Questions for GoogleGuy

[Brett_Tabke]

Rules of this thread:

1- ask one question
2- be brief.
3- no commenting on other posts.
4- no specifics please
5- violators will go posting off ;-)
6- 1 q - 1 q only.
7- thread will be scrubbed of junk/offtopic/etc

After we get 10-20 q's we will submit them to the plex...

[mblair]

Are there any rules of thumb, other than Google's webmaster guidelines, that can help a new website get balanced consideration by Google for good rankings in the SERPs or is it prudent for the webmaster to plan for a neccesary passage of time before a website has a potential to rank well?

[GoogleGuy]

Freedom, fair points--I hate spam pages that use AdSense. I'm talking to some people on that side of the company about how to get spam out of AdSense. It may be that we can designate a keyword to use (like "spamreport") in the "Ads by Goooogle" feedback link. A few weeks ago, that form didn't send back the publisher id as well, or at least not in the database that I saw. I think that they were going to add that though. Once that's working, it would provide a simple way to report a spam page with AdSense right from that page.

Ask folks about this more in New Orleans too, but I'm working on it. In the meantime, use the Campaign Negative Sites feature of AdWords to specify any sites that you don't want your ads to show on. That's an indirect signal of feedback as well.

[Natashka]

where can I report a bad site? I know you mentioned a form, but the form suggests you only enter 1 URL at a time. And what if I found a site (not my competitor btw) that has 100,000 (!) pages in Google, all with black text on black background, and all pointing to a porn site (while using non-adalt text on these doorways). I cannot enter 100,000 URLs manually, I need to notify somebody "human", so they can review it. Is there any email I can send abuse report to and explain the situation?

[GoogleGuy]

steveb, I think this summer would be a great time to look at refreshing the Supplemental Results for the reasons I mentioned over in [webmasterworld.com...]

[GoogleGuy]

abbeyvet, gotcha covered with Freedom's points. I would emphasize this to engineers in New Orleans, b/c there will both quality engineers and engineers from the ads side of things there.

[GoogleGuy]

victor, I'll take that as a feature request:

The Google Web Directory integrates Google's sophisticated search technology with Open Directory pages to create the most useful tool for finding information on the web.

should be something like

The Google Web Directory integrates Google's sophisticated search technology with Open Directory pages to create a pretty darn useful tool for finding information on the web.

Thanks for mentioning this. :)

[xyzzyx]

Thanks for the response - it helps restore some confidence after being hit badly by bourbon

[GoogleGuy]

(I'm starting to enter flash mode.)

JudgeJeffries, I see reinclusions go through, and there's a fair number of them. Once it reaches a person to investigate, I'd budget four weeks up to six weeks for it to show up.

Things that help: lots of details about how it happened, how the stuff was cured, and how it won't be happening again. Smaller problems in quality (10 words of hidden text as opposed to thousands of cloaked, redirecting doorways pages).

Things that hurt: when the site is less mom&pop or genuine, and more buy-cheap-viagra-for-my-debt-consolidation-loans.com or suchlike. The intent and scale and recency of the actions can also be taken into account.

[Kubano]

GG, can you confirm if going URL-only for almost all the pages of a given domain means a penalty?

[kartiksh]

Does non commercial content is still more important than commercial content for Google?

[GoogleGuy]

xyzzyx, if there's Allegra-style shakeups after Bourbon is done, I'll probably set up a special keyword or way to give feedback. I'm going to hold off for now since things are still midway though.

[ncgimaker]

Googleguy what is 1/0?

[GoogleGuy]

inbound, we're pretty allergic to the suggestion when people suggest that we take money for reviewing sites (or reviewing sites for reinclusion). Our skin starts to break out and my shoulder feels all itchy. Several very smart people have suggested it, and I'm not saying we'd never do it, but the whole notion of pay-for-inclusion or pay-for-review or pay-for-rereview-after-you've-caught-me-spamming isn't something that I foresee us doing anytime soon. It's a slippery slope that could easily lead to a conflict of interest.

[kbba04527]

...adding to that what.

What is the meaning of life?

[GoogleGuy]

ncgimaker, NaN. ;)

[mickeymart]

" Bourbon includes something like 3.5 improvements in search quality, and I believe that only a couple are out so far. "

whats a .5 update mean and is that supposed to be good? so far the update is spam filled... will the remaing updates increase or decrease the spam.

oh thats two questions, nevermind the first one.

So far the only thing thats clear is that theres talk and then theres results... not lining up.

[edited by: mickeymart at 9:27 am (utc) on June 2, 2005]

[GoogleGuy]

kbba04527, Google can already tell you this:
[google.com...]

Also:
[google.com...]

I'm more likely to want to debug an error message though. I suppose I have messed up priorities.

[GoogleGuy]

nutsandbolts, I suggest you type up a letter on a single sheet of paper, and then mail that letter to the GooglePlex, addressed to the News Team, via FedEx. :)

Or just ping them again..

[kbba04527]

If anyone could answer that question I knew google could!

[Dayo_UK]

GG

Quick one as my first q did not count ;)

Mozilla Gbot crawls my site frequently - but pages dont get added to the index - whats the deal with this bot? Safe to ban? (it take a lot of bandwidth with seemingly little benefit)

[GoogleGuy]

robotsdobetter, we've already done several major changes to fix most 302 issues. If you do still see a problem, we still have all the reporting mechanisms active from earlier: you can still use "canonicalpage" at google.com/support to report any perceived 302 or canonicalization problem, and that will go to the engineering team via a mailing list that we've set up.

The thing with AdSense last week was actually a recently introduced bug that was quickly reverted once the problem was pointed out (thanks Patrick!). If I give a deeper dissection of that, I promised to do it over on the SearchEngineWatch forums though--Danny asked about it first. Maybe next week I'll talk about it there if people are interested, but it's independent of 302's/canonicalization.

[GoogleGuy]

Langers, I sense in you a deep strength and great reserves of both character and resolve. You will go far in this world, mark my words.

[Dc71]

I know I used up my first question but I would like to add another.

Once the cards are allowed to "fall were they may" and all sites are all created equal with no bias towards them ie. " Sandbox " and are allowed to rank for merit of links , on page factors , internal linking structure , site map , etc. and a site ranks a " trademark term " is it commonplace just to remove the offending site regardless of the comic nature of the site , bad design, bad colors, and obviously " no IT Tech " onboard?

SEO's know that throwing a monkey wrench to search engines can cause a whole head ache of legal problems and since google has the ie. " financial backing " and some webmasters don't shouldn't they wait till the @#$# hits the fan before pulling it for fear of scaring away a advertiser or business partner?

I am curious if that plays a factor if google would just rather avoid the headaches than make some poor boarderline bankrupt comedian some money.

-cheers

[GoogleGuy]

mblair, it usually does take time for a site to build up its reputation. There are always going to be a few sites that are so good or so viral that they don't really need search engines at all. In the old days, the hamster dance swept through the known internet world.

Here's an example of a site that I recently ran across: [thefacebook.com...] It's like a friendster for college students. I think you have to have an .edu email address to join (note the cachet factor + the prevetting/safety factor). If you belong to ucsd.edu, you can get more in-depth stats on those students from ucsd.edu. But you can still search for random names and see snapshots of random people at random schools. It's highly addictive. A site like that builds up it's own reputation through word-of-mouth, and that can happen quite quickly.

[GoogleGuy]

Natashka, use google.com/support to open up a chain of email communication. Please say to pass the spam report on to GoogleGuy. Sounds like a nice find. :)

[GoogleGuy]

Kubano, it's probably not a good thing. I'd be thinking of whether you need to do a reinclusion request, and asking how your site might look to a regular user with fresh eyes.

[shri]

Q1: Can inbound links affect your ranking negatively?

[union_jack]

Google Guy can i be total honest, i make my living as affiliate. I have worked on my site for 7 years and to the best of my knowleage have never used any black hat tactics. Also i fully understand that my business will be of more value if i can supply additional information to run along side my means of generating income, this i have tried to do. However i have found myself wiped out in this update. my question should i be looking to move away from the affilate industry.

[GoogleGuy]

kartiksh, that's a how-long-is-a-piece-of-string question to some degree--it's very Zen. :) We want to point people to what they're looking for, whether it's research or whether they're shopping and want to buy something. It is true that historically when a user types in X, we typically interpret that as meaning that the user would like information about X. That's a very short answer to a very deep philosophical subject though.

[Marketing Guy]

Following on from Freedom's point - do you have any intention to review all sites who display Adsense? The current "when you're in, you can put Adsense where you want" method doesn't seem to be working very well! ;)

It's all very well improving spam reporting features (don't get me wrong, a lot of us will appreciate that), but with all due respect, it's not down to webmasters to maintain the quality of the Google content network.

IMO and in the opinion of many others, a more proactive approach is needed.

Perhaps my question isn't right - I (and I think a lot of people) just want to know that there's more going on in the adsense camp than just making ways for webmasters to self regulate the web.

MG