Sebastian’s Pamphlets

:sdıʇ ɹǝpısuı sʞ1oɟ ɹǝɥʇo ʇdʎɹɔuǝ oʇ unɟ s,ʇı ʇnq .sdɐɥɹǝd ¿uoɹoɯʎxo uɐ ʇɐɥʇ sı .ʎ1ɟʎɐp ɐ ǝʞı1 ʇsnظ ‘ǝɹnʇnɟ ɐ sɐɥ ɔıɟɟɐɹʇ 1ıɐʇ buo1 ǝsɹǝʌǝɹ buı11nd oǝs uʍopǝpısdn

If you’re bored, give it a try. Mark did it.

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What a brilliant marketing stunt. Click here! Err… click: Brilliant. Marketing. Stunt.

Best of luck John

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Yesterday Fantomaster via Threadwatcher pointed me to this page of Google’s Webmaster help system. The cache was a few days old and didn’t show a difference, I don’t archive each and every change of the guidelines, so I asked and a friendly and helpful Googler told me that this item was around for a while now. Today this page made it on Sphinn and probably a few other Webmaster hangouts too.

So what the heck is the scandal all about? When you ask Google for help on “link exchange“, the help machine rattles for a second, sighs, coughs, clears its throat and then yells out the answer in bold letters: “Link schemes“, bah!

Ok, we already knew what Google thinks about artificial linkage: “Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank”. Honestly, what is the intent when I suggest that you link to me and concurrently I link to you? Yup, it means I boost your PageRank and you boost mine, also we chose some nice anchor text and that makes the link deal perfect. In the eyes of Google even such a tiny deal is a link scheme, because both links weren’t put up for users but for search engines.

Pre-Google this kind of link deal was business as usual and considered natural, but frankly back then the links were exchanged for traffic and not for search engine love. We can rant and argue as much as we want, that will not revert the changed character of link swaps nor Google’s take on manipulative links.

Consequently Google has devalued artificial reciprocal links for ages. Pretty much simplified these links nullify each other in Google’s search index. That goes for tiny sins. Folks raising the concept onto larger link networks got caught too but penalized or even banned for link farming.

Obviously all kinds of link swaps are easy to detect algorithmically, even triangular link deals, three way link exchanges and whatnot. I called that plain vanilla link ’swindles’, but only just recently Google has caught up with a scalable solution and seems to detect and penalize most if not all variants covering the whole search index, thanks to the search quality folks in Dublin and Zurich even overseas in whatever languages.

The knowledge that the days of free link trading are numbered was out for years before the exodus. Artificial reciprocal links as well as other linkage considered link spam by Google was and is a pet peeve of Matt’s team. Google sent lots of warnings, and many sane SEOs and Webmasters heard their traffic master’s voice and acted accordingly. Successful link trading just went underground leaving the great unwashed alone with their obsession about exchanging reciprocal links in the public.

Also old news is, that Google does not penalize reciprocal links in general. Google almost never penalizes a pattern or a technique. Instead they try to figure out the Webmaster’s intent and judge case by case based on their findings. And yes, that’s doable with algos, perhaps sometimes with a little help from humans to compile the seed, but we don’t know how perfect the algo is when it comes to evaluations of intent. Natural reciprocal links are perfectly fine with Google. That applies to well maintained blogrolls too, despite the often reciprocal character of these links. Reading the link schemes page completely should make that clear.

Google defines link scheme as “[…] Link exchange and reciprocal links schemes (’Link to me and I’ll link to you.’) […]”. The “I link to you and vice versa” part literally addresses link trading of any kind, not a situation where I link to your compelling contents because I like a particular page, and you return the favour later on because you find my stuff somewhat useful. As Perkiset puts it “linking is now supposed to be like that well known sex act, ‘68? - or, you do me and I’ll owe you one’” and there is truth in this analogy. Sometimes a favor will not be returned. That’s the way the cookie crumbles when you’re keen on Google traffic.

The fact that Google openly said that link exchange schemes designed “exclusively for the sake of cross-linking” of any kind violate their guidelines indicates that first they were sure to have invented the catchall algo, and second that they felt safe to launch it without too much collateral damage. Not everybody agrees, I quote Fantomaster’s critique not only because I like his inimitably parlance:

This is essentially a theological debate: Attempting to determine any given action’s (and by inference: actor’s) “intention” (as in “sinning”) is always bound to open a can of worms or two.

It will always have to work by conjecture, however plausible, which makes it a fundamentally tacky, unreliable and arbitrary process.

The delusion that such a task, error prone as it is even when you set the most intelligent and well informed human experts to it (vide e.g. criminal law where “intention” can make all the difference between an indictment for second or first degree murder…) can be handled definitively by mechanistic computer algorithms is arguably the most scary aspect of this inane orgy of technological hubris and naivety the likes of Google are pressing onto us.

I’ve seen some collateral damage already, but pragmatic Webmasters will find -respectively have found long ago- their way to build inbound links under Google’s regime.

And here is the context of Google’s definition link exchanges = link schemes which makes clear that not each and every reciprocal link is evil:

[…] However, some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results. Examples of link schemes can include:

• Links intended to manipulate PageRank
• Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
• Link exchange and reciprocal links schemes (’Link to me and I’ll link to you.’)
• Buying or selling links […]

Again, please read the whole page.

Bear in mind that all this is Internet history, it just boiled up yesterday as the help page was discovered.

Related article: Eric Ward on reciprocal links, why they do good, and where they do bad.

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Google provides previews of non-HTML resources listed on their SERPs:
These “view as text” and “view as HTML” links are pretty useful when you for example want to scan a PDF document before you clutter your machine’s RAM with 30 megs of useless digital rights management (aka Adobe Reader). You can view contents even when the corresponding application is not installed, Google’s transformed previews should not stuff your maiden box with unwanted malware, etcetera. However, under some circumstances it would make sound sense to have a NOPREVIEW X-Robots-Tag, but unfortunately Google forgot to introduce it yet.

Google is rightfully proud of their capability to transform various file formats to readable HTML or plain text: Adobe Portable Document Format (pdf), Adobe PostScript (ps), Lotus 1-2-3 (wk1, wk2, wk3, wk4, wk5, wki, wks, wku), Lotus WordPro (lwp), MacWrite (mw), Microsoft Excel (xls), Microsoft PowerPoint (ppt), Microsoft Word (doc), Microsoft Works (wks, wps, wdb), Microsoft Write (wri), Rich Text Format (rtf), Shockwave Flash (swf), of course Text (ans, txt) plus a couple of “unrecognized” file types like XML. New formats are added from time to time.

According to Adam Lasnik currently there is no way for Webmasters to tell Google not to include the “View as HTML” option. You can try to fool Google’s converters by messing up the non-HTML resource in a way that a sane parser can’t interpret it. Actually, when you search a few minutes you’ll find e.g. PDF files without the preview links on Google’s SERPs. I wouldn’t consider this attempt a bullet-proof nor future-proof tactic though, because Google is pretty intent on improving their conversion/interpretation process.

I like the previews not only because sometimes they allow me to read documents behind a login screen. That’s a loophole Google should close as soon as possible. When for example PDF documents or Excel sheets are crawlable but not viewable for searchers (at least not with the second click) that’s plain annoying both for the site as well as for the search engine user.

With HTML documents the Webmaster can apply a NOARCHIVE crawler directive to prevent non paying visitors from lurking via Google’s cached page copies. Thanks to the newish REP header tags one can do that with non-HTML resources too, but neither NOARCHIVE nor NOSNIPPET etch away the “view-as HTML” link.

<speculation>Is the lack of a NOPREVIEW crawler directive just an oversight, or is it stuck in the pipeline because Google is working on supplemental components and concepts? Google’s yet inconsistent handling of subscription content comes to mind as an ideal playground for such a robots directive in combination with a policy change.</speculation>

Anyways, there is a need for a NOPREVIEW robots tag, so why not implement it now? Thanks in advance.

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Being a single parent of three monsters at the moment brings me newish insights. I now deeply understand the pain of father Google dealing with us, and what doing the chores all day long means to Matt’s gang in building 43, Dublin, and whereever. What a nightmare of a household.

If you don’t suffer from an offspring plague you won’t believe what sneaky and highly intelligent monsters having too much time on their tiny greedy hands will do to gain control over their environment. Outsmarting daddy is not a hobby, it’s their mission, and everything in perfect order is attackable. Each of them tries to get as much attention as possible, and if nothing helps, negative attention is fine too. There’s no such thing as bad traffic, err … mindfulness.

Every rule is breakable, and there’s no way to argue seriously with a cute 5 yo gal burying her 3 yo brother in the mud whilst honestly telling me that she has nothing to do with the dirty laundry because she never would touch anything hanging on the clothesline. Then my little son speaks out telling me that’s all her fault, so she promises to do it never, never, never again in her whole life and even afterwards. In such a situation I’ve not that much options: I archive my son’s paid links report, accept her reconsideration request but throttle her rankings for a while, recrawl and remove the unpurified stuff from the … Oups … I clear the scene with a pat on her muddy fingers, forgive all blackhatted kids involved in the scandal and just do the laundry again, writing a note to myself to improve the laundry algo in a way that muddy monsters can’t touch laundered bed sheets again.

Anything not on the explicit don’ts list goes, so while I’m still stuffing the washer with muddy bed sheets I hear a weird row in the living room. Running upstairs I spot my 10 yo son and his friend playing soccer with a ball I had to fish out of a heap of broken crockery and uprooted indoor plants to confiscate it just two hours ago. Yelling that’s against our well known rules and why the heck is that […] ball in the game again I get stopped immediately by the boys. First, they just played soccer and the recent catastrophe was the result of a strictly forbidden basketball joust. I’ve to admit that I said they must not play basketball in the house. Second, it’s my fault when I don’t hide the key to the closet where I locked the confiscated ball away. Ok, enough is enough. I banned my son’s friend and grounded himself for a week, took away the ball, and ran to the backyard to rescue two bitterly crying muddy dwarfs from the shed’s roof. Later on, while two little monsters play games in the bath tub which I really don’t want to watch too closely currently, I read a thread titled “Daddy is soooo unfair” in the house arrest forum where my son and his buddy tell the world that they didn’t do anything wrong, just sheer whitehatted stuff, but I stole their toy and banned them from the playground. Sigh.

I’m exhausted. I’m supposed to deliver a script to merge a few feeds giving fresh contents, a crawlability review, and whatnot tonight, but I just wonder what else will happen when I leave the monsters alone in their beds after supper and story hour, provided I get them into their beds without a medium-size flame war. Now I understand why another daddy supplemented the family with a mom.

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