A Happy SERPs Holiday provided by Google Search Results!

For you Christmas lovers–search “Christmas”:

Not a fan of Christmas? Me either! Let’s go get some Menorahs:

Still not your cup of tea? Celebrate Kwanzaa?

Non-religious? All-encompassing? Love Seinfeld? Go Festivus!

Okay, I allow myself to be corny once in awhile with these posts…

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Baidu has recently come to terms with media criticisms over whether Baidu allows its paid results to influence what happens in the organic results. The Wall Street Journal’s China Journal covers this in a little bit of detail noting about Baidu’s paid results response:

Last night, in a conference call with analysts, Baidu unveiled its response: A new system that more clearly separates its paid links from ordinary search results.

“We are doing this because we care. It is important to us. We want to be a responsible corporate citizen,” said Baidu chief executive Robin Li.

They asserted again that the search company doesn’t exclude Web sites from search results because the companies behind them failed to pay for links. But Baidu executives also said they are speeding up development of the new system, called Phoenix Nest, in part to quell confusion. Under Phoenix Nest, paid ads will appear in a clearly marked section on the right side of the search results page.

Baidu has long argued that its paid links are marked, but yesterday CEO Robin Li said, “We do hear from the press from time to time that some of our users were confused by paid and non-paid content.”

This is nothing new for what search engines have had to deal with as even Google has been accussed in the past for possible monetizing their own organic results based off of their paid results as well or not adequately separating their paid/organic results.

Oftentimes those of us in the online advertising industry take for granted that what we understand about search the average Internet user does as well. In fact, most Internet users do not know all of the paid areas of the search results. Let us take an example of someone interested in looking for “gaming computers:”

You would likely get most people able to answer that there are at least one are of the above results being paid search, but that will hinge on whether the browser’s monitor coloring can differentiate the off-color yellow.

Fewer would realize the results on the right are paid, even with the sponsored links showing up. It is not the fault of a user being an idiot, just that the user does not look for the phrase “Sponsored” as a way to tell what is organic or what is paid. This is entirely different from when you use another color to separate the results as Internet users have gotten used to seeing ads in boxes that are of a different color.

Lastly, I would be surprised if many would name the shopping results as a paid search function from Google Base. These results are certainly not a part of organic search (you can argue if it is a part of paid) even though they will vary in positioning (top, bottom, middle, etc).

The point of all this is to note for the Chinese media with knowledge of the online marketing world, that even in the US for Google, most people still do not know the difference between paid and organic results. The search engines are naturally going to muddy the waters in order to get more people to click on the paid results, so without specifically noting what should be done for all engines, there is little point to complain about the current layout.

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The Blackhats have finally caught on (publically at least) to the fact that Google is not doing a very good job with scraping sites, much less authority sites that copy and paste content from your own site. Interestingly enough, Quadzilla has noted that Yahoo is doing a relatively good job on the other hand with its search results:

In the meantime, while Google (and in fact all the Search engines) continues to serve up scraper after scraper - Scrape away! It’s the blackhat technique that just won’t die and continues to drive traffic and make money.

What’s even worse about the scraping aspect is that this is nearly considered to be an acceptable thing to do since according to Google, they cannot determine whether or not you permitted those sites (say the Associated Press) to re-post your content.

It’s the same concept when you see Aaron Wall posting his own same content around the web nearly verbatim and having them rank quite well. This tolerance for duplicate content is rather ridiculous from a user perspective, but from Google’s perspective it lessens their burden from trying to determine what is “truth” and what is a good search result.

But the question remains, what happens when the two need to be the one and the same?

Update (11/13/2008):

SEO ROI has found a site in particular already taking advantage of this nasty aspect on Aimclear:

Trademark Productions steal other people’s content, edit it for the sake of passing through search engine duplicate content filters, and try to pass themselves off as experts you should trust? They’re stealing from Aimclear, Clickz and others.

Here’s the fun kicker from the Sphinn post comment by sockmoney to highlight the problem still going on today:

I battled a site last year that had copied over 10,000 pages of content from my site.  It was brought to my attention by a competitor who was also being scraped.

I wrote a program that would crawl their site, pull the dup URL, and report on it against the matching page on my site.

Now keep in mind, my site is 10 years old, the scraper site was less than one year old.

I filed my report as a DMCA violation with Google (my crawler was only able to match 6,000+ pages copied, so that is what I sent to Google in the format they required).

Google contacted the site owners, they countered and said they have broken no copyright laws.  Google said we cannot do anything else, sorry.  In my mind, Google should be able to see my content was there first, and they do in most cases, so why can’t they assign a scraper penalty to the site(s)?  Instead, they choose in this case to let their site continue to grow “acting” like a legit site with legit content, but all along they were simply existing off our content.

My only option was to hire an attorney.  I was advised that copyright law is a Federal law, and that it would require going to Federal court, which would cost me a minimum of 30-50k in legal fees.

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The more and more I see Google gobble up new areas and jump into new verticals, the more I personally envision their own search results filled with just about only their own products. For someone who works on improving client search results for SEO, this will become an ever-increasing frustration as Google’s SERPs will be less and less beneficial for clients looking for direct impacts to their site. How so? Here’s a vision of how the search results could be in a few years (click to enlarge):

Of course, that entirely depends on whether Google is still around. Nonetheless, as frustrating as it can be to see these results, it makes me wonder how much Google is just shooting itself in the foot the more it continues to promote its own products over other results (manually or algorithimically). All one would need is a great advertising campaign to publically make fun of Google for having all its search results as Google.

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With the full text of Google’s general guidelines leaked on remote quality raters (April 2007 version — PDF) , one can really envision the immense problems that Google is having with its algorithm. A company that proclaimed itself as being able to algorithmically determine what should rank well across the web has been slowly backtracking towards either a manual approach or a double-checking approach towards Google’s search results.

News of the document is spreading like wildfire with ideas on how to use it to every SEO advantage. You can even begin to see further manual reviews happening as well affecting a multitude of websites.

Nonetheless, what the main players are not noting is how blatantly this points out the failure of Google’s algorithm and the future of spam results showing up more prominently.

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I ran across a hot topic on Sphinn titled “Google Showing Bias Towards .org TLDs” and thought to take a look at how other sites/people are trying to run tests on what matters to Google. I am always appreciative to see people trying to run tests that go beyond just pure guesses as I’ve stated before about statistical SEO. Below are some of the findings from The Google Cache on what TLDs matter:

Preliminary Results:

The results were quite shocking. The .org subdomains outranked all other extensions. As you can see, the .nets and .coms are intermixed, some not ranking at all, but the .orgs are stacked at the top. While these results must be taken with a grain of salt until they can be verified on a much larger scale, it does indicate that there may be some bias towards the .org top level domain. (many have suspected this) These results have shown true on appx 80% of datacenters we have tested.

[...]

Implications:

1. Further study is definitely needed. Virante will be expanding the number of test subjects greatly and testing with and without subdomains.
2. Considering the costs are quite similar, it may make sense to begin using .orgs, like our good friends at SEOMoz

I’ve gone through my share of econometric papers, so I usually quickly turn my eyes to what the set-ups were to test such an experiment. First, let’s look at the methodology:

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Everything I learned about Google and the Internet, oh wait, Google is wanting to be the Internet…:

Breaking Down Their “Tools”, and Their Purpose

1. E-Commerce
   1. Google Checkout - There is no business that makes money like the money business. Stepping into Paypal’s shoes, this service is not massive…yet. I have an odd feeling the plans for this are future-based
   2. Froogle - An invasion upon the various comparison shopping websites(remember when MySimon was huge?).
   3. Google Base - Call it CraigsList2.0. It even has personal ads.
   4. Music Search - Try Searching for “The Decemberists Album”. You’ll see yet another top bar ahead of the search results. This is their way of driving traffic to Google Base. But it once again shows that they’re gaining some decent AI about product searches. Not only searching information, but understanding it.
   5. Google Pages - Google’s free hosting setup. Why is this under e-commerce? Read the next section and you’ll understand…
2. Information Centralization
   1. Google Reader - A central location to access all websites you would not normally have to search for. Takes the place of (well, other RSS readers), but also type in traffic and bookmarks.
   2. Local Search - Invalidates the need for a small business website(in the eyes of many). At the top of any search result, it shows business addresses, phone numbers, and busienss names.
   3. Knols - Brings the information of Wikipedia into the “Google” fold. With the information they have organized and indexed, it’s easy to bring it together. Ties in lovely with the define: Function
   4. Question and Answer - Everyone, open a new tab, and search for “What is the population of China?”, or “What time is it in Dayton, Ohio?”. Surprised? Yeahhhh. By having users go straight to them for this information, once again, increased marketshare, no webmaster participation involved.
   5. Define:keyword Search - Perhaps the first sign that Google was doing more than just indexing information. They were organizing it, extracting meaning from it. It’s the first step necessary to being able re-create information.
   6. GMail - You’ll notice this little gem(and it is a gem by the way) got introduced when a significant portion of the middle-aged adults were getting more acquainted with the internet. This particular group has a tendency towards e-mail; it’s safe and requires no credit card number. Not only did it cut into Hotmails market share, but in doing so the people not overly familar with the internet became familiar with Google, and became potential crossovers from the default Live.com search.
   7. Google Print - Google’s project aiming to scan as many books as possible into their database. Using OCR, they’re text-searchable. Click one, and surprise surprise, we see a familiar bar at the left allowing us to purchase this book from a variety of sources…once again, read the next section to realize the implications here.

Scary implications really and I couldn’t say it any better on what Google wants to do and change the Internet unto its own image.

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Here’s my comment via the article at UK Times Online on Slashdot:

 You can follow three paths as a search engine (in simplistic terms):

1) Show everything–this implies crap sites (*coughs* boingboing), great sites (*coughs*

/.), malware sites (3221.com), search results sites, etc. thereupon your results are fully awful, but absolutely representative of what a search engine is “supposed” to show by previous comments, and thus get banned in China thereby showing nothing.

2) Do as you are told–obviously not as fun and cries of shenanigans and submissions are there, but then you get to show more results to people around the world who otherwise would just be filled with pure propaganda.

3) Do your own thing–”hitting the corner of the ping-pong table”, barely get by with regulations without getting punished.

Guess what? None of those are illegal to do under any international law at this point in time (although I recall some events within the US on trying to sue sites that just link to other pages, but nothing for the international arena) and certainly nothing illegal to show or not show within the US for political sites.

Remember, this is a corporation, not a government, so there is no “right” that you have for them to “display” your site in “their” index.

At least all algorithmically anyway.

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Google announced a few days ago its vision to essentially mash together a Wikipedia like site with a Squidoo layout essentially desiring to have a competitive online encyclopedia that has ads. Beyond the horrible name, this product may come to haunt Google in the long-run becoming a turning point its perceived status as an honest company into a monopolistic corporation similarly to Microsoft.

Google Knol essentially could take down the major content providers such as Wikipedia, Squidoo, Hubpages, Yahoo Answers, etc. as it will naturally be ‘algorithmically’ favored by the grand ‘artificial intelligence’ of Google—just as Youtube currently is for videos. Competition for ad revenue will drive a lot of people to copy millions of text from across the web creating duplicate content issues that Google still cannot detect through its ‘artificial intelligence’ particularly with RSS feeds, in turn creating complaints of infringements on copywriting.

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A fascinating exchange between Mr. Google (Matt Cutts) and Johnon (John Andrews) about Google Search Results and how essentially the results are becoming increasingly irrelevant to online users, but with that said, Google’s Search Results are still far and above better than anything out there at this point in time. Of the conversation about Google vs. Innovation, I just wanted to point out one prescient point in the comments by ‘Dan’:

 Google search has become nothing more than… one big AD aggregator…which to me… has nothing at all to do with Internet search.

Google’s Search Results may not be that yet, but I can guarantee it probably will be in due time as more people learn about online marketing and the competition level rises.

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