LinksManager.com Blog

OK, guys and girls in search-engine land, here’s a few questions inquiring minds would like to ask. One is generic and can be answered by any of you (please don’t trample each other rushing to the mike to respond) and the others are specific to individual engines.

Ready, steady, let’s go!

For Ask.com: What did you do with the body?  Jeeves body, to be specific.  Is it entombed in concrete somewhere near Hoffa’s or do you have it in cryogenic storage waiting to be re-animated (ala Jack of Jack-In-The-Box fame) when the winds of marketing shift?

For Everyone: If LinksManager’s application writers can figure out a way to automatically rotate links (a standard option) why can’t yours design a system that automatically rotates returns to give every site with the same relative value a fair share of the hits?

Look, people, we know that all your systems rank websites using the dog show model.  We know that sites, like the dogs at Westminster and other canine competitions, are compared to a set of standards, not each other.  (Maybe someday you’ll be able to make head-to-head comparisons of 5,000,000 sites answering a search for “dog show”, but that day isn’t today.)

Each site — like a champion Black Russian Terrier (a very bizarre dog bio-engineered by the former Soviet Union Army at a secret installation called the Red Star Kennel) — is examined for conformance to the standards of its breed.  Clearly you all have differing standards for breeds such as e-tail sites, .org domains, educational sites, etc., but the methodology is the same, sites are judged against the standards and assigned a numerical ranking.

OK.  If you do a search for Black Russian Terrier you’ll get 560,000 returns (give or take 100,000 or so depending on which engine you use.)  The question is, does your ranking algorithm really scale from 1 to 560,000 with each and every one of those sites having an absolutely different qualitative rating.  Or do 1,000 sites total 1000, 10,000 total 900, etc. ?

And if there are duplicate ratings, wouldn’t it be more fair to rotate the returns at each level to give every site with the same number of points equal exposure?  Even if your bots do rank sites down to 19 decimal places, wouldn’t it be a good idea to rotate those that are within one percentage point of each other?

Many end users, including us, don’t like seeing the same return lineup every time we search a key word because we’ve already explored those top 20 sites after a previous search.  We’d love having a list of different, equally good, sites appear.

For Google: Why does Dogpile.com return #1 in a search for search engines and why does the first actual link to the Google.com search engine return at #71, far behind returns for Alta Vista, Ask, Yahoo, DMOZ, and Netscape?

Since you profess to rank pages in order of importance, does positioning yourself after these competitors say something Freudian about your sense of self-esteem or are you just being magnanimous to the also-rans?

Or could it be, perhaps, that you simply define the word “important” differently than the rest of the English-speaking world.

How else can you explain why Googling bookstore does not give us the planet’s largest book seller, Amazon.com, anywhere in the first 100 returns?  Likewise a search for online auctions returns eBay at #95 while Yahoo Auctions occupy both the #12 and #33 spot.

Which leads to a final question for the Google contingent:  Why is the Yahoo Auction service, which has been out of business for more than a year, more important than eBay?

For Microsoft Live:  Stop smirking, Mr. Gates, we typed the words computer software into your latest, greatest search engine and drilled down 20 pages — 200 returns — without finding a single link to Microsoft.com.

Is that another Freudian slip?

Do we see a hand go up from somewhere deep in Redmond?  No?

In that case, Mr. Gates, we’ll hazard our own guess.  Since the Microsoft Live Guidelines For Successful Indexing say that pages should be designed with “valuable content,” our speculation is that Microbot (or whatever you call your crawler) visited the XP “Solution Center” and found it about as valuable as everyone else does.

For Yahoo:  Why doesn’t Yahoo.com show up in the returns for death throes?  Sorry, Jerry, that really wasn’t very kind.  On the other hand, the 317th richest man in the world should be able to take a joke, even a sick one, as long as someone other than the 42nd richest man in the world is making it.

Speaking of Freudian, here’s a more serious question for you Yahooers.  Does everyone in the search engine business suffer from an inferiority complex?  If not, why do you return News.yahoo.com #3 in a search for news services and News.google.com #2 (behind only a shortcut to some news stories)?

While we’re on the news services return pages, why does the Purdue University News Service rank #6?  Why isn’t the Associated Press site anywhere in the top 100?  Conversely, why is Gongwer News, whatever that is, in the top 100 twice and why is Areaconnect.com, which isn’t really a news service at all, in the first 100 about ten times starting with the #10 spot?

So there it is, the first edition of the Search Engine Follies of 2008 compiled from searches conducted on 6/10/08.  So much for comic relief, time to knuckle down and get serious about improving our page rank. HHHmmm, maybe we should start by visiting here and picking up a few “hidden-energy” SEO tricks from the Old Out-of-the-Broom Closet Witch.

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If you’re a regular or even just an occasional reader of this blog, you’ve probably noticed that we quote from — and link to — Google quite frequently in these posts.  We do this because we feel that when it comes to search-engine optimization in general and the effect of linking on search engine PageRank and returns specifically, Google knows what it’s talking about (at least most of the time) and many other self-proclaimed experts don’t.

Simply put, we think a book’s author is better able to interpret its contents than someone who’s just speculating and when it comes to search engines, Google wrote –and is continuing to write — the book.  Or at least the book that most of the world’s webmasters and search-engine end users are “reading.”

That said, we must admit that we, too, are sometimes reduced to making what we hope are educated and informed guesses about what the Big G is up to because Google is, according to their Vice President of Search Quality Engineering, Udi Manber, very selective about what goes into the “book.”

“We are, to be honest, quite secretive about what we do,” Manber wrote recently. “There are two reasons for it: competition and abuse.  Competition is pretty straightforward.  No company wants to share its secret recipes with its competitors.  As for abuse, if we make our ranking formulas too accessible, we make it easier for people to game the system.  Security by obscurity is never the strongest measure, and we do not rely on it exclusively, but it does prevent a lot of abuse.”

Fair enough.  Like Google, we here at LinksManager also have a patent on our technology and, like Google’s, the details of our patent can be easily accessed online.  Right here, for example.

Relative to patented technology, there are a few other similarities between LinksManager and Google.  For one thing, we don’t believe that anyone else has the programming skill, internet savvy and decade’s long experience designing white-hat link-management systems to take the public information in our patent and use it to create a fully featured, robust, cost-effect, totally ethical and Google-guideline compliant application even half as good as LinksManager.  And while this is one of those “educated guesses” rather than known fact, we strongly suspect that Google is also pretty confident that no one can take the info in its patent application and use it to cobble up a search engine that’s in any way comparable to theirs.

Another similarity is more than an educated guess, Google will sue you if you violate their patent.  And we will sue you if you violate ours.

On the other side of the coin, if you screw up while using LinksManager, our Help Desk will be happy– anxious even — to tell you what you did wrong and help you fix it; Google offers no such service to webmasters whose sites have mysteriously fallen into the sandbox, disappeared from the Google Index radar, or gone into freefall on the returns pages.

Which in our opinion, is a shame.  Google, despite its undeniable power, is neither a municipal government, a state legislature or the United State Congress.  Practically it can and does do whatever it wants, but morally it has no right to take the exalted position that “ignorance is no excuse” … particularly since so many of its “laws” are cloaked from view by what VP Manber refers to as Google’s “security by obscurity” policy.

Despite hundreds of scams, schemes, dreams, shortcuts and end-arounds, some barely legal and others downright dishonest, designed to beat Google and the other search engines out of an undeservedly high page ranking, most of the sites which get penalized for, metaphorically speaking, walking on a search bot’s grass, are owned and operated by small businesspeople who are as knowledgeable about the intricacies of search-engine standards and practices as they are about rocket science.

Such people struggle to build their own sites, often using limited-function free tools provided by their $7.95-a-month hosts, because they have to, not because they want to.  If they had the money, they would happily pay someone else to do it and concentrate on running the parts of their business that they do understand.

Similarly, most of the people who run afoul of the engines are innocent of any unethical intent.  Besides, even if they could afford to pay an “expert” to SEO their site, they’d stand a good chance of getting suckered by someone pushing an unethical SEO solution via a link on the first Google returns page.

Fact is, for Google to imply that if you read and follow their guidelines you’ll never be penalized is neither good enough or true.  Google analyzes, it says, over 100 factors in determining page rank and return position.  People well-grounded in internet and World Wide Web technology and practices can read the Google Guidelines until their eyes fall out, and they swallow their tongues without finding any hint of what the vast majority of those factors are.

A newbie to e-commerce and websites can print copies of the Guidelines, gather his family and friends around the same kitchen table at which they’ve been desperately trying to sustain a struggling business and eight times out of ten they will not — jointly or severally — be able to figure out why their site has disappeared from the index.

So why can’t you just pick up the phone and ask someone at Google to look at your site, tell what you did wrong and explain how to fix it?  Because hiring enough people to answer the phones would bankrupt Google?  Because it would tie up every phone line in the world?  Because people would abuse the system by asking dumb questions that are clearly answered in the guidelines?

Well, give or take 10 or 20 million homo sapiens, there’s probably as many people who don’t understand why they get Windows’ blue screen of death as there are who don’t understand why their site is in the Google sandbox.  Yet, Microsoft manages to offer personalized tech support without the sky falling in on them.

Of course, MS’ personalized tech support isn’t free (past a severely limited ‘warranty’ period.)  Prices vary widely based on the software package involved, the type of issue and the nature of the user (home, corporate, etc.) from about $39 for simple plain-vanilla install issues to hundreds of dollars for telephonically troubleshooting a corporate networking question.  A telephone tech making approximately $20 an hour can generate anywhere from $80 to $800 in revenue for Redmond, a very nice ROI in anyone’s book.

Turning the burden of providing adequate tech support from an obligation into a profit center isn’t exactly what one would call an outstanding public service, but it’s probably necessary for Microsoft.  Without the charges to exclude all but the most serious computer health seekers, we — or at least most of us — would be calling “home” every time Outlook accidentally trashed a non-spam message.

Given the size of the worldwide webmaster community and the complexity of many search-engine issues, Google, like Microsoft, simply cannot, logistically or financially, afford to throw open the gates to a personalized site-correction theme park.  But they can — and arguably have an obligation to — allow people willing and able to pay a reasonable fee to drop in and have their most frustrating question — HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO ME? — answered.

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