Search Engine Roundtable

https://searchengineland.com/google-ebay-penalty-cost-197031 This relates to the ebay penalty. I think one of SEland's founders actually left to take a job at Google as an evangelist. You can probably search for "ebay seo penalty" and find more references. Other notable penalties that were well documented include RapGenius and GV backed Thumbtack and Nest, which quickly had their penalties reversed if I recall correctly. https://seobook.com/blog is the only place I follow any more, since it is more critical of the digital marketing ecosystem. There are so many snake oil salespeople and clueless marketers, so this is a refreshing commentary. https://seroundtable.com is good for rumors and breaking news. https://www.seobythesea.com/ a more technical blog that frequently examines Google's patents.

@ matt cutts How bout this example website:http://www.seroundtable.com All he do is copy content from forums and paste it on his blog by adding a couple of lines. This easily falls into following categories of Spam as mentioned by google 1. Thin Content 2. Copied Content So how bout banning this blog?

Hello from Google! I work for our search ranking team. Sadly, we can't control publishers who do things that we do not advise and do not recommend. We have no guidance telling publishers to get rid of "old" content. That's not something we've said. I shared this week that it is not something we recommend: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689018769782476800 This also documents the many times over the years we've also pushed back on this myth: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-dont-delete-older-helpful-content-…

For what it's worth, it looks like Jewglers is a name the group calls itself [0]. It doesn't appear to be some racist phrase the employee made up. [0] https://www.seroundtable.com/photos/google-jewglers-menorah-sticker-31…

> I think that Google uses stats on whether the user continued checking more results for that specific search query to determine if the visited result answered the user. God I hope not. If Google does do this, it sounds like a really dumb idea, which will ultimately create widespread usability issues. I can already envision SEO consultants recommending this for their clients if this is believed. Doesn’t look like it according to https://www.seroundtable.com/google-browser-back-button-rankings-23415…

As this post shows - it really depends on what you're doing :). There are services that can handle 100k QPS on a single machine, no problemo. There are services that can handle as little as 10 QPS per machine. Those are rather extreme cases. A classic example of a "cheap" service is something like Stack Overflow [1] or Wikipedia: serving content that is mostly static; you just gotta configure your caches well. A classic example of an "expensive" service: a search engine, where so many queries cannot be cached (too rare), or are even completely unique (never seen before [2]). [1] https://stackexchange.com/performance [2] https://www.seroundtable.com/google-15-percent-queries-25730.html

I agree complexity should be avoided. But I don't really follow the logic that if every feature can break security, reliability, etc. you should never change anything or progress. Google is doubling down on these features as you can see at https://www.seroundtable.com/google-pin-live-scores-28261.html. If they're continuing to invest in adding more realtime features, and penalising sites in search results that don't optimise their websites https://www.sitecenter.com/insights/141-google-introduces-penalty-for-… then I think they should apply that same logic to their own site IMHO.

The turning point for me was five years ago when they dropped the "Discussions" filter that would search mailing lists and forums. It was amazing for obscure technical and programming issues. Here's an article about it from the time: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-filters-gone-17993.html

If you have Google Analytics installed, I'd recommend looking into the medium/source. If nothing stands out there, then you'll have to dig a little deeper. To check for some bot/spam traffic, take a look into device, OS, geo, browser, and browser version to see if you can find a spike in a certain combination of those. (Apply secondary dimensions to dig deeper here.) Also check out your landing page(s) for this traffic too (applying an advanced segment could be useful here). After you find out these details but still are left without an answer, you may want to try searching online for others who may have experienced similar traffic (now that you know the finer details) and you may find an answer there. Ex. AdRoll was associated with a a big jump in traffic last year: https://www.seroundtable.com/adroll-invalid-traffic-18922.html

It's not just Google that recommends to avoid link spamming. For example, at http://www.seroundtable.com/bing-links-knowledge-18535.html you can read where Bing said "You should never know in advance a link is coming, or where it’s coming from. If you do, that’s the wrong path." When SEOs break the quality guidelines of all major search engines (not just Google), then they might need to do some work to clean things up if they get caught. One of the reasons that Google is such a popular search engine is that we do take spam seriously and we take action to counter spam.

Holy moly man, you were the one who provided that link: "It's not just Google that recommends to avoid link spamming. For example, at http://www.seroundtable.com/bing-links-knowledge-18535.html you can read where Bing said "You should never know in advance a link is coming, or where it’s coming from. If you do, that’s the wrong path." Your statement implies both Google and Bing share the same sentiment. So now, my question still stands: What about that scenario that I laid out is actually bad/spammy/evil? Why should anyone ever be punished for doing that?

I agree, this is primarily a consequence of being ad-supported. The same problem happens at Google, it is just less noticeable. Google is in the fortunate position of getting to do the best things for users for 99.5% of searches, it is the other .5% that they compromise on. At times, they have tried to do the best thing for customers on searches like "best morgage refinance rate", but in the end, they cancel the experiments because it would crush their revenues, and all the other good they are doing: http://www.seroundtable.com/mortgages-google-advisor-14813.html Google advisor was an amazing product that super beneficial to Google users, but the problem was it displaced $20/click ads.

Yep - not uncommon for spammers to create powerful link networks by buying up a bunch of quality domains, and then spamming links at what they want to rank for. It normally takes Google a few weeks/months to catch this stuff, so for super competitive terms, it's easy to make it worthwhile by ranking for something like "fast payday loans." Then when the domain gets penalized, rinse/repeating. Someone teased Matt Cutts with this a while back: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-payday-loan-cutts-16940.html

Google is doing something similar now[0], both from a searchers and a site owners perspective. Barry Schwartz regularly posts Google updates on his site[1], for over a decade no less. Since August 2023, those updates have been reaching the 500 mean comment range with many updates reaching 700-900 comment range. And this has been happening for 8 straight months! People have been robbed of their livelihoods and many have caught strays, with the culprit being that Reddit, Quora, and LinkedIn have tripled/doubled their traffic. I just don’t understand why Google can’t create a Discussions panel and let people decide what they want to view as opposed to flat out cutting creators off at the knees. No content creator thinks to themselves, “let me go write my next article on Reddit”. Now they are throwing AI in the mix also which is probably the dumbest thing they could have done, but I get why they are doing it. I hope it clicks for Google soon that they are “fucked” and will never recover users they lost to OpenAI, etc. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40067605 [1]: https://www.seroundtable.com/category/google-updates

Here's an article that summarizes the issue: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-deletes-queries-replace-36165.html Personally, I dislike this approach by Google (from their response): > "It’s no secret that Google Search looks beyond the specific words in a query to better understand their meaning, in order to show relevant organic results. This is a helpful process that we’ve written about many times." This is patronizing, manipulative, and condescending - and 'organic'? They've also been boosting low-quality corporate media outlets to the top of their search rankings for some years now (Youtube search is far, far worse incidentally), as well - part of this 'daddy knows best' mentality, I'm sure. Google does provide a 'verbatim' option under its tools heading but this is incompatible with time-restricted searching, although perhaps not on the advanced search page. Practically I find that to get what I want from Google (search results from a broad range of sources) you have to jump through many hoops and write complicated queries for no reason other than to avoid their enshittification defaults, and that's a time-consuming process. It makes Kagi look more and more attractive, certainly - the time-saving alone might be worth the monthly fee.

The followup https://www.seroundtable.com/google-adsense-auto-redirect-bug-19720.ht… mentions it was Flash ads in 2015, which... of course they were. And not sure if it was the same instance, but also in 2015, https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/us/security/news/cybercrime-and-digit… mentions it was a Flash zero-day that was exploited, which... of course it was. I'd love to see if there was anything from the post-Flash era, but this certainly answers the root question. Google, knowing that Flash was a security disaster waiting to happen, happily served those types of ads, which I now realize I'd seen all over but in the moment hadn't thought they were Google's doing. And they could have done virus scanning on every bit of ActionScript flowing through their channels, but they didn't. Yea, the OP's point is well taken.

SEO professional here, I can't see the article due to the wide-spread outage but have reviewed the comments here, comments in closed FB groups, and injected links on sites from this tool, as well as the tool's admission of such links on their site. This tool is most likely owned by a publisher attempting to steal SEO link value from user websites, it is also possible they are selling these links outright or via a PBN system. This type of link building was a common practice in the early 00's used by CMS theme developers and tool makers alike to gain link value. Google took a stand against "widget links", which is likely what these would be classified as, and as recent as 2016 even warned against their usage: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2016/09/a-reminder-about-wid… A year later Google's John Mueller, a trends analyst who often also acts as a liasion between Google and the webmaster community, stated that Google might automatically apply a 'nofollow' attribute to these types of links, effectively killing their ability to siphon SEO link value to improve themselves: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-auto-nofollow-widget-links-23869.h… We have noted in our agency research for clients several similar usages over the past few years that appear to be giving websites positive value instead of either being ignored or penalized, including a WordPress plugin that injects links on government and collegiate websites. The way Google assigns value based on links…

Seems like a mixed blessing for users. I just started too realize that I'm getting links like https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2010/sep/06/g… from Google. Sites load fast and webmasters seem to like it (1), but I think it's a terrible user experience if you want to share the link etc. Apparently, Google will address this someday (2). Regarding the issue mentioned here, of course Google can’t give direct support to all webmasters. But in my experience, the Webmaster forum is a great place to get help as it is full of smart users (and Googlers). Then I would say that, as I used to work for Google. (1) http://digiday.com/publishers/publishers-excited-google-amp-traffic-wo… (2) https://www.seroundtable.com/google-disable-amp-feedback-22173.html (3) https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/webmasters

1) Make sure you have a Google Webmaster Tools account and see if your site has any warnings and/or other problems identified by Google. 2) Think about reducing the number of links on the homepage, and increasing the amount of content. Maybe a greeting for new users letting them know what your about. Overall your homepage is covered in links and as a user at first glance nothing stands out and I'm likely to hit the backspace button. 3) Create a better site structure (clear tiers of content), its very hard to navigate your site. 4) Get rid of empty pages like this: http://www.cardboardconnection.com/2011-topps-tier-one-baseball. 5) Make sure you aren't copying other's content and they aren't scrapping yours see: http://www.copyscape.com/?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cardboardconnection.com%2… 6) Save posts like these for Twitter and Facebook: http://www.cardboardconnection.com/hockey/amazing-patches-from-2011-it… 7) A new design with larger font, different colour scheme and better plugins (commenting, ratings, etc) is in order. 8) Get rid of the Hot Auctions tab, link to eBay from the product page and not a secondary link farm looking tab. 9) Despite all these minor problems (and there's more) the quality of content on site is pretty poor, I guess if I was coming for the history of some cards maybe your site would be helpful but the content is written in a detached, impersonal tone that doesn't garner links or Google…

I hope this doesn't seem self serving, but seomoz.org has some of the highest quality information you can find on SEO. In addition to that, I'd suggest articles on http://searchengineland.com/ - they offer high quality content and news in the industry. Anything written by Vanessa Fox on SEL is usually great. Guides like Excel for SEO shows some of the basic stuff we do: http://www.distilled.net/excel-for-seo/ For high level patent / research based SEO, nobody does it better than http://www.seobythesea.com/ (his URLs are ugly, but his content is great) For specific beliefs on how the algo works, this is a good resource: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors SEOmoz has webinars and a PRO Q&A. Distilled.net also offers videos of our conferences. As for books, the best I've read are Art of SEO, which is co-written by Rand, and SEO Secrets by Danny Dover (formerly of SEOmoz, now at AT&T) which talks more about the consulting side. The problem with books is that stuff can go out of date quickly. If you're reading a book that talks about PageRank sculpting, for example, it's dated. Other great sites: http://www.seobook.com/ - high level opinions and analysis of industry issues http://www.seroundtable.com/ - recap of industry news and forums http://www.searchenginejournal.com/ - lots of tactical articles Things I've written for…

More reporting without paywall and link to the court filing here: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-lawsuit-serpapi-dismissed-41731.ht…

> Hush, don't remind them that they have RSS feeds, or they might remove them altogether. Twitter had RSS feeds many moons ago: * https://www.seroundtable.com/twitter-rss-depreciated-16973.html

I don't know which product you're even talking about. If you mean AI Overview, you really need to cite the source of this claim: > seeing that it drives consumers away from your product Because every single source I can find claims that Google search grew in 2024[0]. HN is not a good focus group for a product that targets billions of people. [0]: For example https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-growth-39040.html but feel free to provide a more credible source that claims the opposite.

Related: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-bug-leads-too-many-search-ads-4012…

Note, Google also uses user interaction data from Chrome to influence the search results. [0] [0] https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-user-interaction-signals-36…

The site also disables the back button (on mobile Chrome). I have no idea why the site owner thinks their site was downranked (and the article never says: it assumes some context I lack), but I cynically wonder if it's related to the back-button and video-ad thing. Edited to add: This article here provides some information about the meeting/roundtable thing described in TFA. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-creator-summit-38196.html

The "lies" there are such bullshit. They basically consist of "Google claimed they didn't do X" now it looks like they probably do X and therefore google lied. They are somewhat circumspect about the fact that each example is actually, 8+ years ago Google made a claim about what they did at the time and now there's evidence that they are currently doing doesn't match that claim. That's not a lie. For example, they link to this tweet from 2016 as such a claim: https://ipullrank.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/image21.png Or a later example where they link to this 2016 talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJPu4vHETXw Later on, they use claims from 2012: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-chrome-search-usage-15618.html

True. Though the majority of their content is SEO related https://www.seroundtable.com/category/misc

Google's response to the claims: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-responds-garbage-ai-content-in-goo…

G Double check button only gives one reference(at least in my examples) but it seems like Bard does not give references by design[1][2]. Websites are kinda getting ripped off, because Google is not referencing them and giving them exposure and traffic. But Bard is still in the experimental phase so I hope that will change. [1] https://searchengineland.com/google-explains-why-bard-rarely-lists-cit… [2] https://www.seroundtable.com/google-bard-wont-link-to-sources-too-ofte…