June 8, 2005
In
This Issue:
1. Google's Human Touch
2. In the News - Google Bourbon, Google Sitemaps
3. More News Headlines
4. This Week's Q&A - Graphic-heavy designs
& SEO
5. Wrapping It Up
_________________
Google's Human Touch
The search world is all abuzz this week about
the discovery that Google, which uses ultra-complex
algorithms to rank web pages, also has an army
of humans that review Google SERPs and can apparently
manually tag certain pages as "spam."
On the one hand, it makes perfect sense that Google,
like any company, would take part in quality testing
of its product. As you can imagine, though, some
webmasters and SEOs are up in arms about the possibility
that these workers (quite often college students)
are able to identify certain pages as spam. Are
they really qualified to do that? What if they
mistakenly label a page/site as offensive? How
does Google handle the recommendations from these
testers? There are obvious implications here,
especially when you consider that Google has long
said that there's no human element in the SERPs,
it's all automated.
I'm not going to use this space to get into a
Right/Wrong discussion. But if you can follow
the links and how this has developed over the
past week, you can learn a LOT about how Google
identifies "offensive" web pages ...
and, thusly, make sure you don't do those things
yourself. Here are the relevant links:
Search Bistro: Google
Secret Lab
Search Bistro: Flash
Animation showing how the evaluation software
works
Search Bistro: Google's
"Spam Recognition Guide for Raters"
(great stuff)
Search Bistro: Google's
"General Evaluation Guidelines"
(great stuff)
The above links and documents are from the gentleman
who first posted about this discovery, which came
from a student in his class who was working for
Google as a "rater." Here are two discussions
about the whole thing:
Threadwatch: Google's
Secret Army?
WebmasterWorld: eval.google.com
In that last link, a Google spokesperson discusses
the program and calls it "a console to evaluate
quality passively, not to tweak our results actively."
And at the well-respected Search Engine Watch,
Danny Sullivan adds his opinion: "What almost
certainly is not happening is that the human reviewers
are actually moving sites up and down with their
ratings."
And I really suggest you get the DOC and PDF files
linked above for some insight into how Google
trains people to rate web sites and recognize
spam.
_________________
In The News
Google Bourbon Update
Meanwhile, if you watch Google SERPs closely you
may have noticed some recent changes. (I haven't,
actually, but I've been too swamped to really
investigate in great detail.) The update they're
in now has been dubbed "Bourbon" (no
idea), and Google has confirmed that changes have
been going on over the past week or two. And in
a recent post, Google's spokesperson suggests
changes should continue to be seen over the next
week or two. Something worth keeping an eye on,
and you can do so easily by reading GoogleGuy's
ongoing updates on WebmasterWorld.
WMW: GoogleGuy's
posts
Google SiteMaps
Our all-Google newsletter continues with news
of Google SiteMaps, launched late last week. This
is a tool that allows webmasters to feed Google
pages that you'd like to have included in Google's
web index. It's free and there's no guarantee
that what you feed will get added to Google. It
requires you know how to make an XML file with
the URLs of the pages you want crawled.
Google
SiteMaps
SEW Blog: Interview
with Google's lead on the Sitemaps project
_________________
More News Headlines
Here are a few news headlines worth your time to read.
These are just some of the headlines we've posted
to OWTweb.com in recent
days.
How
not to work with an SEO/SEM firm
June 06, 2005 - ClickZ.com
Search,
banners, email: A tale of two marketing plans
June 06, 2005 - ClickZ.com
Moms
are choosey about retail e-mail newsletters, study
says
June 03, 2005 - Internet Retailer
More headlines: http://www.owtweb.com/news/
_________________
This Week's Q&A
Hi Matt,
I think we have a problem with our web site design,
and would like to know if there's a way to solve
it without redesigning the site. That's not an
option.
The problem is that there's not as much text-based
content on the home page (and other pages) as
a search engine would like, I'm sure, and it's
probably too graphic heavy. We do have some good
content on the site, but I think it might be too
deep or too hard to find and won't rank well.
Anything we can do to get around this short of
redesigning the site, which isn't going to happen?
Jack
Hi Jack --
Thanks for the email. Let me ask you this: Have
you done a site map? If not, I would recommend
it. Create a site map in the root of your web
site, such as www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.html,
and link to it somewhere on your graphic-heavy
home page. The site map should be an accurate
map of the pages you have, though if we're talking
hundreds or thousands of pages, you may want to
limit the map to the main sections of the site
and perhaps the most important deep-level pages.
Here in the site map is where you can help a crawler
find those deep pages with good content. If the
site map is plainly linked from your home page,
the crawlers should have no trouble finding it,
and then crawling to the pages you describe on
the site map.
(Have a question? Email questions@owtweb.com)
_________________
Wrapping it Up
Hope business online is treating you well. Please
send in questions to help restock for the newsletter....
Thanks for reading,
Matt McGee
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