SEO: 4 things huge sites are allowed to do but you’re not.

by Brandrsn • 12 years ago

111 40 12 years ago

devx• 12 years ago

I've also noticed sites like TheVerge do native advertising in a way that's very hard to tell until you actually see the article. And I don't think I've seen any "Sponsored" or similar tag anywhere close to the article, which I believe is in Google's policy.

Google itself seems to be doing this, too (not properly labeling ads), while telling everyone else not to do it and penalizing them.

sogen• 12 years ago

Agreed, Google Ads now look exactly like search results, dark pattern!

Karunamon• 12 years ago

Aside from the bright yellow "AD" lozenge right next to those, you mean. And the separation between them and the rest of the results..

mrsaint• 12 years ago

When Google replaced other search engines like Altavista back in the last century, one thing that made it so special was that it was fully automated and didn't seem to favor anyone. Nowadays, post-Panda, things seem to have become a lot more murky, and I am not sure whom to thank for that (overzealous SEO folks perhaps who had tried to game Google's algorithm?). I mean seriously, have you ever received one of those "Please remove the link to our website from your website because the link hurts us" requests? At the same time as this article pointed out the new rules don't seem to apply equally, making things even more murky. Curious where we're heading with that...

bhartzer• 12 years ago

I think you mean post penguin, not post panda. Penguin is all about links, panda is about on site content.

lazyant• 12 years ago

silly question: how do you know a link hurts you?

moron4hire• 12 years ago

I would like to know as well.

blauwbilgorgel4• 12 years ago

Google won't give you the exact links that hurt you. I think if they did, then people would just disavow those specific links and go on spamming (hoping some other links would stick). Not really a lesson to learn there.

They do give you increasingly more information in Webmaster Tools about "unnatural links to your website": https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2700611?hl=en They task you to read the guidelines on linking: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356 and to apply your new-found knowledge to clear any suspicious links from your incoming links list. Then to kindly ask those other webmasters to remove those links (instead of spamming them for link requests). It is like a spammer rehabilitation program :). The spammer mindset is pretty cruel, selfish and destructive. You can't be too nice. That forms a pretty complex game theory with difficult opponents. Yet Google is somehow changing their opponents to clear up the spam they've created and cower in fear every time they announce an algorithmic update.

ig1• 12 years ago

I didn't read the whole article but from the first example it's not particular strong. Google discourages widget back-links but that's far from considering it black-hat.

There doesn't seem to be any evidence suggesting that Google treat widget back-links differently depending on who the widget is from.

emhart• 12 years ago

It gets much stronger

EDIT: Though the vitriol does go off the rails a bit toward the end...

jacquesm• 12 years ago

1 thing you're allowed to do: Ignore google completely. Build your business in such a way that it works, with or without google sending you traffic. That way you don't need to lose sleep over your rankings and you don't need to panic every 6 months when google updates their algorithms in a major way.

Just treat them like you would treat the weather, enjoy it when it's nice but make sure your business runs even when it is raining. If you're dependent on Google for your traffic you are doing it wrong.

joosters• 12 years ago

It's such a huge source of traffic that you cannot ignore it, much as you might like to. Of course you're allowed to ignore it, you'll just suffer badly if you do.

ssharp2• 12 years ago

You can build your business in such a way that it works with or without Google, but it's going to work a lot better with Google than without it.

People do lose sleep over rankings, because in some industries, the amount of traffic and business generated by organic search is substantial. If you're relying almost entirely on Google search traffic, you are doing it wrong, but if you're ignoring organic optimization, you're also doing it wrong. Telling people who may be making many millions of dollars in revenue from organic search to just "treat it like the weather" is horrible advise. I think I know what you're saying, build up other traffic channels, but the way you're phrasing it makes that harder to see. At some point as marketing grows, most websites start branching off into many, many different areas -- paid, social, email, etc. -- but organic search is still a big part of the mix.

Panda and Penguin finally backed up what Google had been saying for years. The problem is that there is always a gap between what Google says to do and when Google chooses to specifically enforce what it had been saying. In the meantime, lot's of people exploit that gap.

The best long-term move is to do what's right, but when you see cases like this, you really lose trust in how Google is treating websites.

oneeyedpigeon3• 12 years ago

The trouble is, anything you do to try to gain favour with a search indexer:

a) Is going to distract from the quality of your content, unless you should be doing it anyway

b) Is going to be irrelevant (at best) or counter to your original intent (at worst) when the indexer's algorithm changes, and Google are changing their algorithm all the time, with far more resources behind it than you have to keep up with it.

lmm• 12 years ago

Google has an effective monopoly on search, so you can't just ignore them.

securingsincity• 12 years ago

I know Matt Cutts is a HN user would love to see him way in as he did on the Rap Genius controversy

jawns• 12 years ago

The most egregious example of a huge site doing things that smaller sites are not allowed to do is ...

GOOGLE!

Recently, I've seen its "survey wall" cropping up on more and more sites.

It works like this:

You do a Google search. You see a link to an article you want to read. You click through.

You're met with a message that tells you that if you want to actually read the page, you have to complete a survey.

And the whole thing is powered by Google: http://thenextweb.com/media/2011/10/31/googles-latest-conten...

Remember back when Experts Exchange tried to pull the same nasty tactic -- have its cake (get indexed in Google search results) and eat it too (hide that content behind a paywall)? Remember how slimy it was, and how Google penalized it several times, as it tried various other ways to cloak its content?

Well ... Google is doing exactly the same thing.

oneeyedpigeon3• 12 years ago

Weird - I have never seen this, and I don't have an adblocker installed, javascript disabled, etc. I wonder if this is geolocation- or browser-specific?

streptomycin2• 12 years ago

As of last year, it only showed surveys to users from US/UK/Canada. Not sure how much things have changed by now, but it's definitely not global yet. I also heard that it didn't work in Safari, but I'm not sure if that was just a temporary thing.

hagbardgroup• 12 years ago

It's not really cloaking, because it shows a snippet first. It's a good product for publishers who don't want to clog their pages with display ads. Would you rather that, or a godawful interstitial?

stevenleeg• 12 years ago

I've actually noticed Chegg doing the exact same thing experts exchange did.

For example, if I'm looking up homework help for second order differential equations, I'd see something like this[1] in the Google results. Does anyone know why is this not being penalized?

[1] – http://www.chegg.com/homework-help/questions-and-answers/1-f...

digitalengineer• 12 years ago

Same as Quora. I can google it and clcik the link to it, but then it's blurred and I need to login to see answers: "You must be signed in to read this answer."

gk1• 12 years ago

On the flip side of this is Google Consumer Surveys[0], which is actually quite useful. You set up a survey, specify your target demographics, and Google takes care of finding participants. How does it get participants? With the popups you mentioned.

[0] https://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/home

smackfu• 12 years ago

I would hope that ads are generally useful to the people placing them.

fear91• 12 years ago

The best thing is they punish you for "ads above the fold" and actively de-index "scraper websites". Matt Cutts preaches how bad it is constantly.

Ironically, what Google could be summed up as is a scraper website absolutely FULL of ads above the fold ( http://searchengineland.com/figz/wp-content/seloads/2012/01/... ). If you place ads like Google does, your website won't rank shit.

blauwbilgorgel4• 12 years ago

Google's search result pages don't rank high either. I agree that it is a negative, but I do not see the double standard.

To equate Google.com with a scraper site that scrapes StackOverflow and tries to outrank the original by changing publishing date and other nasty tricks is not too sane. There is no double standard and there is no fair comparison.

It is not Matt Cutts who preaches how bad it is; it is the users (you and me) who are complaining about this and asking Google to take action. It is the user metrics showing something is wrong with the quality or experience.

Finally it is about intent. The spirit of the guidelines. It is only when blackhat spammers start exploiting techniques, that those techniques become punishable offences or are taken away. Google gives us popular search keywords? Spammers will automatically create crappy pages to target those. You can get a site to link to you by writing a quality article for their visitors? Spammers will write or outsource crappy articles and ruin article marketing for everyone. You are a charity and you want to create a widget with a link back to your site? Bummer... better add nofollow, because spammers used baity widgets like "Which zombie am I?" to link back to their clients' websites with targeted unrelated keywords.

If you go to the Google search results do you think: Damn what a commercial site! Animated ads everywhere! And all these scraped results they are trying to rank for without giving credit to the content creators...?

"Ads above the fold" are usually Google's own advertisements. They ding webmasters for forcing their own ads onto their readers. So it is a decision about quality and reputation, not money or bullying small sites.

Do the all-things-being-equal test. Two sites equal in all regards, yet one has animated advertisements above the fold. Which one would satisfy your users the most? It's a tiny factor, but it is there. And it is there for a good, not a nefarious, reason.

streptomycin2• 12 years ago

A paywall and a surveywall are not "exactly the same thing". The surveys take about 5 seconds to complete. It's more like how many videos on YouTube and elsewhere show an ad before playing, except those video ads are typically much longer and more annoying.

blauwbilgorgel4• 12 years ago

This is clickbait. The last story they had on HackerNews was shortly after the RapGenius drama. According to someone smeared in that story they tried to blackmail him: Pay us and we won't publish. Tweets from them collaborate this: "It is a report on Expedia BH (Blackhat) SEO, check your G+ account Martin, anyone in charge can contact us back. Yes, my husband contacted you there, please keep communication with him.". I usually do not mind an agenda, but in this case I do not want any HN readers burned by this company. This post will give them 1000s of visitors and perhaps a few clients.

So there definately is an agenda. Google banned a few of these people's sites. They are not happy about that. But they still have something worthwhile to say right? Wrong. This is only written to create uninformed controversy and a difficult PR problem for Google.

They are not insiders leaking how big sites do shady SEO. They were creating spammy small sites and sometimes were sourced to write linkstuffed articles for bigger sites. They can see just as much as we can see.

We don't know if these tactics are even working. Maybe Google already discounted any links, through algorithmic detection, spam reports or manual spam fighters. Who knows? Certainly not the spammers that were caught time and time again: Proving Google is way ahead of them. Google can't ever say: These guys are right, we favor big sites. But that is the popular sentiment they are exploiting. One does not have to feel sorry for Google, but I hope people realize the position they're in here.

If you want to know more about how Google fights spam (they probably dinged a few major sites during the time it took me to write this post): http://www.google.com/insidesearch/howsearchworks/fighting-s...

If you want actionable SEO advice for your startup: http://hackersandfounders.tv/RDmt/rand-fishkin-inbound-marke... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=El3IZFGERbM

MichaelTieso2• 12 years ago

I'm sorry but you are incredibly misinformed. As someone that has sold sponsored posts for a very long time with some of the biggest websites on the internet, I can confirm to you that it is happening at a much larger scale than you can ever imagine. For those that know, this story is not really news and has been going on for several years. Google has indeed been fighting spam and has done a decent job at it but in many cases the smaller sites are the ones affected the most and the big name sites get away with it.

"We don't know if these tactics are even working." They are working. Google is catching up but it's still FAR from being ahead in fighting these blackhat SEO practices. What you mean is that Google WON'T be saying "these guys are right, we favor big sites" but the reality is they do.

I made a fairly large comment on here with the last report. Many of the comments said "show me proof!" which then I came along and did just that. Matt Cutts reached out to me shortly after and I forwarded over emails received from Expedia. The funny thing is, a few weeks after that I STILL got emails from Expedia BUT it wasn't from Expedia.com. "Only Expedia.com was affected so we're still going to sell links for Expedia.co.uk". It amazes me sometimes how blind everyone is about this.

franze• 12 years ago

the hypothesis here is that: big sites do shitty SEO but they are still big sites, that is why google is evil.

this hypothesis if flawed: just because they are big site - and are still big and show up in google - does not mean that they get away with it.

google's response - from algorithms, mini algorithms (which just target a specific vertical of sites) and spam actions - are most of the time subtle and seldomly targeted at a whole site (especially if the site overall delivers some value)

i have consulted websites - market leaders in their markets and vertical - which had major SEO issues from their technical setup (shooting themselves in the foot) + manual penalties + (user generated) spam issues on their site. still they were the market leaders from brand perception and overall site traffic. they were performing well compared to the competition, they were not performing well compared on how well they could (and later did) perform without these issues.

my recommendation of loves looking at crappy SEO at other sites: And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? - in general a better use of your time and ressources

techaddict009• 12 years ago

Seeing recent Top news related to SEO on HN it seems like backlinks is the key to rank in Google.

Quality of content and Quantity doesn't matter all what matters is backlinks!

miamidesign• 12 years ago

I wrote about this sort of thing back in May http://www.whitehatseo.org/ethics/cnet-news-storm

gesman• 12 years ago

All of bad, big sites spent tons of cash of Adwords.

No one at google is going to penalize the "giving hand"

paxtonab• 12 years ago

My first impression on reading this article is that the sites he names (techcrunch, careerrookie, etc.) have hundreds of thousands of indexed pages of actual content. They may be being practicing black hat seo (or just wasting marketing dollars), but their content is actually relevant, and their referral traffic from these links probably outweighs any SEO penalties they are receiving for these practices.

It should be pretty obvious that you can't spend a weekend creating an SEO link farm and expect to get to the front page of Google... Try bankrolling a professional editorial staff for a year and generate actual content in whatever niche you want and then run your anchor text experiment. Post a link to HN with those results!

MichaelTieso2• 12 years ago

The solution to this: penalize sites for 3-6 months regardless of how big or small they are. I see far too often big sites getting a small slap on the hand then get fixed up real fast back to where they were before. They gain much more out of it by doing blackhat SEO and risking becoming penalized for a few days. Most sites I've seen get penalized go right back to selling and buying links not long after they've been fixed up.

SEO: 4 things huge sites are allowed to do but you’re not.

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