Brian White

Skeptic: My Google Toolbar PageRank indicator says 0/10 for your site. (Nelson laugh) ha-ha.
Me:Yes, but I started getting referrals from Google, including referrals from the search phrase [brian white]. I must have *some* PageRank…

Indeed, to rank for Random Stuff™, you need some PageRank. PR is calculated pretty much continuously inside of Google which keeps our results fresh, but the Toolbar PageRank value is refreshed not nearly as often. Thus, one should not pay too much attention to PR, and instead rely on their own logs and analytics applications.

How did I get PageRank? I’ve met a few industry folks at shows like Pubcon and SES, and have been getting links to my posts from search industry news sites and blogs by them or from those who have heard of me (self-rating: I’m a C-lister at best). That little bit of effort has turned into a nice stream of traffic, although I’m not focusing on that at all.

Update: In the comments, Adam Senour points out quite correctly that PageRank is just one of over 100 factors in how pages or sites rank in Google.

I’m going to Milan SES this week with two people on my team. It’s very nice to be within a few hours flight of so many diverse countries. I haven’t practiced Italian but I’m sure I’ll get a crash course–the agenda is completely in Italian.

I also have some peers in Search Quality headed to SMX in Seattle next week. Oh to be a fly on the wall at the You&A with Matt and the Penalty Box Summit! My compadres will have to brief me afterward.

Hope to see you in Milan if you’re going there. I also wish Danny and his team best of luck with SMX Advanced.

I was perusing the FAQ over at Blogitive recently, and found an item I don’t exactly agree with.

Blogitive is a business that, in a nutshell, matches bloggers and advertisers with the caveat that the advertising is in the form of blog content, and within that content is a direct hyperlink with the desired keywords as anchor text. Please correct me if I am missing specifics, but that is based on the information I gathered.

This FAQ item in particular that caught my attention:

Q: Do the search engine mind this tactic?

A: No, search engines need people to create content that is unique and relevant. By supplying that, both you and the client are helping the search engines grow it’s [sic] index. Just make sure to supply as good of content as possible.

While I agree that both search engines and users love original content, I respectfully disagree with the way this question was answered. My opinion is that this particular tactic can be trumped by a specific part of Google’s guidelines, given that the tactic can make it difficult for users and search engines alike to know that the post is sponsored. Matt, in his update to his paid link reporting post, outlines methods to make content like blog posts in ways that don’t affect search engines.

A quick check of the query ["filed under Blogitive"] shows sites that are likely participating in paid blog posting. A sampling shows some websites show that they’re not completely forthcoming on the sponsored nature of the posting. While a site-wide disclosure policy, typically available via a navigational link, seems to be a common way to disclose the nature of some of the content within a site, as a user I’d appreciate that the post itself was labeled as sponsored.

Labeling the post itself as sponsored in machine-readable text moves the site more into alignment with Google’s guidelines:

Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

The takeaway is thus: To the extent the site owner employs paid link activity on their site in a way that works to obfuscate the nature of the links to search engines and to users, is the extent to which that activity can have a negative influence on their presence in Google results. The good news is that there are the aforementioned ways for sites to align with the guidelines and to also align with what users expect from Google’s natural search results.

Brian is a Google employee and a member of the Search Quality group focusing on Webspam. These opinions are his alone.

Google Personalized Homepage is now iGoogle, and will probably be the home page of the iPhone I’ll eventually buy…

The URL (http://www.google.com/ig) stays the same. Some folks speculated on the name when the Personalized Homepage came out in 2005:

P.S. Anyone know what the “ig” in the www.google.com/ig is supposed to indicate? I always think “iGoogle” as in “iRobot“, but am pretty sure that’s not their intention

Let’s go back to basics today.

Car owners typically know that there are a number of automatic safety features on a modern vehicle. There are a number of gauges and sensors that will show a driver that a taillight is out, or that the windshield wiper fluid is low. People routinely eyeball their tires or check the actual tire pressure with a tire pressure gauge so they know they’re maximizing the life of their tires and the safety of their commute.

Similarly, website owners have a few things they can do as well to do quick checks of their site. One easy way to check a site’s health in Google is via the site: operator. It’s my favorite operator by far (Advanced operators documentation). When I talked to website owners at Pubcon in Las Vegas last year, I was struck by how many people weren’t aware of it. These searches are useful to the technical and the non-technical alike.

Adding the site: operator to a search will allow one to restrict the results to a granular level. Most people use site: to restrict a search to a specific subsection of our index, such as [site:yahoo.com yankees] to only search Yahoo for information on the New York Yankees. They may not know that if one uses the site operator alone, Google will do its best to bring you back all the documents it knows about for that subsection of Google’s index. Some examples:

• It can restrict to a top-level domain ([site:co.uk]),
• to a domain level ([site:brianwhite.org]),
• subdomain level ([site:sports.yahoo.com])
• or a subdirectory ([site:mattcutts.com/blog/]).

There are more possibilites including subsections with dynamic URLs–so it’s fun to play around with that operator.

Stuff I like about the site: operator:

• It shows you immediately how page titles and URLs look. The nice thing about seeing all of one’s documents like this is that things you want to think about fixing will stick out at you pretty quickly. They might be page titles or documents you don’t want visible to the public. You can take things into your own hands (ideas below), or if you work with a web development professional or SEO, you can pick up the phone and ask them about what you see in these results.
• You can look at the estimated results at the top right to gauge roughly how many pages Google knows about.
• You can use a site: search on other sites to see how they want the world to see themselves through search engines. This could be sites you admire, your competitors, or admired competitors.
• As a member of the Webspam team at Google, I occasionally see sites that are hacked or defaced by rogue enterprises that aim to put revenue-generating pages on sites without the owner’s knowledge, in the hopes that those pages “borrow” the site’s reputation to show up in Google. Most sites don’t have to worry about this. Last year I posted on this topic at SEW. Again, it’s not something to worry about too much, my point is that routine site: checks have a good chance of showing you instantly if rogue pages have been inserted into your site (paying attention to analytics reports can help here too).
• Google’s not the only search engine to support this operator. While the implementations differ slightly, Yahoo, Live Search, and Ask all support it.

Tips on using the site: operator:

• You can also add a negative site: operator to do additional filtering. Consider this query: [site:brianwhite.org -site:www.brianwhite.org]. I’m asking Google, “Please give me everything you know on the domain brianwhite.org, but remove results that are on the subdomain ‘www’ on the same domain.” These combinations can be powerful, especially if you have a larger site and use subdomains. One of the joys of living in our “search era” is challenging oneself to combine operators and techniques to get interesting results.
• Don’t panic if you see problems within your site: search, a lot of them can be fixed. There’s no guarantee that any particular URL has been seen by a user, as well–they still have to search for it and have the URL show up in results. More can be learned at the Google Webmaster Help Center.
• Don’t worry about Supplemental Results. Supplemental results, by themselves, don’t indicate problems. My blog has about half its results marked as Supplemental right now, and I consider that a bonus. Some sites have URLs come in and out of Supplemental status on a continual basis. Google’s index is refreshed very frequently and is highly dynamic. I don’t worry about that ratio as I know that people are finding my site based on my logs and Analytics reports.

Actions you can take as a result:

• Head to Google’s Webmaster Tools where you can get more insight on how Google crawls your site, discuss what you see with other site owners, and look for help in the documentation section.
• If there are sections of your site you want to remove from the index quickly, Webmaster Tools has a removal tool.
• If you have non-urgent things you’d like to clean up, you can think about cleaning up things like page titles or modifying your robots.txt and/or META tags to prevent crawling or archiving. I’m thinking of preventing Googlebot from crawling some sections of this blog based on a site: search (I’ll talk about it in an upcoming post).

I know that some webmasters and site owners have pet uses of site: operator queries. What are your favorite applications, tips, or issues with this operator? I’d love to hear about them. Also, eagle-eyed readers will have noted that there were no lyrical poems, stanzas, or verses to be had in this ode

Update Jun 16 2008: The Supplemental Results label went away.

All right, time for a work-related post. Matt put out a call for reports of paid links this week as our team is looking for test data.

During my recent web travels, I encountered this page:

Not exactly a ringing endorsement…