Paul pretty much dislikes folks who don’t link to him, so Danny Sullivan and Rand Fishkin are well advised to drop a link every now and then, and David Naylor better gives him an interview slot asap.

Google’s numbered “penalties”, esp. #6

As for numeric penalties in general … repeat("Sigh", ∞) … enjoy this brains trust moderated by Marty Weintraub (unauthorized):

Marty: Folks, please welcome Aaron Wall, who recently got his #6 penalty removed!

Audience: clap(26) sphinn(26)

The Gypsy: Sorry Marty but come on… this is complete BS and there is NO freakin #6 filter just like the magical minus 90…900 bla bla bla. These anomalies NEVER have any real consensus on a large enough data set to even be considered a viable theory.

A Red Crab: As long as Bill can’t find a plus|minus-n-raise|penalty patent, or at least a white paper or so leaked out from Google, or for all I care a study that provides proof instead of weird assumptions based on claims of webmasters jumping on todays popular WMW band wagon that aren’t plausible nor verifiable, such beasts don’t exist. There are unexplained effects that might look like a pattern, but in most cases it makes no sense to gather a few examples coming with similarities because we’ll never reach the critical mass of anomalies to discuss a theory worth more than a thumbs-down click.

Marty: Maybe Aaron is joking. Maybe he thinks he has invented the next light bulb.

Gamermk: Aaron is grasping at straws on this one.

Barry Welford: I would like this topic to be seen by many.

Audience: clap(29) sphinn(29)

The Gypsy: It is just some people that have DECIDED on an end result and trying to make various hypothesis fit the situation (you know, like tobacco lobby scientists)… this is simply bad form IMO.

Danny Sullivan: Well, I’ve personally seen this weirdness. Pages that I absolutely thought “what on earth is that doing at six” rather than at the top of the page. Not four, not seven — six. It was freaking weird for several different searches. Nothing competitive, either.

I don’t know that sixth was actually some magic number. Personally, I’ve felt like there’s some glitch or problem with Google’s ranking that has prevented the most authorative page in some instances from being at the top. But something was going on.

Remember, there’s no sandbox, either. We got that for months and months, until eventually it was acknowledge that there were a range of filters that might produce a “sandbox like” effect.

The biggest problem I find with these types of theories is they often start with a specific example, sometimes that can be replicated, then they become a catch-all. Not ranking. Oh, it’s the sandbox. Well no — not if you were an established site, it wasn’t. The sandbox was typicaly something that hit brand new sites. But it became a common excuse for anything, producing confusion.

Jim Boykin: I’ll jump in and say I truely believe in the 6 filter. I’ve seen it. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it happen to a few sites.

Audience: clap(31) sphinn(31)

A Red Crab: Such terms tend to become a life of their own, IOW an excuse for nearly every way a Webmaster can fuck up rankings. Of course Google’s query engine has thresholds (yellow cards or whatever they call them) that don’t allow some sites to rank above a particular position, but that’s a symtom that doesn’t allow back-references to a particular cause, or causes. It’s speculation as long as we don’t know more.

IncrediBill: I definitely believe it’s some sort of filter or algo tweak but it’s certainly not a penalty which is why I scoff at calling it such. One morning you wake up and Matt has turned all the dials to the left and suddenly some criteria bumps you UP or DOWN. Sites have been going up and down in Google SERPs for years, nothing new or shocking about that and this too will have some obvious cause and effect that could probably be identified if people weren’t using the shotgun approach at changing their site

G1smd: By the time anyone works anything out with Google, they will already be in the process of moving the goalposts to another country.

Slightly Shady SEO: The #6 filter is a fallacy.

Old School: It certainly occured but only affected certain sites.

Danny Sullivan: Perhaps it would have been better called a -5 penalty. Consider. Say Google for some reason sees a domain but decides good, but not sure if I trust it. Assign a -5 to it, and that might knock some things off the first page of results, right?

Look — it could all be coincidence, and it certainly might not necessarily be a penalty. But it was weird to see pages that for the life of me, I couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t be at 1, showing up at 6.

Slightly Shady SEO: That seems like a completely bizarre penalty. Not Google’s style. When they’ve penalized anything in the past, it hasn’t been a “well, I guess you can stay on the frontpage” penalty. It’s been a smackdown to prove a point.

Matt Cutts: Hmm. I’m not aware of anything that would exhibit that sort of behavior.

Audience: Ugh … oohhhh … you weren’t aware of the sandbox, either!

Danny Sullivan: Remember, there’s no sandbox, either. We got that for months and months, until eventually it was acknowledge that there were a range of filters that might produce a “sandbox like” effect.

Audience: Bah, humbug! We so want to believe in our lame excuses …

Tedster: I’m not happy with the current level of analysis, however, and definitely looking for more ideas.

Audience: clap(40) sphinn(40)

Of course the panel above is fictional, respectively assembled from snippets which in some cases change the message when you read them in their context. So please follow the links.

I wouldn’t go that far to say there’s no such thing as a fair amount of Web pages that deserve a #1 spot on Google’s SERPs, but rank #6 for unknown reasons (perhaps link monkey business, staleness, PageRank flow in disarray, anchor text repetitions, …). There’s something worth investigating.

However, I think that labelling a discussion of glitches or maybe filters that don’t behave based on a way too tiny dataset “#6 penalty” leads to the lame excuse for literally anything phenomenon.

Folks who don’t follow the various threads closely enough to spot the highly speculative character of the beast, will take it as fact and switch to winter sleep mode instead of enhancing their stuff like Aaron did. I can’t wait for the first “How to escape the Google -5 penalty” SEO tutorial telling the great unwashed that a “+5″ revisit-after meta tag will heal it.

I’m not yet sure whether the old year ended with an asc(33) or the new year started with an U+0021. However, I want to shout out a loud Thank You! to you, my dear readers. Thanks to you my pamphlets prosper.

I’m not only talking about your very much appreciated kind mentions¹ on your blogs. What gets my lazy butt out of my bed to write more pamphlets is another highlight of my day: checking this blog’s MBL and Feedburner stats. In other words: I write because you read, sphinn and stumble my articles.

The 2007 Search Blog Awards

Despite my attempt to cheat my way to a search blog award with a single-candidate-category, Loren over at SEJ decided to accept a nomination of my pamphlets in the Best SEO Blog category. It was a honor to play in that league, and it means a lot to me.

Congrats to Barry, and thanks to the 150 people who voted for me!

Yep, I’ve counted even the 1/2/3-votes, in fact as constructive criticism. I’ve no clue whether the folks who gave me low ratings just didn’t know me or considerd my blog that worthless. Anyway, I take that very seriously and will try to polish up Sebastian’s Pamphlets for the next round.

The 2007 Rubber Chicken Awards (SEM version)

In related good news, I, Google’s nightmare, have almost won the 2007 Rubber Chicken Award for the dullest most bizarre SEO blog post.

Ranked in row two I’m in good company with Geraldine, Jeff and David. Another post of mine made it in row three.

Congrats to Matt and Sandra who won the most wanted award on the Web!

More Ego Food

While inserting my daily load of blatant comment-author-link spam on several blogs, last night I stumbled upon a neat piece of linkbait from Shaun and couldn’t resist to slap and discredit him. Eventually he banned me, but I can spam via email too. Read the result more ego food tonight: Sebastian’s sauced idiot version of robots.txt pulled by Shaun from the UK’s Scotland’s great Hobo SEO Blog.

What can I improve?

I’m really proud of such a great readership. What do you want to see here this year? I’m blogging in my spare time, but I’ll try to fulfill as many wishes as possible. Please don’t hesitate to post your requests here. Consider the comments my to-do list for 2008. Thank you again, and have a great year!

Just in case you, dear reader, are not a hardcore SEM addict who reads search blogs even during the holiday season, let me explain why a Rubber Chicken Award Top 10 nomination is a honor.

The Rubber Chicken Award honors the year’s most serious SEO research. Extra brownie points are given to the dullest draft and the most tedious wording.

Rumors are swirling that Google’s search quality spam task force has developed the complex RCAFHITSI^©™ algo^{patent pending®} which compiles and ranks search blog posts presented to Mike Blumenthals’s Rubber Chicken Award Jury:

• Bill Slawski
• Greg Sterling
• Rand Fishkin
• Danny Sullivan
• Matt Cutts (suspected final arbiter and extremely busy, so we don’t know whether he’ll show up or not)

Here is the cream of the crop of the search world, the 2007 Top 10 search blog posts nominated in the Rubber Chicken Award for the dullest and most boring/serious SEO/SEM article:

1. Want traffic? Rank for High Traffic Keywords…
2. We Add Words to AdWords… Google Subtracts them
3. Why eBay and Wikipedia rule Google’s SERPs
4. SEOs home alone - Google’s nightmare
5. 13 Things to Do When Your Loved One is Away at Conferences
6. SEO High School Confidential - Premiere Edition!
7. The Sphinn Awards - Part I & -Part II.
8. Top 21 Signs You Need a Break From SEO (2007 version)
9. 10 Signs That You May Be a Blog Addict
10. The SEO’s Guide to Beginners
11. The Internet Marketer’s Nightmare
12. Mission Accomplished—Top Ranking in Google
13. Google Interiors - the day my house became searchable

I’ve selfishly marked the two posts you want to vote for. Because all nominations are truly awesome, just vote for everything but make sure to check “5” for #3 and #4:

Thank You, Dear Reader!

Update: I can’t post another voting whore call to action today, but of course I’d very much appreciate your vote in the Best SEO Blog of 2007 category at SEJ’s 2007 Search Blog Awards.

• Best search related pamphlets
I hereby selfishly submit my blog.

To no avail:

Sebastian, we’re not going to have a category for Best Pamphlets, but good try

There’s no such thing as a Best Crabby Search Pamphlets category just because my blog would be the sole candidate? Ok, I understand that. Really. I didn’t even swear. Yet.

So here’s my call for action. Nominate your favorite blog (that’s mine of course!) in any of the following categories that match:

• Best SEO Blog
  You’d expect more marketing stuff from an SEO blog.
• Best SEM Blog
  You’d expect even more marketing stuff, as well as PPC and whatnot. I suck on both.
• Best SEO Plugin for Wordpress
  I never wrote a WordPress plugin. Actually, this year I hate WordPress because they messed up the database structure in version 2.3 without providing any documentation or at least a reasonable migration procedure. Also their coding standards suck ass and make me puke whenever I see WordPress code.
• Best Search Agency Resource Blog
  My employers don’t blog.
• Best Link Building Blog
  Link building pamphlets are rare nowadays.
• Best Social Media Marketing or Optimization Blog
  I don’t game social media.
• Best Local Search Blog
  I’m happy when I find my shoes before I leave the house, hence I can’t give any advice on local search.
• Best Video Search Blog
  I watch x-rated videos only. Probably posting geeky clips doesn’t qualify me.
• Best Mobile Search Blog
  When I’m on the road I usually search until I give up and ask a cabby for an escort. Cheating this way makes sure I’m not always too late, but doesn’t qualify me for mobile search consultancy.
• Best Google Blog Not Owned by Google
  I’m not in Google news.
• Best Search Engine Corporate Blog (owned by the search engines)
  Although I’ve developed a tiny search engine years ago, I fear that smutty results don’t count.
• Best Contextual Advertising Blog
  My organic traffic is cheaper, and probably as reliable as PPC campaigns.
• Best Affiliate Marketing Blog
  I sold two Seobook subscriptions recently, does that count?
• Best Search Engine Community/Forum
  I visit Sphinn and the Google Webmaster forum and never will launch a new forum again.
• Best New Search Engine of 2007
  See above.
• Best Search Engine Research Blog
  I revealed that Microsoft plans to relaunch Live Search as porn affiliate program, why eBay and Wikipedia rule Google’s SERPs, and more SEO research like that.
• Best Search Linkbait of 2007
  When I try it, folks bury it.
• Breakout Blog of 2007
  I’m blogging since 2005 but moved my blog away from blogspot this year.
• Best Search Conference Coverage of 2007
  I don’t even attend conferences.
• Best Search Conference Coverage in Photos
  See above.
• Best Search Marketing Facebook Group
  Facebook killed my account for spamming or so.
• Most Giving Search Blogger
  I can’t give away a fraction of Bill Slawski’s great insights.
• Best Independent Search Blog (not owned by media company or marketing agency)
  What does that mean? Ok, I’m in.
• Best Search Blog Post of 2007
  I wrote a dull book on redirects, and more.

Oh well. Instead of nominating my stuff better convince Search Engine Journal that they really need a Crabby Pamphlets Category. Or try Category #16 at Performancing.

Update December/28/2007: YAY! Thank you all! Now you can vote for my pamphlets in the “Best SEO Blog of 2007″ category at the SEJ Search Blog Award 2007 contest. Here are the candidates:

• SEOmoz Blog
• Sebastian’s Pamphlets
• Search Engine Roundtable
• Graywolf’s Wolf-Howl
• Tropical SEO
• PageTrafficBlog
• SugarRae
• SEO Scoop
• Search Rank Blog
• SEO by the SEA
• Search Marketing Gurus
• SEO Book

It truly is an honor just to be nominated together with these great SEO bloggers.

Savoring Sphinn comes with a duty Donna thinks, so she appeals to share the love. She’s right. All of us benefit from Sphinn love, it’s only fair to spread it a little. However, picking only three people I’d never have come accross without Danny’s newest donation to the Internet marketing community is a tough task. Hence I wrote a long numbered list and diced. Alea iacta est. Here are three of the many nice people I met at Sphinn:

Hamlet Batista	Tadeusz Szewczyk	Tinu Abayomi-Paul
Blog	Blog	Blog
Feed	Feed	Feed
A post I like	A post I like	A post I like

To those who didn’t make it on this list: That’s just kismet, not bad karma! I bet you’ll appear in someone’s share the sphinn love post in no time.

To you three: Get out your sphinn love post and choose three sphinners writing a feed-worthy blog, preferably people not yet featured elsewhere. I’ve subscribed to a couple feeds of blogs discovered at Sphinn, and so did you. There’s so much great stuff at Sphinn that you’re spoilt for choice.

Check out his folks bin frequently for readable Webmaster interviews.

Thanks John, it was fun

1. Well, I’ve started this blog because every dog and his grandpa blogs, but the actual reason was, that I couldn’t convince my beloved old cat listening my rants any more. Sadly my old comrade died years ago in the age of 15, leaving alone a gang of two legged monsters rampage in house and garden.
2. Since then I’ve used my blogs for kidding, bollocks, and other stuff not suitable for more or less static sites where I publish more seriously. However, I’ve scraped some wholehearted posts from the blog to put them on the consulting platform, because this site is way more popular. Vice versa I’ve blogged announced my other articles and projects here. This blog is somewhat a playground to test the waters and concurrently a speaking tube. I still find it difficult to do that with another platform, the timely character of blogging perfectly allows burying of half-baked things.
3. Every now and then I write an open letter to Google, for example my series of pleas to revamp rel=nofollow. Perhaps a googler is listening
   Also, a blog is a neat instrument to get the attention of folks who don’t seem to listen.
4. Frankly I like to share ideas and knowledge. Blogging is the perfect platform to raise rumors or myths too. Also, writing helps me to structure my thoughts, this works even better in a foreign language.
5. Last but not least I use my blog as reference. While providing Google user support sometimes I just drop a link, particulary as answer to repetitive questions. By the way Google’s Webmaster Forum is a nice place to chase SEO tidbits straight from the horse’s mouth.

Although I admit I’ve somewhat tag-baited my way in here, I’m tagging you:
Thu Tu
John Müller
John Honeck
Jim Boykin
Gurtie & Chris