Dofollow, Nofollow, Sponsored, UGC,
A change to Nofollow
Last month, Google announced that it would be changing the way it handled nofollow, moving it from a guideline to a hint. As part of this, they also announced the release of parallel attributes rel=”sponsored” for sponsored links and rel=”ugc” for user-generated content in areas such as forums and blog comments.
Why not ignore such links completely, as was the case with nofollow? Links contain valuable information that can help us improve search, such as how the words in the links describe the content to which they point. Examining all the links we encounter can also help us better understand unnatural link patterns. By switching to an index model, we no longer lose this important information, while allowing site owners to indicate that certain links should not carry the weight of a first-party endorsement.
In many emerging markets, the mobile Web is in fact the entire Web. Few people create HTML links on the mobile Web outside of social networks, where links are generally not followed by default. This reduces the potential signal available to track what people are doing directly and/or change the way the nofollow attribute is handled.
The fact that Google is changing the way nofollow is treated is a general admission that Penguin and other elements of the “war on links” may have been a little too effective and started taking valuable signals away from Google.
Google has suggested that the change in the way nofollow is handled will not lead to additional spam in blog comments. When they announced nofollow, they suggested it would reduce spam in blog comments. Blog comment spam remains a growth market long after the gravity of the Web has shifted from blogs to social networks.
Changing the way nofollow is treated only makes any kind of external link analysis even more difficult. Those who specialize in link audits (yuck!) And the good news for professional link auditors is that this increases the effective cost they can charge customers for the service.
Some nefarious types will notice when competitors are penalized, then launch Xrummer to help promote the penalized site, ensuring that the link auditor puts the competing business out of business even faster than Google.
Ties, commitment or something else…
When Google was launched, they had neither Chrome nor Android. They weren’t yet spying on billions of people on a massive scale:
If, like most people, you thought that Google stopped tracking your location once you deactivated the location history in your account settings, you were wrong. According to an AP investigation published on Monday, even if you turn off location history, the search giant still tracks you every time you open Google Maps, get certain automatic weather updates or search for items in your browser.
As a result, Google had to rely on external signals as its main ranking factor:
The reason why PageRank is interesting is that there are many cases where simply counting citations doesn’t match our common-sense notion of importance. For example, if a web page contains a link to Yahoo’s home page, it may be a single link, but it’s a very important one. This page should be ranked higher than many pages with more links but coming from obscure places. PageRank is an attempt to see how close an approximation of “importance” can be obtained simply from link structure. … The definition of PageRank above has another intuitive basis in random walks on graphs. The simplified version corresponds to the permanent probability distribution of a random walk on the Web graph. Intuitively, this can be seen as modeling the behavior of a “random surfer”.
Google’s dependence on links has turned links into a commodity, leading to all kinds of scare campaigns, manual sanctions, nofollow and the Penguin update.
As Google collected more usage data, those who focused too much on links often ended up marking their own purpose, creating sites that wouldn’t rank.
Google no longer invests heavily in scaremongering because it’s no longer necessary. Research is so complex that most people can’t understand it.
Many SEOs have scaled back their link-building efforts as Google has increased the weighting of user engagement metrics, although it seems that the tide may now be moving in the other direction. Some sites that had decent engagement metrics but little in the way of link building slipped on the update late last month.
As much as Google wants relevance in the short term, it prefers a system that is complex enough for external viewers that reverse engineering seems impossible. If they discourage investment in SEO, they increase AdWords’ growth while better controlling algorithmic relevance.
Google will soon be collecting even more usage data by routing Chrome users via their DNS service: “Google doesn’t actually force Chrome users to use only Google’s DNS service, so it doesn’t centralize the data. Instead, Google configures Chrome to use DoH connections by default if a user’s DNS service supports it.
If traffic is routed via Google, this means hosting the page in terms of its ability to track many aspects of user behavior. This is similar to AMP or YouTube in terms of its ability to track users and standardize relative engagement metrics.
Once Google hosts the end-to-end user experience, it can create a near-infinite number of ranking signals, given the advancement of its computing power: high-fidelity quantum logic gates, for benchmark testing. Our machine completed the target calculation in 200 seconds, and based on measurements from our experiment, we determined that it would take the world’s fastest supercomputer 10,000 years to produce a similar output.
Relying on “a simple trick to…” approaches of all kinds will often turn out to be meaningless.
EMDs evicted again
I was one of the first promoters of exact match domains when the industry at large didn’t believe in them. I also quickly mentioned the moment when I felt that the algorithms had evolved in the other direction.
Google’s mobile layout, which they’re also testing on desktops, replaces green domain names with gray words that are easy to miss. And favicon icons make organic results look like ads. Any boost that a domain name like CreditCards.ext might have gotten in the past due to keyword matching has certainly disappeared with this new layout, which further depreciates the impact of exact match domain names.
At one time, CreditCards.com was considered a destination for consumers. It is now visualized… below the fold.
If you have a memorable, brand-driven domain name, the favicon can help offset the above impact somewhat, but matching the keywords becomes a much more precarious approach to maintaining rankings, as weight on brand awareness, user engagement and authority increases relative to weight on anchor text.
,
A change to Nofollow
Last month, Google announced that it would be changing the way it handled nofollow, moving it from a guideline to a hint. As part of this, they also announced the release of parallel attributes rel=”sponsored” for sponsored links and rel=”ugc” for user-generated content in areas such as forums and blog comments.
Why not ignore such links completely, as was the case with nofollow? Links contain valuable information that can help us improve search, such as how the words in the links describe the content to which they point. Examining all the links we encounter can also help us better understand unnatural link patterns. By switching to an index model, we no longer lose this important information, while allowing site owners to indicate that certain links should not carry the weight of a first-party endorsement.
In many emerging markets, the mobile Web is in fact the entire Web. Few people create HTML links on the mobile Web outside of social networks, where links are generally not followed by default. This reduces the potential signal available to track what people are doing directly and/or change the way the nofollow attribute is handled.
The fact that Google is changing the way nofollow is treated is a general admission that Penguin and other elements of the “war on links” may have been a little too effective and started taking valuable signals away from Google.
Google has suggested that the change in the way nofollow is handled will not lead to additional spam in blog comments. When they announced nofollow, they suggested it would reduce spam in blog comments. Blog comment spam remains a growth market long after the gravity of the Web has shifted from blogs to social networks.
Changing the way nofollow is treated only makes any kind of external link analysis even more difficult. Those who specialize in link audits (yuck!) And the good news for professional link auditors is that this increases the effective cost they can charge customers for the service.
Some nefarious types will notice when competitors are penalized, then launch Xrummer to help promote the penalized site, ensuring that the link auditor puts the competing business out of business even faster than Google.
Ties, commitment or something else…
When Google was launched, they had neither Chrome nor Android. They weren’t yet spying on billions of people on a massive scale:
If, like most people, you thought that Google stopped tracking your location once you deactivated the location history in your account settings, you were wrong. According to an AP investigation published on Monday, even if you turn off location history, the search giant still tracks you every time you open Google Maps, get certain automatic weather updates or search for items in your browser.
As a result, Google had to rely on external signals as its main ranking factor:
The reason why PageRank is interesting is that there are many cases where simply counting citations doesn’t match our common-sense notion of importance. For example, if a web page contains a link to Yahoo’s home page, it may be a single link, but it’s a very important one. This page should be ranked higher than many pages with more links but coming from obscure places. PageRank is an attempt to see how close an approximation of “importance” can be obtained simply from link structure. … The definition of PageRank above has another intuitive basis in random walks on graphs. The simplified version corresponds to the permanent probability distribution of a random walk on the Web graph. Intuitively, this can be seen as modeling the behavior of a “random surfer”.
Google’s dependence on links has turned links into a commodity, leading to all kinds of scare campaigns, manual sanctions, nofollow and the Penguin update.
As Google collected more usage data, those who focused too much on links often ended up marking their own purpose, creating sites that wouldn’t rank.
Google no longer invests heavily in scaremongering because it’s no longer necessary. Research is so complex that most people can’t understand it.
Many SEOs have scaled back their link-building efforts as Google has increased the weighting of user engagement metrics, although it seems that the tide may now be moving in the other direction. Some sites that had decent engagement metrics but little in the way of link building slipped on the update late last month.
As much as Google wants relevance in the short term, it prefers a system that is complex enough for external viewers that reverse engineering seems impossible. If they discourage investment in SEO, they increase AdWords’ growth while better controlling algorithmic relevance.
Google will soon be collecting even more usage data by routing Chrome users via their DNS service: “Google doesn’t actually force Chrome users to use only Google’s DNS service, so it doesn’t centralize the data. Instead, Google configures Chrome to use DoH connections by default if a user’s DNS service supports it.
If traffic is routed via Google, this means hosting the page in terms of its ability to track many aspects of user behavior. This is similar to AMP or YouTube in terms of its ability to track users and standardize relative engagement metrics.
Once Google hosts the end-to-end user experience, it can create a near-infinite number of ranking signals, given the advancement of its computing power: high-fidelity quantum logic gates, for benchmark testing. Our machine completed the target calculation in 200 seconds, and based on measurements from our experiment, we determined that it would take the world’s fastest supercomputer 10,000 years to produce a similar output.
Relying on “a simple trick to…” approaches of all kinds will often turn out to be meaningless.
EMDs evicted again
I was one of the first promoters of exact match domains when the industry at large didn’t believe in them. I also quickly mentioned the moment when I felt that the algorithms had evolved in the other direction.
Google’s mobile layout, which they’re also testing on desktops, replaces green domain names with gray words that are easy to miss. And favicon icons make organic results look like ads. Any boost that a domain name like CreditCards.ext might have gotten in the past due to keyword matching has certainly disappeared with this new layout, which further depreciates the impact of exact match domain names.
At one time, CreditCards.com was considered a destination for consumers. It is now visualized… below the fold.
If you have a memorable brand-driven domain name, the favicon can help offset the above impact somewhat, but keyword matching becomes a much more precarious approach to maintaining rankings as the weight on brand awareness, user engagement and authority increases relative to the weight on anchor text.
,
