Steve Johnston
The Google Blog of a Google Consultant
April 26, 2006
Charles Phelan at ZipDebt appears to be the Steve Johnston (forgive me) of the personal debt management world in the US. A sole practitioner with a key self-help, debt elimination product to sell and a breadth of experience and understanding that makes him very credible. His site performs reasonably well in Yahoo and MSN but is completely absent from the Google SERPs for anything remotely competitive as a search expression. This had been going on for ever and he was beginning to think he had been penalized; although for what was a mystery to him, as he had always been very straight-forward with any optimization work he did and certainly didn't think he'd done anything unethical. So finally he typed in 'Google consultant' into Google and here we are.
My experience of the sorts of problem Charles has been experiencing has been overwhelmingly down to simple technical configuration errors that have got Google confused about where the content is; the 'Location Management' of the introduction. And this has proved to be the case for ZipDebt.
ZipDebt sells a product online and runs an affiliate scheme of its own, which are managed using osCommerce behind a shared SSL certificate on a domain separate from www.zipdebt.com. The problem has arisen from normal, unrestricted, site links from zipdebt.com into the SSL domain for the 'checkout' which give Google access to these locations; combined with the affiliate links coming into pages that are not part of the normal site; finished off with a bunch of relative href links in the HTML giving Google full access to the whole site under the SSL domain locations at ssl-secure-page.com. We haven't quite unpicked the reason for the next step, but somehow in the confusion of the above, Google decided that the ssl-secured-pages.com domain was the primary location for the ZipDebt content. This Google search demonstrates this fact (for now), and this screenshot1 demonstrates it for later. In addition, if you execute a search for ZipDebt itself, Google's preference for the SSL domain is clear - screenshot2 for when we have fixed it. The nail in the coffin for the ZipDebt.com domain is the fact that all its pages are in Google's Supplemental index, and haven't been spidered since the Summer of 2005 - screenshot3 for later.
Okay, so we have identified the problem and the purpose of this post is to assist in the solution. We have already fixed the problems with the site being accessible under the SSL domain, by using 301 redirects for all locations that should be on the ZipDebt.com domain (test this one: https://ssl-secured-page.com/~zipdebtc/index.php). Now Google needs to discover the redirects and adjust the index entries for ZipDebt.com. I have an anxiety about their presence in the Supplemental index and how quickly we can expect Google to fix them, but the stages of work are clear:
- 1. Get Google to notice the redirections
- 2. Reinforce the new locations once corrected
So here is stage 1: A list of priority old locations that that we need Google to revisit and find the redirections:
ZipDebt Home, ZipDebt Testimonials, ZipDebt Contacts, ZipDebt Free Ebook, ZipDebt Privacy Policy, ZipDebt Links, ZipDebt Ordering and ZipDebt FAQ.
If we are successful, we should see something change over the next week or so, certainly with the SSL domain. As I said, because of ZipDebt.com's entries being in the Supplemental database, we may not see such a rapid change. The two searches on Google to watch are:
- Old locations in Google (13 at time of writing)
- Real locations in Google - not in Supplemental (0 at time of writing - 11 in Supplemetal, last cached in the Summer of 2005)
Updates when we have them.
April 25, 2006
"Don't let your website be seen as spam...
Dear Steve,
By registering or renewing domains for only a year at a time your website is
at risk of being identified as illegitimate or as a source of spam by the
internet's leading search engines.
Google has stated that domains registered for only one year are seen as
illegitimate, risky sites that are downgraded in their search results.
"Unless you only need a domain temporarily, it's madness not to secure it.
You'll get a better price and better search engine rankings, plus, there'll
be no risk of someone stealling it if you forget to renew."
Andrew Michael
CEO Fasthosts
With UKreg, though, you can now secure your domains for a full
decade in advance at the special rate of only 7.99GBP per year.
Extending your existing registrations to a full 10 years can now be done at
the click of a button, and will ensure that your websites will be recognised
as authoritative, legitimate sites that are visible for all to see on the
likes of Google, Yahoo and MSN searches.
So forget about renewing every 12 months and boost your website's search
engine rankings now by securing your domain at this exclusive price for the
next decade!
Best regards,
The UKreg team
This is a piece of unethical and manipulating sales crap, which propagates mis-information from a source that really should know better. The fact that either they don't know better, or do and are disregarding it, is worrying in equal measure.
To help put the record straighter; part of Google's patent, paragraph [0099], talks about how they could consider the purchased period of a domain registration as quality signal. The logic goes that spammers will buy short term domains, legit businesses will buy longer periods.
Buying longer term domains will not affect your ranking directly, only Google's perception of you authenticity, if, and that is an important if, they are actually using it as a quality signal. The patent simply suggests that they want to protect a right to do so.
April 24, 2006
"Google continues to dominate the search market in the UK, powering 74.8% of all UK internet searches for the four weeks ending 1 April. The top four search engines combined powered 95.7% of UK internet searches in the four week period.
MSN.co.uk Search is Google's closest competitor, powering 6.7% of UK internet searches. When combined with its .com property, MSN Search powered 7.8% of searches. Yahoo! Search is the next strongest competitor with searches on Yahoo! Search - UK & Ireland accounting for 5.7% of UK internet searches. Collectively, Yahoo! Search - UK & Ireland and Yahoo! Search powered 7.5% of searches. Ask UK powered 5.4% of UK internet searches. Combining its UK and .com properties, Ask powered 5.6% of searches in the four week period."
I have reproduced their newsletter report because I couldn't find the newsletter on their web site to link to. Go figure. This growth to 75% is up from 70% less than a year ago.
April 20, 2006
Google eBook to be published in paperback
Random House UK have signed me up to write an expanded paperback version of my '50 Ways to Make Google Love Your Web Site'. Due for publication in January 2007, watch out for it on the shelves of your neighbourhood bookshop in the New Year! Thank you for all the feedback I have had on the ebook version, it has helped me enormously when looking forward to expand it for paperback publication.
Google Seminar programme to be developed
Following on from a successful event for Redeye, entitled 'Getting friendly with Google' earlier this month (sorry not to let you know in advance), I am looking to develop further speaking events such as this and am in discussions with the online agency of a big London advertising firm and with one of London's leading business schools. Watch out for an Events page appearing on my site soon. I am keen to also do private seminars and training sessions along these lines.
BMW & BMM Banned
And yes, I was paying attention to BMW and BMM (Big Mouth Media) getting banned from Google, just didn't find a moment to blog it. Philipp Lenssen did a great job on the BMW story in the meantime.
