The figures come from Net Applications, which says it tracks about 160 million unique visits per month to a worldwide network of more than 40,000 sites.

According to Net Applications, Firefox and Safari also saw market share losses in January. While they were declining, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer gained 1.09%, its biggest monthly gain in at least two years.

One possible explanation is that a lot of people bought new PC computers over the holidays, and Internet Explorer’s market share grew in January because it’s the default browser there. But that didn’t happen a year ago; in January 2011, Explorer’s market share declined nearly a full percent. (IE did gain in February, 2011, as shown above.)

Net Applications ties Explorer’s gain and Chrome’s decline to the Google penalty which removed Chrome from search results for a number of browser-related search terms. Google penalized Chrome in early January after the company’s own botched sponsored blog post campaign ran afoul of Google’s search/webmaster guidelines.

In my searches this morning, the main Chrome page doesn’t appear on page one for “browser,” “web browser,” “download web browser,” “chrome,” “google chrome” nor “chrome browser.” I’m not sure that’s why Chrome’s market share dropped in January, but it’s an interesting theory to consider at minimum.

(tip via Computerworld)

Google said even though it felt there were no “remaining violations” of its guidelines, the search engine’s spam fighting team was going to reduce the PageRank value of the Google Chrome home page, which in turn lead to today’s ranking decrease.

From the statement Google sent us:

We’ve investigated and are taking manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome and lower the site’s PageRank for a period of at least 60 days.

We strive to enforce Google’s webmaster guidelines consistently in order to provide better search results for users.

While Google did not authorize this campaign, and we can find no remaining violations of our webmaster guidelines, we believe Google should be held to a higher standard, so we have taken stricter action than we would against a typical site.

Lower PageRank Value Doesn’t Equal Banning

At the time the statement was originally sent, around 1:30 PT today, the page had a publicly-reported PageRank value of 9. The highest you can have is 10.

One tool I used reported the non-https version of the page as having a PageRank of zero. Another check with the Google Toolbar shows it still at 9. However, it’s common that PageRank values shown to the public may be behind, sometimes months behind, the scores that Google is actually using.

Lowering the PageRank value is not the same as removing or banning the page from Google. Potentially, however, a lower PageRank value will reduce its ability to rank well for certain terms. That’s what’s happened as a result of this.

Will It Still Rank?

When the statement was initially received, the Chrome home page still ranked for searches on chrome, google chrome and the generic term of browser, as you can see below:

I wrote in the earlier version of this story:

Chances are, even with the PageRank reduction, the page will continue to rank for these terms. However, if it were to fall out of the first page of results for “browser,” or to something lower than its current number two position that I see, then the penalty will have had some real teeth….

If that penalty doesn’t cause some type of ranking reduction, then it’s not really much of a penalty at all. The separate issue of Google’s campaign creating garbage posts remains, but that’s a penalty that’s typically applied to the garbage post themselves.

No, It Will Not

Now that has happened for a search on “browser,” as you can see below:

That’s the first page of results for “browser” on Google now. Previously, Chrome has been ranked number two. Now you have to go to the fifth page of results to find it, ranked in position 50:

NOTE: Only about a half-hour after writing this, we’ve also seen the page sink to as low at 73.

In fact, the page no longer ranks for “chrome” or for “chrome browser,” either. Instead, of the Chrome home page that looked like this showing up first:

It’s the Chrome installation help page that gets top billing:

The main download page does still make it in the top results, but it has been demoted in both cases to “sitelink” status as you can see here:

John Doherty emailed me that he’d run some ranking checks on other terms before the change happened. Here’s the shift from what he recorded to what I see now:

• internet browser, dropped from 5th to 58th
• web browser, dropped from 4th to 54th

A Solid Slap

Overall, only one page in the sponsored post campaign was ever spotted with a “straight” link that passed credit to the Chrome page. It also didn’t seem as if the campaign overall was designed to help Chrome rank for any particular terms. It was doing fine on its own before this happened.

But technically, even that single link was enough to make Google guilty of buying paid links, even if it happened because of two different agencies being involved. Minor technical violation or not, I’d say Google applied a solid penalty against itself, one that should last for at least 60 days.

But If Google Can’t Figure Things Out…

To me, the bigger issue in this has always been the garbage content that was produced by the campaign, “thin” material that Google has fought to keep out of its own search results. I’m still trying to understand how Google failed to understand that the marketing companies it engaged with would produce this.

Given how much detail Google professes to put into its marketing, as I covered yesterday, it still remains amazing that the company found itself involved with this type of campaign.

It also raises the serious question that if Google can’t keep track of its own rules, what hope is there that third parties are supposed to figure it all out?

I hate to write that, because the last thing I want is for a Google screw-up to be an excuse for anyone to do the type of “marketing” that Google did. But it’s also true.

Postscript: The head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts, has shared some comments on Google+ though he’s on vacation. He confirms that the video player links didn’t pass any link credit, but because they found at least one non-video player link that did, that was deemed sufficient to take action against Google. From his post:

If you investigated the two dozen or so sponsored posts (as the webspam team immediately did), the posts typically showed a Google Chrome video but didn’t actually link to Google Chrome. We double-checked, and the video players weren’t flowing PageRank to Google either.

However, we did find one sponsored post that linked to www.google.com/chrome in a way that flowed PageRank. Even though the intent of the campaign was to get people to watch videos–not link to Google–and even though we only found a single sponsored post that actually linked to Google’s Chrome page and passed PageRank, that’s still a violation of our quality guidelines, which you can find at http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769#3 .

In response, the webspam team has taken manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome for at least 60 days. After that, someone on the Chrome side can submit a reconsideration request documenting their clean-up just like any other company would. During the 60 days, the PageRank of www.google.com/chrome will also be lowered to reflect the fact that we also won’t trust outgoing links from that page.

(Stock image via Shutterstock. Used under license.)

Related Articles

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• Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google
• New York Times Exposes J.C. Penney Link Scheme That Causes Plummeting Rankings in Google
• Google’s Action Against Paid Links Continues: Overstock & Forbes Latest Casualties; Conductor Exits Brokering Business
• 90 Days Later, J.C. Penney Regains Its Google Rankings
• Google Bans Itself Again By Banning BeatThatQuote.com
• Wait… Google Banned BeatThatQuote Again!
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• Google’s Jaw-Dropping Sponsored Post Campaign For Chrome
• Google: Yes, Sponsored Post Campaign Was Ours But Not What We Signed-Up For

Google: We Only Meant To Buy Online Ads

Google has sent me this statement:

Google never agreed to anything more than online ads. We have consistently avoided paid sponsorships, including paying bloggers to promote our products, because these kind of promotions are not transparent or in the best interests of users. We’re now looking at what changes we need to make to ensure that this never happens again.

That seems odd, at first, because it has become clear that Google was behind a campaign that paid bloggers to promote its Chrome product. Otherwise, the web wouldn’t be littered with all these posts that say “This post sponsored by Google.”

Essence Digital: Google Thought They Were Buying Video Ads

The email I received from Google also pointing to a statement from Essence Digital, a New York/London digital media agency. The statement:

There’s been some recent attention in the news involving a Google campaign (see linked article). Here’s some context on what happened.

We want to be perfectly clear here: Google never approved a sponsored-post campaign. They only agreed to buy online video ads. Google have consistently avoided paid postings to promote their products, because in their view these kind of promotions are not transparent or in the best interests of users.

In this case, Google were subjected to this activity through media that encouraged bloggers to create what appeared to be paid posts, were often of poor quality and out of line with Google standards. We apologize to Google who clearly didn’t authorize this.

In other words, Google seems to have contracted with Essence Digital to have a video ad campaign be run across the web. Apparently, Google had no idea how Essence Digital was going to actually run the campaign or make the video ads appear across the web.

Why Did Google Need An Outside Firm To Buy Video Ads?

Why Google needed an agency to do this for them is really weird, since Google’s own video ad network is a pretty effective way to place video ads across the web and in far more places that this campaign did.

So, a big question here remains: what exactly did Essence Digital promise to Google? What was so compelling about its pitch that Google wanted to go for it?

Unruly: We Didn’t Ask For Links & Don’t Care About Them

Meanwhile, as best I can tell, Essence Digital didn’t actually implement the campaign. Instead, video promotion company Unruly was used, as I suspected when writing my story last night. Unruly’s been in touch with me to say:

As Andrew Girdwood points out, Unruly never requires bloggers to link to back to an advertiser’s site. That’s because we’re in the business of video advertising not search engine marketing, so we couldn’t care less about link juice. We don’t ask for it, we don’t pay for it, and we don’t track it.

In line with FTC and EU regulation Unruly always requires that bloggers clearly disclose any post, tweet, or other reference to the video as being sponsored and we provide guidance on how to do this. We also request that if they do link anywhere they use nofollow, both because that’s best practice and also because it’s in their own interest to do so.

Unruly is committed to an ethical, legal, and totally transparent approach to online marketing. It’s crucial that posts are clearly marked as sponsored and that links are marked as nofollow. And it’s crucial that opinions belong to the author, which is why we never push an angle or opinion, and also why, occasionally, bloggers will unfortunately pen a post that deviates from our guidelines, as here. Where that happens, we’re very happy to have it pointed out and will cure the infraction as fast as possible.

As I said in the story, I didn’t expect that Unruly would ask bloggers to link to the site. No smart company trying to buy links would do that, hoping instead that it would just happen naturally.

Unruly Doesn’t Care About “Link Juice” But Has Terms About PageRank?

However, to say that “we couldn’t care less about link juice” is obviously not true. In Unruly’s terms and conditions, as I wrote about yesterday, there’s this statement:

Monthly earnings caps for Your Site(s) are determined by the Google PageRank of each Site and such other factors as Unruly Media may consider form time to time. You will be notified by email when one of Your Site(s) is approaching its monthly limit and again when the limit is reached;

There’s no reason to talk about payment based on Google PageRank unless you expressly care about link juice. It is Google’s own measure of the ability for a page to pass along link juice. But a comment from my earlier post from who seems to be Unruly CEO Scott Button addresses this:

On the reference to PageRank in our Ts&Cs, Unruly uses a number of data sources and statistical techniques, that may include PageRank checks, to protect our advertisers from low quality video views. These measures are in place to protect the revenues of high quality sites and to ensure that views of the video represent genuine user interest – they have nothing to with search engine marketing

OK, but it’s hard to argue that Google was delivered high-quality views from the campaign that was just run, I’d say. Also interesting, I’m virtually certain this section of the Unruly terms was added after my story was posted:

where you write an editorial post linking to or embedding a Branded Video any links within this post or associated with it which link to the Advertiser’s website need to be marked with a ‘nofollow’ tag in accordance with Google guidelines. Any infraction of this rule may result in any payment being suspended or withheld.

I don’t recall seeing this yesterday, because I did a keyword search against this page for both nofollow and Google. I found nothing about nofollow mentioned (otherwise, I’d have written about that). I did find a mention about Google, but only the single one that I noted. The Internet Archive also shows that this wasn’t part of the page last year.

It might be that Unruly, in this particular campaign, wasn’t concerned about gathering up link credit. I’d certainly agree that was probably not the intention.

But in other campaigns, with terms like that, it suggests that Unruly is trying to buying links. That sort of means that Google is potentially doing business with the same type of drug dealer it’s trying to put out of business, though it has an intermediary involved.

JavaScript Might Not Block Link Credit

Unruly also did an interview with AllThingsD, talking about, as in the statement I received, that no one is asked to link, but if they do, they’re asked to use nofollow. Further, the company said, “All links from the video player are wrapped in Javascript, so although Google can follow them, they don’t influence search engine rankings.”

As I covered in my earlier story, wrapping links in Javascript doesn’t necessarily block credit from being passed (and see also here). Only Google can really tell us what the situation is. So, we’re waiting for Google’s spam team to weigh in (which might be delayed, as I know that the head of that team, Matt Cutts, is currently on vacation).

I’m hoping to see both the exact instructions that the bloggers were given, as well as learning more about what exactly Google thought it was buying. It’s likely there’s plenty of wiggle room for Google to claim that if any paid links did end up being purchased, it wasn’t its fault — an excuse that hasn’t saved others from penalties like JC Penney, so the Google Chrome page might still face a ban.

Biggest Issue Remains: Garbage Content

The bigger issue in all this, as I wrote before, is that the campaign produced a lot of garbage content. That doesn’t mean that Google Chrome gets banned. Rather, it’s just embarrassing to Google, when it has been busy trying to prevent this type of content from ranking in its own search engine.

Postscript: See Google’s Chrome Page No Longer Ranks For “Browser” After Sponsored Post Penalty

Related Articles

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• New York Times Exposes J.C. Penney Link Scheme That Causes Plummeting Rankings in Google
• Google’s Action Against Paid Links Continues: Overstock & Forbes Latest Casualties; Conductor Exits Brokering Business
• 90 Days Later, J.C. Penney Regains Its Google Rankings
• Google Bans Itself Again By Banning BeatThatQuote.com
• New York Times Continues Paid Link Outing Stories, Looks At Online Flowers Industry
• Two Weeks Later, Google Lifts Ban On BeatThatQuote
• Wait… Google Banned BeatThatQuote Again!
• Google Loses “Backwards Compatibility” On Paid Link Blocking & PageRank Sculpting
• Google Forecloses On Content Farms With “Panda” Algorithm Update
• Why Google Panda Is More A Ranking Factor Than Algorithm Update
• Taking a Closer Look at the Google’s Panda 2.5 “Flux”
• Google’s Holiday Gift To Webmasters: No Panda Updates Till Next Year
• Google & Bing Have “Won A Major Victory” Over Content Farms, Study Says
• Google’s Jaw-Dropping Sponsored Post Campaign For Chrome
• Google’s Chrome Page No Longer Ranks For “Browser” After Sponsored Post Penalty

“This Post Sponsored By Google”

Aaron Wall wrote about the campaign today at SEO Book, spotting how a search for “This post is sponsored by Google” brings back over 400 pages written apparently as part of a Google marketing campaign:

We’re checking with Google for confirmation that the company is behind the campaign, but expect a response to be delayed, as Google’s PR department, like much of Google, is off today. But it certainly appears to be Google-backed.

Google Buys Links

The campaign is odd in two major ways. For one, it potentially violates Google’s guidelines against paid links.

The head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts, has been quite vocal that sponsored posts shouldn’t be a way for people to gain links in response for payment, that any links in such posts should use the nofollow attribute to prevent them from passing credit to Google’s ranking algorithm.

And yet here, we see one of Google’s sponsored post doing exactly that:

The arrow points to a link leading to the Google Chrome download page. This is a straight link, not blocked with nofollow. It only appears in this post because the post is part of a sponsored campaign by Google, as noted at the bottom of the page. Therefore, both the author and Google itself are in violation of Google’s guidelines and risk being banned by Google.

The video itself is also a link. It’s not hosted on YouTube, nor does clicking on it bring up a video page. Instead, it leads to the Google Chrome download page, through a JavaScript link that Google would understand.

Will Google Ban Google Chrome?

Paid links drew much attention last year, after Google penalized JC Penney, as well as Forbes and Overstock for using them. Google even banned BeatThatQuote, one of its own companies last year, BeatTheQuote, over the issue. In 2009, Google penalized Google Japan for its own search results for the same issue, not removing it but reducing its ability to rank for 11 months.

Potentially, all this means that Google will have to ban the Google Chrome download page over paid links. That would suck for Google, since it’s busy running ads for Google Chrome, which will in turn prompt people to search for it. Right now, the page appears at the top of results for searches on google chrome:

A ban would make it disappear for anything from a month to a year, based on how Google’s handled past penalties.

From the posts that I’ve reviewed, most do not seem to have links to Google or the Google Chrome page. In addition, I expect that Google probably never instructed anyone to directly link to anything.

The campaign — most likely run by third-party Unruly, based on where the video is hosted and handy if Google wants to pass the blame — probably had instructions that just said people should write about whatever they want, positive or negative, with the only requirement being that the Chrome video be included as part of their post.

Google’s Garbage Content Campaign

That’s perhaps the bigger problem with this campaign, much more disturbing to me. Google’s paying to produce a lot of garbage, the same type of garbage that its Panda Update was designed to penalize.

Consider the post above that I highlighted, which says:

Having a small business, I have found Google to be a key element in getting my business out to the online community. I have put so much money into advertisements and at the end of the day, my analytics show that Google is still the top referrer to my business. That has said a lot to me and I started to invest a lot of time into SEO. If you do your SEO it right on your website, Google will propel your business to another level. As a small business, my voice is bigger and better because of Google. It takes me from just being a local business to working with clients world wide.

What’s that got to do with the purported focus of this post: “Google Chrome Helping Small Business.” The author is saying nothing about how Google Chrome has helped her business or any business she knows of. Instead, Chrome only gets mentioned at the end, with text that seems pretty boilerplate to this campaign:

Google Chrome helped this small business in Vermont go global. What can Google Chrome do for your future?

Avoid These “Reviews” Of Google Chrome

A different post is entitled “Review: Google Chrome” and says:

I wanted to share a quick note on Google Chrome; more specifically, I want to share how it can change your small business. It is no secret that there are endless ways to expand your small businesses; however, what is the best way to accomplish that? These days, it’s hard to know who to trust, but with the name Google, you know you are in good hands. I am sure most of you are familiar, but check out this video! It will inspire you to do more.

Ready for that in-depth review? Here it comes:

Google Chrome helped this small business in Vermont go global. What can Google Chrome do for your future?

Fortunately, if you search for “google chrome review,” that post doesn’t make it into the top results. However, consider this search for google chrome benefits:

Imagine you’re someone trying to understand the benefits to using Google Chrome versus other browsers. Out of 21 million possible matches, two of Google’s sponsored garbage posts make it into the top ten results. Here’s what one of the top ranked posts says:

“The Benefits Of Google Chrome,” the post is entitled. And those benefits?

The Internet has many wonderful tools for helping us save money. There are great blogs written by passionate people teaching us how to use coupons effectively. There are budgeting tools to assist us with maintaining a healthy financial life. There are small businesses who are available to provide quality products made locally. Whatever financial information it is you are looking for, you are bound to find it on the Internet. And Google Chrome can help you.

See anything there that’s Chrome-specific? I mean, Internet Explorer and Firefox could help you with all of these things, as well. So what are the unique benefits that Google Chrome will provide, from this author’s experience and knowledge?

Google Chrome helped this small business in Vermont go global. What can Google Chrome do for your future?

Ah, yes, that boilerplate text and video again.

Here’s what another post in the top results says:

The opening paragraph has 295 words generally about saving money and finding those who want to save money. None of it is about Google Chrome until you get to the last sentence, with 35 words that say:

This is where Google Chrome comes in, they offer a way for small businesses to get started easily and get their business name in to the online and social media world without spending a fortune.

After that, there’s no review of Chrome’s features. There’s no review of how Chrome can actually be used by small businesses. There’s just the standard copy about that Vermont business and the video.

The Video Isn’t Even About Chrome

How about the video itself that Google’s pushing? You may have seen on television already. It has nothing to do even with how Chrome actually helped the Vermont flour producer featured, King Arthur Flour, succeed. Here, watch it yourself:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Since King Arthur Flour has been online since at least December 2006, I’m willing to bet it got its start through the Internet Explorer browser. It sure wasn’t Chrome, which didn’t exist at the time.

By the way, while the company’s Google+ page gets featured in the ad, it’s not important enough to King Arthur Flour to be featured on its home page alongside the company’s Facebook and Twitter accounts, as you can see on the right.

So what have we got? Google’s paid for a content-light post that’s not a review of Google Chrome, nor a review of how Google Chrome helps small business, pushing a video that also doesn’t show how Google Chrome helps small businesses.

Perhaps Google’s Ads Need Less Emotion & More Quality

Ironically, the New York Times had a great article today talking about how Google is working harder than ever to advertise itself, in particular to help promote Chrome. From the article:

“If we don’t make you cry, we fail,” Ms. Twohill said. “It’s about emotion, which is bizarre for a tech company.”

Actually, Google makes me want to cry for all the wrong reasons, such as an ad about Google Chrome that never explains what the hell Google Chrome is. Maybe that’s all about the curiosity Google’s trying to push:

Like Google’s events, its TV ads are light on details about products’ features. Instead, they are meant to evoke curiosity and emotion, Ms. Twohill said.

The first ads for Chrome, aimed at frequent Web users, were online and discussed the browser’s speed and security. But when it came time to take Chrome mainstream, she said, Google turned to television to reach those “who don’t get out of bed in the morning and think, ‘I’ll get a new browser today.’ ”

If they don’t get out of bed thinking they need a new browser, there’s a good chance they don’t even think about what browser they currently use. So perhaps an ad that actually does explain the product features of Chrome might be more useful.

At the very least, if you’re going to do a sponsored post campaign, then make the posts have content that also explain the product, not a campaign that produces posts that violate your own content guidelines. Because when I read in the New York Times about the care taken to pick tablecloths for the Google Zeitgeist event for advertisers:

“Google is a very clean, simple brand,” she said. “Linen gets sloppy. It gets dirty; it’s hard to sit under. I take a lot of inspiration from our home page. It’s just simple.”

Then this type of campaign feels like those linen tablecloths that Google wanted to avoid, sloppy and dirty.

Postscript: I heard back from one a blogger I contacted who had done one of these posts. She told me that she’d heard about the campaign through the SITS Girls community. After some searching, I can see that two pay-per-post campaigns run by Unruly have been offered there. One was for the American Cancer Society; the other for T-Mobile.

Both asked that bloggers watch a video and decide if they wanted to do a post about it, saying whatever they wanted, and embed the video on their blog. Payment was $40 in Amazon gift card credit for each. I can’t find that a Google campaign was offered this way, but it seems identical to the other campaigns that the community runsin conjunction with Unruly.

Also, the sign-up terms on the Unruly site have this interesting section:

Monthly earnings caps for Your Site(s) are determined by the Google PageRank of each Site and such other factors as Unruly Media may consider form time to time. You will be notified by email when one of Your Site(s) is approaching its monthly limit and again when the limit is reached; or

These are general terms and might not apply to this particular campaign that Unruly appears to have run on behalf of Google. But regardless, it suggests that Unruly is indeed running campaigns with the intention of gaining better search rankings through paid links.

I say this because there is absolutely no other reason to link payment to the Google PageRank of a site unless you are trying to influence rankings.

Postscript 2: See our follow-up story, Google: Yes, Sponsored Post Campaign Was Ours But Not What We Signed-Up For.

Postscript 3: See Google’s Chrome Page No Longer Ranks For “Browser” After Sponsored Post Penalty

Related Articles

• Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google
• New York Times Exposes J.C. Penney Link Scheme That Causes Plummeting Rankings in Google
• Google’s Action Against Paid Links Continues: Overstock & Forbes Latest Casualties; Conductor Exits Brokering Business
• 90 Days Later, J.C. Penney Regains Its Google Rankings
• Google Bans Itself Again By Banning BeatThatQuote.com
• New York Times Continues Paid Link Outing Stories, Looks At Online Flowers Industry
• Two Weeks Later, Google Lifts Ban On BeatThatQuote
• Wait… Google Banned BeatThatQuote Again!
• Google Loses “Backwards Compatibility” On Paid Link Blocking & PageRank Sculpting
• Google Forecloses On Content Farms With “Panda” Algorithm Update
• Why Google Panda Is More A Ranking Factor Than Algorithm Update
• Taking a Closer Look at the Google’s Panda 2.5 “Flux”
• Google’s Holiday Gift To Webmasters: No Panda Updates Till Next Year
• Google & Bing Have “Won A Major Victory” Over Content Farms, Study Says
• Google: Yes, Sponsored Post Campaign Was Ours But Not What We Signed-Up For
• Google’s Chrome Page No Longer Ranks For “Browser” After Sponsored Post Penalty

(Stock image courtesy of Shutterstock. Used under license.)

A search for [site:co.cc] currently returns 105,000,000 results.

Google originally delisted the co.cc subdomains because Google saw a “very large fraction of sites” on that subdomain to be “spammy or low-quality” and felt it was warranted, in this case, to simply block the whole subdomain from showing up in Google’s results.

I am not sure if this change was intentional or a bug where after we write about it Google will delist the subdomains again.

Here is what the results looked like previously:

Now that many of the results are back, you can check for yourself to see how spammy or low-quality co.cc sites are or are not.

Related Stories:

• Google Delists All CO.CC Domains From Index
• Wait… Google Banned BeatThatQuote Again!
• Why Google Should Ban Its Own Help Pages — But Also Shouldn’t
• AdWords Cloaks Its Help Pages, Gets Banned By Google
• 90 Days Later, J.C. Penney Regains Its Google Rankings
• Got A Google Penalty? A Workflow For Managing Google Penalties
• Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google
• Google Sending Additional Reconsideration Request Responses To Webmasters

Image credit ShutterStock’s welcome back sign.

New Monthly Search Update

The news comes from a post to the Google Inside Search blog, itemizing ten search-related changes that have been made.

Google did a similar post like this last month, and now it confirms this will be a monthly update on what it considers to be noteworthy changes but ones not big enough to merit blog posts of their own.

From the post:

Today we’re publishing another list of search improvements, beginning a monthly series where we’ll be sharing even more details about the algorithm and feature enhancements we make on a near-daily basis…

We’ve been wracking our brains trying to think about how to make search even more transparent. The good news is that we make roughly 500 improvements in a given year, so there’s always more to share. With this blog series, we’ll be highlighting many of the subtler algorithmic and visible feature changes we make. These are changes that aren’t necessarily big enough to warrant entire blog posts on their own.

While Google calls these all algorithm changes, some of them are really related to the search interface, while others impact how Google crawls, which is different from the algorithm that controls how Google ranks pages (to understand more about search algorithms, see our What Is SEO / Search Engine Optimization? page and watch the movie).

On to the changes:

Parked Domains Get Ticketed

One of the most significant changes is that Google says it has a new algorithm to detect parked domains. From the post:

New “parked domain” classifier: This is a new algorithm for automatically detecting parked domains. Parked domains are placeholder sites that are seldom useful and often filled with ads. They typically don’t have valuable content for our users, so in most cases we prefer not to show them.

That’s a pretty easy change to understand. Many domainers I’ve spoken to have understood over the years that it’s become harder to rank on Google without having some substantial content on their sites. This is a clear sign life is getting harder.

Ironically, Google’s own AdSense For Domains program has fueled much of the parked domain industry that its web search team is now penalizing against.

Rewarding The Original

Another big change is that Google says it can now better detect which is the “original” page when confronted with several that seem similar:

Original content: We added new signals to help us make better predictions about which of two similar web pages is the original one.

Within a web site, a variety of things can cause a page to be duplicated. However, a bigger issue for many publishers is when people copy or “scrape” their content without permission. These scraper sites sometimes can even outrank the original site for searches.

Google doesn’t specifically say this change is aimed at scraper sites, but it should help with that issue — and it’s an issue Google’s been especially been battling against since launching its Panda Update earlier this year.

Our previous post from August also talks more about this battle: Google Signals Upcoming Algorithm Change, Asks For Help With Scraper Sites.

For Google, it’s also another reason why publishers may want to consider using the canonical tag. The posts below have more about this:

• Google, Yahoo & Microsoft Unite On “Canonical Tag” To Reduce Duplicate Content Clutter
• Google Supports Cross-Domain ‘Canonical Tag’
• Do You Have Duplicate Content Issues Across Domain? Google Will Now Alert You

Stop Crowding Me

A third big change was Google saying that it’s pulling back on allowing a single site to potentially occupy too much of the top search results. From the post:

Top result selection code rewrite: This code handles extra processing on the top set of results. For example, it ensures that we don’t show too many results from one site (“host crowding”). We rewrote the code to make it easier to understand, simpler to maintain and more flexible for future extensions.

We’ll try for a follow-up here to get further clarity, but about a year ago, Google made it possible for one site to have more than the usual single listing it might get at the top of the page. These stories, especially the second, explain more about this:

• Official: Google Now Lets One Domain Dominate Search Results
• Google Showing More Results Per Domain For More Queries

The change means that that a brand owner may occupy less of the search results page for a search on their name, so competitors or critics potentially turn up more.

Of course, brands like McDonald’s or Coca-Cola have so many additional sites, along with social media profiles, that they still do well in crowding out others.

My post from September, Should Rick Santorum’s “Google Problem” Be Fixed?, explains this more, at the end.

Rare Words Count For More

An interesting change is that if you’re searching for a “rare” or unusual word, Google is easing back on ignoring this and potentially returning matching web pages that might not contain that word.

From the post:

Sometimes we fetch results for queries that are similar to the actual search you type. This change makes it less likely that these results will rank highly if the original query had a rare word that was dropped in the alternate query. For example, if you are searching for [rare red widgets], you might not be as interested in a page that only mentions “red widgets.”

Bigger & Fresher

Elsewhere in the post, Google says that it is doing “more comprehensive indexing,” promising that this will make “more long-tail documents available in our index, so they are more likely to rank for relevant queries.”

Google also said that its blog search results are both more comprehensive and fresh. Image results were also said to be fresher.

Suggestions, Tablet Layout & Goal!

In the remaining changes, first, Google says that it will be offering more autocomplete suggestions. Second, it says it has made small changes to improve its look on tablets.

Finally, those looking for Major League Soccer and Canadian Football League scores, rejoice! Google says it will now display scores, schedules and links to game recaps and box scores for games.

Related Stories

• What Is SEO / Search Engine Optimization?
• Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors
•  Google Signals Upcoming Algorithm Change, Asks For Help With Scraper Sites
• Do You Have Duplicate Content Issues Across Domain? Google Will Now Alert You
• Google Showing More Results Per Domain For More Queries
• Responding To Complaints, Google Adds Verbatim Search Results
• Improved Snippets, Rank Boost For “Official” Pages Among 10 New Google Algorithm Changes

Meta Keywords Tag 101

If you want the history of the meta keywords tag, how it emerged, how it declined, how to use it if you stupidly decide you still want to, see my detailed post from the past, Meta Keywords Tag 101: How To “Legally” Hide Words On Your Pages For Search Engines.

Surprise! Bing Says Meta Keywords Is A Signal

But really, don’t use it. You don’t need it. Google doesn’t support it. As for Bing, let me clear up the confusion here. In July, out on WebmasterWorld, Duane Forrester, senior product manager for Bing webmaster outreach, provided this advice about the tag:

I’ll make this statement: meta keywords is a signal. One of roughly a thousand we analyze.

Getting it right is a nice perk for us, but won’t rock your world. Abusing meta keywords can hurt you.

That was a big change, big news, since until that point, Microsoft hadn’t said that its search engine made any use of the meta keywords tag since the days of having run its own crawler. We’re talking back even before Bing, when the search engine was known as Microsoft Live Search.

I didn’t hear about this, and I gather it got by others, as well. A month later, WebmasterWorld featured it, which got Search Engine Roundtable to notice. I think I was on vacation that week, so I’m not feeling so bad! But Search Engine Roundtable featured it again this week, in a poll where nearly 50% said they now will use the tag.

All Those Damn Questions!

That I noticed. Painfully so. Because if Bing is using the meta keywords tag, that brings back all those questions I hate, like:

• What’s the right format?
• Do you need to have commas?
• Do you need to have a space after the comma?
• Is too much repetition going to help or hurt you?
• What is the maximum length?
• What if you go too long, will that hurt you?
• What if you think it was done wrong and you want to report that it’s all fixed?

A Spam Signal

I contacted Forrester to ask if it was true, and to see what further answers he could provide. After some back and forth, it seemed clear to me that Bing is looking at the tag as a spam signal, not a ranking signal. As I summarized to him in my email:

It sounds like you’re saying that you see a high correlation between crummy pages and people who use the meta keywords tag with garbage – that it’s a spam signal, not a ranking signal.

If that’s the case, then I’d still advise people that you don’t use it for ranking purposes (which solves all those really annoying questions above) but you might use it as a spam signal and that people simply shouldn’t use it.

And his response was:

Yeah, you’re pretty much bang on Danny. In fact, it’s not like we’re actively trying to encourage folks to start using the tag. And you’re right – the scenario I describe is more of a spam signal, which ultimately leads to rankings (or not, as the case may be).

So use the tag? Sure, if you want to take a chance that by overstuffing it, you’ll cause Bing to think you’re spamming. Be safe, be smart, save your time. Don’t use it.

What if you already have it on your page? Many pages do. And I wouldn’t panic, if you do. I suspect it’s seen as a spam signal more heavily if there are other spam signals present.

Postscript: After this posted, Forrester sent me this further comment about if you already use the tag:

The main thing people need to keep in mind if they decide to use the tag is to follow the known best practices. Ultimately, it’s the overt keyword stuffing that gets noticed and makes us want to look a little closer. If you’re willing to stuff pointless keywords into the meta keywords tag, what else might you be inclined to do?

Google is calling for help in identifying a long-running problem: scraper sites in its search results — and particularly scraper sites that are ranking higher than the original page. Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s spam fighting group, put out the call for help on Twitter this morning:

Scrapers getting you down? Tell us about blog scrapers you see: http://goo.gl/S2hIh We need datapoints for testing.

The link leads to a Google Doc form that asks for the exact query where there’s a “scraping problem,” along with the exact URLs of the original and scraper pages. The form explains that Google “may use data you submit to test and improve our algorithms.”

It’s not entirely unusual for Google to call for help like this, but it’s noteworthy because the issue of scraper sites has been particularly prominent in recent months.

Google vs. Scraper Sites

Google has always had critics but, within the last year, many of them grew more vocal about what they perceived as a decline in quality of Google’s search results. Google responded early this year with a blog post in which it disagreed that search results had grown worse, but also promised “new efforts” to fight spam. Among other types of spam, that post called out scraper sites:

And we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content.

Cutts then announced the algorithm change on his own blog a week later, saying that “slightly over 2% of queries change in some way” after the update. He added that “searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content.”

Panda Update vs. Scraper Sites

But the scraper problem didn’t go away. In fact, after the Panda update rolled out in February, many webmasters flooded Google’s help forums with reports that it had gotten worse.

A few months later, during our SMX Advanced conference in Seattle, Cutts confirmed that the newest Panda update would target scraper sites. That update — Panda 2.2 if you’re scoring at home — rolled out in mid-June.

And that pretty much brings us up to today — where Google is “testing algorithmic changes for scraper sites (especially blog scrapers),” and apparently looking for some examples that it thinks it may have missed. If nothing else, it’s a chance for everyone who’s been so vocal about the scraper site problem to report exactly what they’re seeing in Google’s search results.

If you’re logged in to Webmaster Tools, the new spam report page is accessible at www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?pli=1. And calling it a “page” is something of a misnomer because Google has turned what used to be one simple form into a mini-site with eight links for more information about various types of problems.

Rather than a single spam report form, there are now several. The links above for “Paid links,” “Malware” and “Phishing” all lead to separate forms for reporting those specific issues. The fourth form — for things that are “really webspam,” as Google says at the bottom – leads to a much shorter form that looks like this:

The old webspam form was on a single page and asked users to choose one (or more) checkboxes that described the spam-related problem; the checkboxes included options like “Hidden text or links,” “Misleading or repeated words,” “Cloaked page,” “Deceptive redirects” and several others. Here’s a screenshot of the old form, found on HuntsvillePR.com.

Both James and I sent this information to Google as soon as we heard of it. After several hours, Google has told us, “we’re still investigating this report, and to be cautious we disabled all URL removals earlier this morning.” So now, if you even own a site, you won’t be able to remove the site or pages from the site using Google’s URL removal tool.

How did this loophole work? Pretty simple as James described. You use the following URL when logged into Google Webmaster Tools:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals-request?hl=en&siteUrl=http://{YOUR_URL}/&urlt={URL_TO_BLOCK}

Then replace {YOUR_URL} with a URL you control within Webmaster Tools, and replace {URL_TO_BLOCK} with the URL of the site you want to block.

You could block a whole site, section or single page this way, based on how you entered the URL. To block a site, use the top level domain (E.g. http://www.someurl.com/), to block a section (subfolder) use a subfolder URL (E.g. http://www.someurl.com/somefolder/) and to block a page use the specific page URL (E.g. http://www.someurl.com/somefolder/somepage.html).

I am waiting an update from Google on why this happened, if site’s were impacted and how long this was an issue.

Postscript:: Google sent us a statement that they have fixed the issue. A Google spokesperson said:

We’ve confirmed that there was an issue within the URL removal feature in our Webmaster Tools and have already pushed out a fix and re-enabled URL removals.

The URL removal feature keeps detailed records, so we’re currently reprocessing earlier removal requests to ensure their validity. Our initial examination has shown only a limited impact.