most of the time the client was logged into Google and once they logged out their own site was back to ranking where they had previously seen it. Turns out these clients had been studying their competition’s websites for their main keywords and were not clicking on their own sites, so Google assumed they actually preferred the competitor’s sites over their own.

So what does this mean for SEO?

As WebProNews puts it:

Naturally, when Google announces any significant changes to the way users get their search results, the search engine optimization community must take notice, and must consider what said changes mean for them. If people start getting more results that are specifically tailored to their own tastes, it could be harder for businsses to reach those people through traditional SEO tactics. That’s one way of looking at it. Another way is this: Google always makes changes, but there are always ways to adapt.

Rest assured the internet marketing team at MasterLink is keeping abreast of the changes at Google. I don’t personally foresee this affecting the way we preform SEO, but may increase the need for social media marketing on sites like Facebook and Twitter to reach your targeted audience.

The biggest change I see happening is that focusing on keyword rankings to gauge a SEO campaign’s success will become completely irrelevant as everyone will be seeing different results for the exact same queries based on past browsing history (if they have not figured out how to turn it off). So, as always, but even more so now, we will focus on actual results that show a positive ROI to determine success. Is your site gaining traffic for your top keywords as well as long tail keyword phrases? Are you getting more conversions, sales, leads from your website? These are the types of statistics a results-orientated, ROI-focused SEO campaign should be tracking. SEO for rankings is dead!

Google Chrome, while still in beta, has been slowly finding its way onto increasingly larger percentages of existing computers. Google Wave has been released to developers and may practically re-invent the way we work on the internet. Twitter Search has forced Google’s hand into pushing for more real-time searches and the unveiling of Google Caffeine. Google OS has been announced for release in a couple years.

Bing has single-handedly saved Microsoft search from plunging into the depths of internet obscurity, while reversing the decreasing revenue trends that normally spell death for a search network. Microsoft has also pulled off a coup almost two years in the making by assuming the role of Yahoo’s search engine. Microsoft has issued a widespread beta release of their version of the Content Network.
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This winner-take-all chess match should also determine if the desktop machine will remain the preeminent computational workhouse with cloud-computing a serious option.

We get it guys. You’re two technology behemoths that are in a no-holds-barred, fight to the death to see who will define Web 3.0. Well that’s just it isn’t it? It won’t be Microsoft or Google that get to decide the internet’s advancement. The users get a seat at the big-kid table, too. If the user didn’t get the say, then Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter would have never entered our common geek vernacular.

Not a day goes by without the two juggernauts beating their chest about something or other. Meanwhile, they’re still behind in the real-time search field, and Facebook just got FriendFeed for their part. The last-time I checked Ask was still pretty competitive with Bing in search volume. Apple is quickly eating up the mobile devices department with its own iPhone. Firefox is making huge leaps and bounds in the browser wars.

It’s fun to watch while big companies go head-to-head. The only winner can be the consumer. Still, let’s not take our eyes off the ball, and remember what counts; the user.

Google recently made another announcement regarding their Flash indexing capabilities. Last year they announced they had learned to crawl and index Adobe Flash content. At that time I covered the announcement with my opinion that Google’s indexing of Flash content does not equal that of properly optimized HTML content. This time around the improvements seem to be based on googlebot’s interaction with Flash content, such as clicking buttons as well as improved indexing of external files.

To date, when Google encounters SWF files on the web, we can:

• Index textual content displayed as a user interacts with the file. We click buttons and enter input, just like a user would.
• Discover links within Flash files.
• Load external resources and associate the content with the parent file.
• Support common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, such as SWFObject and SWFObject2.
• Index sites scripted with AS1 and AS2, even if the ActionScript is obfuscated. Update on June 19, 2009: We index sites with AS3 as well. The ActionScript version isn’t particularly relevant in our Indexing process, so we support older versions of AS in addition to the latest.

The blog post uses an example that shows Flash content in an external file ranking in Google results where it was not previoulsy. The query [2002 VW Transporter 888] returns this result:

When checking the source code of the resulting page the searched for terms do not appear. Checking Google’s cache of the page shows us that the phrase is not found on the page.

You can see that Google shows us their default message when the text is not found in the HTML source of the page, “These terms only appear in links pointing to this page”.  I checked both Yahoo Site Explorer and SEOmoz’s LinkScape and both reported zero links to the page. So, yes, I think that proves that Google is not only indexing Flash but also ranking the content.

However, I’d like to see an example of a competitive phrase contained only in Flash content ranking well in Google. The phrase “2002 VW Transporter 888″ is obviously not very competitive with only around 23k pages appearing for the phrase in Google’s index of billions of pages. Until I see Flash content ranking for competitive phrases I will still recommend to all of my clients that all of their desired keywords are contained within properly optimized HTML text on the page.

Again, don’t get me wrong. I’m not entirely against using Flash as part of interactive web design. MasterLink uses Flash in many new web sites as part of the overall design. But HTML text will always be the focus for competitive SEO as far as I am concerned.

SEOMoz posted their SEO Best Practices today and gave their opinion on SEO and Flash:

Although we believe the search engines can crawl Javascript and Flash in a limited capacity, we choose not add the risk. Their ability to parse these languages is inferior to their ability to parse HTML and choosing to code in the former can lead to lower search engine rankings.

I wholeheartedly agree. What do you think about this announcement from Google? Will it change the way you SEO your sites?

I am not one to usually try to stir up debate or call the search engines out for misleading people, but I still can’t figure out what a “nofollow” tag REALLY does. That being said, I know what it SUPPOSEDLY does, but there is data to contradict this claim. After reviewing an experiment I did, it seems that Yahoo and MSN are obeying the rules, but Google, who was first to encourage the use of this tag is not doing what people think it is.

For those of you who do not know what the “nofollow” tag does, here is a quote from Search Engine Watch:

“If Google sees nofollow as part of a link, it will:

1. NOT follow through to that page.
2. NOT count the link in calculating PageRank link popularity scores.
3. NOT count the anchor text in determining what terms the page being linked to is relevant for.”

Now, I did a little experiment that anyone can do (some may call it blackhat - but to me it is just research) to test whether these benefits of the nofollow tag actually work in each of the 3 major search engines.

What I did was go to the AskDaveTaylor.com blog and found an article to which I posted a comment. I chose this site due to its strong page rank and its level of trust in the search engines as seen by his many rankings - thanks Dave :-). The post that I left is under the name of “Mark Warranty Peterson,” just a random name with a keyword in it and linked to the site “theautoclub.com”. Now, since the comments are on this blog are treated with the rel=”nofollow” tag, you would assume that none of the 3 rules of nofollow as outlined above would be disproven.

Ok, so here it is a few months later and the page that I left the post on has a PR5 and the SE algorithms have all had time to fully evaluate this page. So, I went in and did an exact search in Google, Yahoo and MSN for “Mark Warranty Peterson”. Now, one would think that the only page that would show up in the results would be for the page in which the post was left. Well, the only search engine that lived up to this belief is the infamous Microsoft Live Search. Microsoft also did not include the page with the post in a backlink check to theautoclub.com

Yahoo’s results showed the page of the post and one spammer page. A backlink check of the domain (theautoclub.com) in Yahoo did, however, include the page from the post that had the nofollow tag.

What did Google show? Hmm…..this is where I was VERY SURPRISED. The results show the page with the post on it, AND the page to which the nofollow link points! They did not show this page in a backlink check, but when does Google ever show many links there anyways. Now, the other interesting thing theautoclub.com is now ranked #74 for “Mark Warranty Peterson” (edit: now showing at #70 on page 7). Notice that this is a broad match for this term and not an exact match query and the site does not have the word Peterson anywhere in the whole site. I then decided to check the cache of the page after finding it at #74. What did Google have to say about the search query?

“These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: mark peterson“

Now, if I read correctly, according to a Google post, ”when Google sees the attribute (rel=’nofollow’) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results.” Well, this seems to be pretty good proof that this isn’t true. I also have the server logs to show that Google has crawled through this link to the destination website in the link with the nofollow. That disproves that Google will “NOT follow through to that page.”

Now, I am pretty sure that I am not the only person that has done this test and seen the results. This must explain why I haven’t seen a decline in comment spam on my blogs as it looks like the “link condom” is broken…

So, can somebody help me out and explain exactly how Google REALLY treats the nofollow tag?