Archive for October, 2009
Many SEO’s and Google themselves have been preaching the relative un-importance of visual page rank for ages….now it appears Google is finally ready to put its words into action – they have removed Google page rank from being reported in Google Webmaster Tools and here is the official explanation:
Susan Moskwa from the Google Webmaster Central team explained it was removed because Google keeps telling webmasters “that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much.” They felt it was “silly” to keep telling webmasters that, and at the same time show it in Webmaster Tools. So Google removed it from Webmaster Tools. I think this is a good thing, since I agree it is obsessed over too much, plus what Google showed in Webmaster Tools was not very useful to webmasters.
Good first step, now let’s see what other changes this leads to.
It seems MFA sites have been hit with low quality scores and are being warned/banned by the truckload!! This is great news for ‘real’ adwords users because now the bids won’t be artificially pumped up with the estimated 10-15 million MFA sites rotting the web.
Here are some excerpts from a thread over at Webmaster World:
“they are still at it.. got a few campaigns hit by 1/10 QS.. Ads that have been running for last 2 years with no change in ‘domain’ or anything.. They just decided overnight that they are low quality..”
“Our affiliate/partner sites which were running for over 3 years without any change are now 1/10 …The problem is bigger because some of our other websites which are not connected to affiliate/partner business in any way, and have order form on our own domains and we sell it from our stock, they are also 1/10 … This websites have PR5″
“My site went to QS 1/10 after 2 years of not having any issues, I have been using adwords since 05″
“This thread is such a nightmare for adWords users. Anyone who hasn’t got the dreaded mail must be thinking.. I am next. I keep logging in and checking my adwords a/c every few minutes. Getting paranoid. Horrible feeling..”
“Another account banned here. I have gotten warnings in the past, but feel they were unjustified. I talked to my reps about these warnings and they gave me recommendations, but never told me that if they were not resolved you will be banned. This account has been online for 5+ years and we spend about 100k per year in advertising.”
The whole thing sounds brutal and you can follow the thread here http://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adwords/3995572.htm
It is official, Yahoo! is not longer considering the ‘keyword’ tag when ranking websites in their search results. Google stopped paying attention to these many eons ago but it seems Yahoo! has finally followed suit. It was just too easy to manipulate so I am not really surprised. This tidbit of info came out Tuesday during the SMX East conference.
For a long time, the industry some what made fun of Yahoo for using it (at all) for ranking purposes. Then, during the Q&A period of the session, Cris Pierry, Senior Director, Search, Yahoo said at 2:09pm (EST), that they no longer use the meta keywords tag for rankings. In fact, Yahoo stopped using it a “few months ago,” said Pierry.
I was kind of funny when Danny asked Cris, why didn’t Yahoo announce this? Cris basically shrug his shoulders. He then asked Cris, “are you sure?” Cris gave me a look, the look like, that was a dumb question, since he is the man now behind Yahoo Search.
So don’t bother optimizing (stuffing) your keyword meta tags anymore because none of the search engines really care!
After some SEO testing proved this to be incorrect Yahoo! stepped in with an explanation.
What changed with Yahoo’s ranking algorithms is that while we still index the meta keyword tag, the ranking importance given to meta keyword tags receives the lowest ranking signal in our system.
Words that appear in any other part of documents, including the body, title, description, anchor text etc., will take priority in ranking the document – the re-occurrence of these words in the meta keyword tag will not help in boosting the signal for these words. Therefore, keyword stuffing in the keyword tag will not help a page’s recall or ranking, it will actually have less effect than introducing those same words in the body of the document, or any other section.
However, when no other ranking signal is present, unique words that only appear in the meta keyword tag section of documents can still be used to recall these documents.
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