aaronwall

One of my buddies that got into SEO a half decade before I did mentioned the copy and paste rankeroo stuff was real popular back in the days of Infoseek, Altavista, Excite, Lycos and similar.

Google looks for the canonical version of a document and then deduplicates before returning the result set.

You can add &filter=0 to the end of the search URL for a particular query to turn off the duplicate content filters.

An old school spam technique for some affiliates in the early days of Google was to buy a high PR link to their affiliate URL so that like site.com/?aff=123 would be the default version of the homepage & the branded searches for the merchant would then owe the affiliate the commissions until the rankings shifted again.

Very easy to post things on Reddit as a marketer, particularly when working with a small group who can respond to each other to season threads. Plus you can pay trusted Reddit account holders to post items for you.

The design is too monochromatic.

Back in the day a friend mentioned you could choose what version of a phrase you wanted to make the canonical for a search autocompletion by embedding a broken image call to a SERP page for the version of a keyword you wanted to be more popular.

Google has tons of ways to identify real users versus fake users. And lots of the fake it until you make it efforts leave statistical outliers that can lead to ignoring or smoothing away much of the benefits, especially if there is no fire following the smoke trail.

Sites that have a poor user experience by design create the ranking signals for their own demotion by such design. Get a lot of traffic from search with not many people liking the destination page and that ranking will quickly go away.

For what it is worth, Google has favored macro-parasites over micro-parasites. The bigger companies have access to the ears of market regulators, etc. The average small publisher or affiliate site has almost nobody care if it disappears.

Part of the most recent Google update was penalizing high authority trusted sites for publishing off topic content from third parties. There is a concept called "goog enough" explaining how the likes of Forbes ranked for just about everything. https://www.blindfiveyearold.com/its-goog-enough

One time I had a client who thought it was "unfair" to pay me just because I knew how algorithms worked. He was quickly fired, but he did not find inheriting his family owned business unfair. He did not find his ranking boost which gave him outsized profits unfair.

There is no way to go back in time to make everything fair from some arbitrary starting point. All you can do is your best to do your best.

Pricing can lead to unequal outcomes, but it at least provides a signal that you are on the right track or not.

A quest for universal fairness can only work by lowering people rather than by promoting them doing what they are best at.

Anyone seeking universal fairness & equal outcomes in all aspects of life should read Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron as many times as required to change that mindset. http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html "THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General."

People are not required to live in the biggest & most expensive cities in the world. Doing so is a premium good. Removing the pricing signal just turns everything into a lottery and/or lowest common denominator practices demonstrating the tragedy of the commons. Sorry your neighbor has mental health issues, uses meth and screams as they throw stuff against the wall at night. Hope you got a good night sleep!

When I got started on the web I moved a couple states over to live with a friend who was going to college. We lived in a mobile home & our rentier extractor landlord captured like $110 a month. I was able to spend little time doing work I didn't want to do in order to pay rent & could spend a lot of time learning.

High rents can offer some level of exclusivity and give people an opportunity to express their values, what they value, and how much they value it. There's a reason that most people who are in subsidized public housing end up wanting to move away if they can afford to.

There are a lot of cross currents there.

The old people with a reverse mortgage & the taxpayer subsidizing the associated losses.

People who put much of their excess savings into an appreciating home they planned to sell to fund their retirement as they moved elsewhere to somewhere cheaper, but now have a home which as a step function is worth far less.

People who would be quickly underwater if the property market tanks deciding to jingle mail, leading to blighted streets for those who stayed.

Local property taxes pay for schools, fire departments, police, etc.

As far as the state being a perfect provider to step in ... in the US about half of healthcare spending is fraud. That the bill is passed onto someone else is a big slice of that (along with ignoring antitrust laws, local CON laws, illegal to import pharmaceuticals directly as a consumer, etc).

I used to live near Chicago as a kid & recalled this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini%E2%80%93Green_Homes "At first, the housing was integrated and many residents held jobs. This changed in the years after World War II, when the nearby factories that provided the neighborhood's economic base closed and thousands were laid off. At the same time, the cash-strapped city began withdrawing crucial services like police patrols, transit services, and routine building maintenance. ... On July 17, 1970, Chicago police patrolman Anthony N. Rizzato and Sergeant James Severin were shot and killed by gang members while patrolling community housing for an all-volunteer "Walk and Talk" project. As the officers proceeded across the Cabrini–Green baseball field, the assailants opened fire from an apartment window. The purpose of the shooting was to seal a pact between two rival gangs."

Which land will the free or subsidized housing go on? Will the people spending a grand or two a month in property taxes want the elevated crime levels near their own front door?

They could have charged a review fee to have an appraiser visit & make accurate price estimates & then let the homeowner keep the Zillow certified valuation label if they don't sell it to Zillow.

Some of those were even formally recognized as revenue trading agreements to show growth.

The rating agencies would rate just about everything https://www.cnbc.com/id/27321998

Official #1: Btw (by the way) that deal is ridiculous. Official #2: I know right...model def (definitely) does not capture half the risk. Official #1: We should not be rating it. Official #2: We rate every deal. It could be structured by cows and we would rate it.

And the parts that were so junky they couldn't be rated got remixed into another deal to get rated.

Big brands have the ad budget to advertise. That drives awareness. If they have offline stores, those can be thought of as both destinations AND interactive billboards which drive further brand awareness and demand for branded searches.

Many of the top search queries are navigational searches for brands.

And so if tons of people are searching for your brand then if there is a potentially related query that contains the brand term & some other stuff then they'll likely return at least a result or two from the core brand just in case it was what you were looking for.

Google takes 45% revshare on YouTube. Some videos that were demonetized still show ads, so on those Google is taking 100%.

I've seen mid-roll ads on songs on YouTube.

Hosting costs & delivery costs (per byte) drop every year. Every year their compression gets better. Every year their ad revenues goes up. YouTube ad revenues have been growing at something like 30% a year for many years.

I think one reason Google doesn't break out YouTube profitability is because as soon as they show they are profitable they end up getting some of their biggest partners (like music labels) using those profits to readjust revshares.

Also if Google claims YouTube is not profitable they can be painted as the victim for extremist content or hate content they host, whereas if they show they were making a couple billion year a year in profits these narratives would be significantly less effective.

Core search ad prices haven't really been falling yet Google blended click prices keep falling about 20% a year while ad click volume is growing about 60% a year. This is driven primarily by increasing watch time on YouTube and increasing ad load on YouTube. Google blends video ad views in with their "clicks" count.

Worth mentioning a couple factors related to this. You couldn't turn location data on for any service external to Google without also having it turned on for Google & even when you had location services turned off for Google sometimes they still had it turned on anyhow.

There are a few widespread scaled publishing operations like IAC which seems to be doing well with the split up of About.com & relaunching it as vertically focused branded sites, but the content farm business model died with the Panda update.

Some of the sites that were hit like Suite101.com went offline. eHow is still off well over 90%. ArticlesBase sold on Flippa for like $10k or some such. One of the few wins hiding in all the rubble was HubPages, but even they had to rebrand and split out sites & merged into a company with a market cap of about $26 million ... and the CEO of Hubpages is brilliant.

Even with IAC on some sites they are suggesting ad revenues won't be enough http://www.tearsheet.co/culture-and-talent/investopedia-laun... "As Investopedia charts its course as a media brand, it’s coming up against the roadblock all publishers eventually hit — the reality that display revenue alone won’t be enough. ... Siegel said he expects course revenue to exceed what’s generated from the site’s free content. While he wouldn’t say what the company’s annual revenue was, Siegel said it grew an average of around 30 percent for each of the last three years."

There is also other factors which parallel the panda update that further diminish the quick-n-thin rehash publishing business model - Google's featured snippets & knowledge graph pulling content into the SERPs so there is no outbound click on many searches - programmatic advertising redirecting advertiser ad spend away from content targeting to retargeting & other forms of behavioral targeting (an advertiser can use a URL as a custom audience for AdWords ad targeting even if that site does not carry any Google ads on it) - mobile search results have a smaller screen space where if there is any commercial intent whatsoever the ads push the organic results below the fold

I am not sure that this take is accurate.

I would agree that programming search results tend to be quite good, but I think this is likely in large part because the average person attracted to programming both has a high IQ and has experience building some part of the web stack. Thus the sites that are quite manipulative in nature would have a hard time trying to fake it until they make it in such a vertical where people are hard to monetize and are very good at distinguishing real from fake. And even if a fake site started to rank for a bit it would quickly fall off as discerning users gave it negative engagement signals.

This is also perhaps part of the reason sites like Stack Overflow monetize indirectly with employment related ads targeted to high value candidates versus say a set of contextually targeted ads on a typical forum page or teeth whitening gizmo ads on the Facebook ad feed.

The lack of filtering of "trash" probably comes from a bunch of different areas

- I think there was a quote that people are most alike in their base instincts and most refined in areas where they are unique. some of the most common queries are related to celebrity gossip & such. There are also flaws in human nature where inferior experiences win based on those flaws. For example, try to buy flowers online and see how many layers of junk fees are pushed on top of the advertised upfront low price. shipping, handling, care, weekend delivery, holiday delivery, etc etc etc

- some efforts to filter trash based on folding in end user data may promote low quality stuff that people believe in. a neutral & objective political report is less appealing than one which confirms a person's political biases. and in many areas people are less likely to share or consider paying for something neutral versus something slanted toward their worldview.

- as the barrier to entry on the web has increased some of the companies that grew confident they had a dominant position in a market may have decided to buy out other smaller players in the vertical & then degrade the user experience as real competition faded. there was a Facebook exec email mentioning they were buying Instagram to eliminate a competitor. Facebook's ad load is now much higher than it was when they were smaller. But the same sort of behavior is true in other verticals too. Expedia & Booking own most the top travel portals.

There has also been a ton of collateral damage in filtering all the trash. So many quirky niche blogs & tiny ecommerce businesses were essentially scrubbed from the web between Panda, Penguin & other related algo updates.

Thanks for sharing that :)

One interesting bit from the most recent IAC investor conference call is on it they mentioned that their search deal with Google was renewed for another 4 years & that the rev share on mobile was lower than it was in the past. An analyst asking a question mentioned both Google and Yahoo! were lowering revenue share on mobile.

There are numerous ways to interpret that. At a base level, one could look at how the mobile search results are sometimes a screen full of ads, or how in some verticals they are a screen full of ads followed by yet another screen full of ads.

And then there is the knowledge graph & other flavors of scrape-n-displace, which is largely content recycled from elsewhere, given prominent positioning not based on merit or editorial quality, but based on who the publisher (or recycler) is.

Another parallel trend would be the confirmation bias / brand bias factors promoting older and staler sites. Or simplified "take" articles in the mainstream media rather than the original source articles on niche hobbyist blogs and forums or such.

And in taking broad sets of new niche intents and trying to guide those streams of users back down well worn paths. For example, sometimes when you want to find a particular news story about a broad & well-known web platform like Apple, Amazon, Facebook, or Google it can be hard to find sites other than the official site. And on some other longtail queries Google rewrites what is being searched for in a way that brings up some results that don't match the true searcher intent. Probably the best example I can come up with on this front is say you wanted a pair of shoes of a specific brand, size, width, and model number. If they are not the most recent and most heavily marketed versions it can be tough. Auto-generated internal search pages on trusted brand sites rank well, while a small retailer carrying that specific shoe might be penalized by Panda.

It is worth pointing out just how pissed off Google engineers were publicly when they felt Bing was copying their search results.

https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses...

http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-...

"The SERPs are clean these days."

Here's an alternate take on that http://www.johnon.com/1075/bullish-on-seo-rankbrain-vs-seobr...

Did you get that $4 billion number from that quarterly results? Does that include things like their payments to Opera and Apple? Does it include search rev share deals with entities like AOL and Ask (& soon to be Yahoo)? Does it include paying from Chrome distribution bundled with Flash security updates & such? I have never seen the overall numbers broken down in terms of what percent goes where on the different sorts of syndication deals.

Three things which would be a major issue for Yahoo! on that sort of search would perhaps be first that they themselves rely so heavily on content syndication to power their various verticals, second they keep losing search market share (especially as more search happens on mobile devices and Google has mobile locked down with their Android contracts), and they also screwed up their old directory before they moved it to Yahoo! small business as part of the Alibaba share spinco.

I also don't see how Yahoo would effectively differentiate their search engine enough to be able to (profitably) buy share at prices set by Google, particularly if they over-promote their internal results & rely on a smaller search index.

Every time I travel (or am away from home for over a day straight on a weekday) I get a bit of anxiety from having to work on a laptop because it is so much less efficient. It is nearly impossible to be a company with say a couple employees total & stay competitive in saturated markets when one of the employees is on a laptop which lowers their working productivity by about 50%.

As a bonus, on my last trip, my laptop's hard drive had a corruption issue which I couldn't easily fix without wiping the drive. I should have had a backup laptop with me. Luckily I was able to borrow my wife's Windows Surface Pro & was flying back the next day after my laptop broke. But from my fear of working on laptops I really think the people who mention doing all their work from the phone are either crazy or they are thinking far into the future or they count chats / meetings at coffee shops as encompassing most of their work. :)

Granted, cell phones might eventually might get much better with keyboard and display hookups, but even the frequent moving them around (and the smaller size causing hot components to be closer together) makes them more likely to eventually run into some sort of issue than a desktop computer which just sits there & has more space to dissipate heat and such.

The assertion is 100% correct.

There are other reports out there & some of them do great breakdowns of click volume, click costs, click values & so on ... based on things like: device type (desktop vs tablet vs cell phones, or even across operating systems), branded keywords vs unbranded keywords, text ads vs PLAs/shopping ads, etc.

There are many such reports, but the SEM company which regularly puts out the best report on this front is RKG (which was bought out by Merkle last year http://www.merkleinc.com/news-and-events/press-releases/2014... and even after the buyout is still putting out great reports each quarter).

RKG's most recent report is downloadable here http://www.rimmkaufman.com/digital-marketing-report/ & it is something I read (and recommend) every quarter. :)

In the report, they stated they saw Google dramatically increase minimum CPC on own brand keywords over the past year, that brand keyword cost was up 39% YoY, and that Google was now charging brands more for clicks on their own brand terms than Bing does. You can see a quick review of their report here http://searchengineland.com/us-paid-search-growing-but-at-sl...

And there might be multiple factors in Google showing fewer ads. Some general assertions and/or hypothesis on potential drivers...

A rise in minimum CPCs on brand keywords might block out some of the lower value 3rd party arbitrage on the branded terms, Google might be showing larger ads (with more ad extensions) above the organic results & fewer ads in the right sidebar, some categories might have PLAs / shopping ads performing so strong that there is less need for text ads, in some categories (like hotel search) Google has effectively turned much of the "organic" search result set into another layer of ads via their hotel price ads, Google includes affiliate links in their knowledge graph, over time more of Google's search volume is on mobile devices with a smaller SERP interface & no right rail to show ads in, over time more of Google's search volume is in emerging markets with less shallower and less mature ad markets, etc etc etc

A few other things worth mentioning on their general economic trends: on smaller devices partners (outside of the big one in Apple) are easier for Google to squeeze out & represent a smaller share of Google's ad revenues, over the last couple years the partner network keeps comprising a smaller percent of Google's overall ad revenue (numerous sources on this front, like http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2013/10/anal... & http://blog.pagefair.com/2014/adsense-smoking-gun/ ), Google is getting higher revenue from clicks on Google.com & their regional search properties but the YouTube pre-roll ads generally go for less money (since they are earlier in the consumer funnel than search is & have less intent than a search does) & drag down the aggregate click price (because Google counts YouTube video ad views as clicks).

One other thing worth mentioning in terms of mobile is that while the mobile click values (and thus CPCs) are lower, Google offsets that by dominating the mobile interface with ads. 3 years back I wrote this post http://www.seobook.com/mobile-seo highlighting how Google had over double the CTR on mobile search ads as they did on desktop search ads. The top graph from that post came from an RKG quarterly report for that quarter.

After Wikia Search failed, there's no risk in Google further subsidizing the growth of Wikipedia so long as Google then gets to scrape back much of the value add via their knowledge graph & Wikia is primarily monetized via Google AdSense.

It makes sense Wikimedia didn't see an immediate donation drop. In terms of a conversion funnel, the people who are using Wikipedia for the first time are not likely to donate. My guess is most of the people who are most likely to donate a small amount here or there are the regular users who regularly seek out the site. The drop in donations due to the lower exposure would take years to kick in, because now with 20% or 30% fewer users, there will also be less new future power users who would donate in say 2018 or 2019. But offsetting any decline there for a company making over a billion a month in profits shouldn't be too substantial. Sergey Brin donates a half-million a year grant to the Wikimedia foundation & Google has also donated a few million.

It is also worth mentioning the knowledge graph now often contains affiliate links for things like music, ebooks, and so on. Over time more and more knowledge categories will have paid affiliate links in them (say booking a restaurant, heading to a concert, etc.)

In some cases Google may temporarily make a link type free to try to drive adoption and awareness, but over time it will be the same sort of scrape-n-displace they've done with hotel bookings. They not only turned the "organic" hotel search listings into a second set of paid ads, but now they are also testing having some users convert and buy the hotel booking while on Google.com - just like they are doing with their car insurance offering. And they have also added links to cityname hotel searches in their knowledge graph in order to drive more people into that "almost nothing but ads" funnel.

You can see the net effect of that sort of displacement on an industry by looking at all the consolidation in travel. Expedia acquired Travelocity and Orbitz. That leaves Expedia, Priceline & TripAdvisor as the remaining 3 big players. And even with TripAdvisor Google offered them and Yelp an ultimatum to allow Google to scrape/steal their reviews & if they wanted to opt out of that theft then they could use a robots directive to block Googlebot from indexing their site. That monopolistic abuse was so brazen it actually managed to draw the interest of regulators and politicians. Eric Schmidt did a fantastic job of misdirection & fibbing at the 2011 congressional hearing (ref http://www.benedelman.org/news/040115-1.html ) but the regulatory & political reviews forced Google to back away from at least that form of monopolistic bundling.

Though, of course, the same sort of behavior continues to this day in other forms. From just yesterday there's both https://twitter.com/chrispirillo/status/624630005734113280 & https://twitter.com/jeremys/status/624675646694780928

Even if they were popular enough to fill the seats they still lose, as they still lose those employees spending time on the phone to take the initial arbitrage reservation & then they lose time on the phone once again when the employee takes the arbitrage reservation cancellation call.

Then they can have a fleet of them which go into traffic at peak hours & allow people to bid to have them removed from traffic. ;)

Manual removal from the results supersedes the core relevancy algorithms.

Lots of misinformation in this post. It is almost hard to pick a spot to start.

>Google provided a search engine that worked better than any other so people started using it.<

While at the beginning this may have been true, over time that search engine has grown more parasitic in terms of things like scrape-n-displace knowledge graph results, AdWords ads on branded keyword terms where ads with junk bundleware rank above official sites, etc. http://blog.brandverity.com/2738/software-bundlers-target-br...

>People are still using it because it's still better than the others.<

Care to explain why Google is spending over a billion Dollars a year buying default search placement in other browsers like iOS & Mozilla Firefox? Any thoughts on the Flash security updates which hit other browsers and bundle Chrome's web browser in with it? Or how about the Android contracts with default search placement (and other forms of) bundling baked into them?

Google is spending well over a billion Dollars a year on the thesis that your thesis is wrong.

>It's not a monopoly.<

The hell it's not. At least if we use any of the standard definitions.

>You can use another search engine if you want to.<

And while an informed individual may choose to, the majority of people are driven by default settings which are purchased, as per the above.

>The site that emailed to get a link taken down employed an SEO agency to improve their rankings and they created a bunch of spammy links to try to manipulate Google into ranking that site higher than others that probably deserve to rank higher due to their content.<

Are you suggesting there are not false positives, or that competitors do not buy links to torch their competitors? Either such assertion is simply untrue.

>They got the warning because their link profile suggested that it was obvious they had been trying to manipulate rankings, not because they had one or two iffy ones.<

The second they there presumes a competitor didn't do them for it. Only a person ignorant of the field of SEO would presume this to be true in all cases.

>Re, the nofollow aspect. Google didn't "force" sites into using the nofollow attribute by scaring them into thinking that their rankings would drop. Nofollow was in place before there was any notion that who you linked to could harm you. Sites like Wikipedia and others were only too happy to add nofollow to links because it put spammers off from crapifying their sites.<

This is a complete misunderstanding of history, on numerous levels.

Nofollow was introduced as a (ineffective) solution to blog comment spamming. To help aid further/wider adoption, at some point some Googler's even suggested things like pagerank sculpting could be useful, up until some large sites started doing it excessively. They were looking for reasons to justify its widespread use, because Google intended from day one that the tag could then be spread onto paid links & other links they didn't want to count.

And the other level of absolute misunderstanding was that (before Google went on their fearmongering campaign about links) they in the past suggested that you couldn't control who links to you, but you could control who you link to & sites which linked to bad neighborhoods could indeed be penalized for it.

Very rarely is there a comment which is that long & that wrong. Impressive!

Many SEO consultants have suggested that even if you get the links removed, you should still disavow them in order to help speed up Google's evaluation of the links profile.

In those instances, even if you think you are being a good guy, there's a good chance you are wasting the one resource you can never recover (time) in an attempt to help someone who is likely going to attempt harming you AND waste your time.