Central Perk

miercuri, 30 iulie 2014

Good News for the Economy:

Featured

Today, the Bureau of Economic Analysis released a report showing strong economic growth last quarter, with the gross domestic product (GDP) increasing at a 4 percent rate.

This is a good indicator that the economy is continuing to improve, and another sign that the President's policies are starting to pay off -- but the economy could be doing even better if Congress decided to do its part, something the President talked about today in Missouri.

Find out more about the report, and how the President is continuing to create opportunity for middle-class Americans.

Using Modern SEO to Build Brand Authority

Posted: 29 Jul 2014 05:15 PM PDT

Posted by kaiserthesage

It's obvious that the technology behind search engines' ability to determine and understand web entities is gradually leaning towards how real people will normally perceive things from a traditional marketing perspective.

The emphasis on E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) from Google's recently updated Quality Rating Guide shows that search engines are shifting towards brand-related metrics to identify sites/pages that deserve to be more visible in search results.

Online branding, or authority building, is quite similar to the traditional SEO practices that many of us have already been accustomed with.

Building a stronger brand presence online and improving a site's search visibility both require two major processes: the things you implement on the site and the things you do outside of the site.

This is where several of the more advanced aspects of SEO can blend perfectly with online branding when implemented the right way. In this post, I'll use some examples from my own experience to show you how.

Pick a niche and excel

Building on your brand's topical expertise is probably the fastest way to go when you're looking to build a name for yourself or your business in a very competitive industry.

There are a few reasons why:

Proving your field expertise in one or two areas of your industry can be a strong unique selling point (USP) for your brand.
It's easier to expand and delve into the deeper and more competitive parts of your industry once you've already established yourself as an expert in your chosen field.
Obviously, search engines favour brands known to be experts in their respective fields.

Just to give a brief example, when I started blogging back in 2010, I was all over the place. Then, a few months later, I decided to focus on one specific area of SEO—link building—and wrote dozens of guides on how I do it.

By aiming to build my blog's brand identity to become a prime destination for link building tutorials, it became a lot easier for me to sell my ideas on the other aspects of inbound marketing to my continuously growing audience (from technical SEO to social media, content marketing, email marketing and more).

Strengthening your brand starts with the quality of your brand's content, whether it's your product/service or the plethora of information available on your website.

You can start by assessing the categories where you're getting the most traction in terms of natural link acquisitions, social shares, conversions, and/or sales.

Prioritize your content development efforts on the niche where your brand can genuinely compete in and will have a better fighting chance to dominate the market. It's the smartest way to stand out and scale, especially when you're still in your campaign's early stages.

Optimize for semantic search and knowledge graph

In the past, most webmasters and publishers would rely on the usage of generic keywords/terms in optimizing their website's content to make it easier for search engines to understand what they are about.

But now, while the continuously evolving technologies behind search may seem to make the optimization process more complicated, the fact is that it may just reward those who pursue high-level trustworthy marketing efforts to stand out in the search results.

These technologies and factors for determining relevance—which include entity recognition and disambiguation (ERD), structured data or schema markups, natural language processing (NLP), phrase-based indexing for co-occurrence and co-citations, concept matching, and a lot more—are all driven by branding campaigns and how an average human would normally find, talk, or ask about a certain thing.

Easily identifiable brands will surely win in this type of setup.

Where to start? See if Google already knows what your brand is about.

How to optimize your site for the Knowledge Graph and at the same time build it as an authority online

1. Provide the best and the most precise answers to the "who, what, why, and how" queries that people might look for in your space.

Razvan Gavrilas did an extensive study on how Google's Answer Boxes work. Getting listed in the answer box will not just drive more traffic and conversions to a business, but can also help position a brand on a higher level in its industry.

But of course, getting one of your entries placed for Google's answer boxes for certain queries will also require other authority signals (like natural links, domain authority, etc.).

But what search crawlers would typically search for to evaluate whether a page's content is appropriate to be displayed in the answer boxes (according to Razvan's post):

If the page selected for the answer contains the question in a very similar (if not exact) form, along with the answer, at a short distance from the question (repeating at least some of the words from the question) and
If the page selected for the answer belongs to a trustworthy website. So most of the times, if it's not Wikipedia, it will be a site that it can consider a non-biased third party, such as is the case with a lot of ".edu" sites, or news organization websites.

Although, John Mueller mentioned recently that Knowledge Graph listings should not be branded, in which you might think that the approach and effort will be for nothing.

But wait, just think about it—the intent alone of optimizing your content for Google's Knowledge Graph will allow you to serve better content to your users (which is what Google rewards the most these days, so it's still the soundest action to take if you want to really build a solid brand, right?).

2. Clearly define your brand's identity to your audience.

Being remarkable and being able to separate your brand from your competitors is crucial in online marketing (be it through your content or the experience people feel when they're using your site/service/product).

Optimizing for humans through branding allows you to condition the way people will talk about you. This factor is very important when you're aiming to get more brand mentions that would really impact your site's SEO efforts, branding, and conversions.

The more search engines are getting signals (even unlinked mentions) that verify that you're an authority in your field, the more your brand will be trusted and rank your pages well on SERPs.

3. Build a strong authorship portfolio.

Author photos/badges may have been taken down from the search results a few weeks ago, but it doesn't mean that authorship markup no longer has value.

Both Mark Traphagen and Bill Slawski have shared why authorship markup still matters. And clearly, an author's authority will still be a viable search ranking factor, given that it enables Google to easily identify topical experts and credible documents available around the web.

It will continue to help tie entities (publishers and brands) to their respective industries, which may still accumulate scores over time based on the popularity and reception from the author's works (AuthorRank).

This approach is a great complement to personal brand building, especially when you're expanding your content marketing efforts' reach through guest blogging on industry-specific blogs where you can really absorb more new readers and followers.

There's certainly more to implement under Knowledge Graph Optimization, and here's a short list from what AJ Kohn has already shared on his blog earlier this year, which are all still useful to this day:

Use entities (aka Nouns) in your writing
Get connected and link out to relevant sites
Implement Structured Data to increase entity detection
Use the sameAs property
Optimize your Google+ presence
Get exposure on Wikipedia
Edit and update your Freebase entry

Online branding through scalable link building

The right relationships make link building scalable.

In the past, many link builders believed that it's best to have thousands of links from diversified sources, which apparently forced a lot of early practitioners to resort to tactics focused on manually dropping links to thousands of unique domains (and spamming).

And, unfortunately, guest blogging as a link building tactic has eventually become a part of this craze.

I've mentioned this dozens of times before, and I'm going to say it one more time: It's better to have multiple links from a few link sources that are highly trusted than having hundreds of one-off links from several mediocre sites.

Focus on building signals that will strongly indicate relationships, because it's probably the most powerful off-site signal you can build out there.

When other influential entities in your space are vouching for your brand (whether it's through links, social shares, or even unlinked brand mentions), it allows you to somehow become a part of the list of sites that will most likely be trusted by search engines.

It can most definitely impact how people will see your brand as an authority as well, when they see that you're being trusted by other credible brands in your industry.

These relationships can also open a lot of opportunities for natural link acquisitions and lead generation, knowing that some of the most trusted brands in your space trust you.

Making all of this actionable

1. Identify and make a list of the top domains and publishers in your industry, particularly those that have high search share.

There are so many tools that you can use to get these data, like SEMRush, Compete.com, and/or Alexa.com.

You can also use Google Search and SEOQuake to make a list of sites that are performing well on search for your industry's head terms (given that Google is displaying better search results these days, it's probably one of the best prospecting tools you can use).

I also use other free tools in doing this type of prospecting, particularly in cleaning up the list (in removing duplicate domains, and extracting unique hostnames; and in filtering out highly authoritative sites that are clearly irrelevant for the task, such as ranking pages from Facebook, Wikipedia, and other popular news sites).

2. Try to penetrate at least 2 high authority sites from the first 50 websites on your list—and become a regular contributor for them.

Start engaging them by genuinely participating in their existing communities.

The process shouldn't stop with you contributing content for them on a regular basis, as along the way you can initiate collaborative tasks, such as inviting them to publish content on your site as well.

This can help draw more traffic (and links) from their end, and can exponentially improve the perceived value of your brand as a publisher (based on your relationships with other influential entities in your industry).

These kinds of relationships will make the latter part of your link building campaign less stressful. As soon as you get to build a strong footing with your brand's existing relationships and content portfolio (in and out of your site), it'll be a lot easier for you to pitch and get published on other authoritative industry-specific publications (or even in getting interview opportunities).

3. Write the types of content that your target influencers are usually reading.

Stalk your target influencers on social networks, and take note of the topics/ideas that interest them the most (related to your industry). See what type of content they usually share to their followers.

Knowing these things will give you ton of ideas on how you can effectively approach your content development efforts and can help you come up with content ideas that are most likely to be read, shared, and linked to.

You can also go the extra mile by knowing which sites they mostly link out to or use as reference for their own works (use ScreamingFrog).

4. Take advantage of your own existing community (or others' as well).

Collaborate with the people who are already participating in your brand's online community (blog comments, social networks, discussions, etc.). Identify those who truly contribute and really add value to the discussions, and see if they run their own websites or work for a company that's also in your industry.

Leverage these interactions, as these can form long-term relationships that can also be beneficial to both parties (for instance, inviting them to write for you or having you write for their blog, and/or cross-promote your works/services).

And perhaps, you can also use this approach to other brands' communities as well, like reaching out to people you see who have really smart inputs about your industry (that'll you see on other blog's comment sections) and asking them if they'll be interested to talk/share more about that topic and have it published on your website instead.

Building a solid community can easily help automate link building, but more importantly, it can surely help strengthen a brand's online presence.

Conclusion

SEO can be a tremendous help to your online branding efforts. Likewise, branding can be a tremendous help to your SEO efforts. Alignment and integration of both practices is what keeps winners winning in this game (just look at Moz).

If you liked this post or have any questions, let me know in the comments below, and you can find me on Twitter @jasonacidre.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Seth's Blog : This is ours

This is ours

Last night on the bike path I passed a well-dressed citizen, walking along with a bottle of water. I was stunned to see him finish his water and hurl the bottle into the woods.

I stopped and said, "Hey, please don't do that."

He looked at me with complete surprise and said, "what?" as if he didn't understand what 'that' was. His conception of the world seemed to be that there was two kinds of stuff... his and not-his. The park wasn't his, so it was just fine to throw trash, in fact, why not?

The challenge we have in the connection economy, in a world built on ever more shared resources and public digital spaces is that some people persist in acting like it belongs to someone else. When they spit in the pool or troll anonymously, when they spam or break things, it's as if they're doing it to someone else, or to the man.

Too often, we accept this vandalism as if it's a law of nature, like dealing with the termites that will inevitably chew exposed wood on a house's foundation. It doesn't have to be this way. Over and over, we see that tribes and communities and organizations are able to teach people that this is ours, that it's worth taking care of and most of all, that people like us care for things like this.

• Email to a friend •

marți, 29 iulie 2014

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Whopping 35% Have Debt in Collection! Delinquent Debt in America: By Region and Metro Area, Where Is It?

Posted: 29 Jul 2014 12:21 PM PDT

The Urban Institute has an interesting 14-page synopsis on Delinquent Debt in America.

By percentage, the number of people in collections is largely concentrated in the South, while amount owed shows no geographic pattern. The Urban Institute uses 2013 credit bureau data from TransUnion to measure how many Americans are reported as at least 30 days late, not including late payment of mortgages. The institute also examines how many Americans have debt in collections and the amount of this debt.

In order to have credit card debt, one first must have credit. However, some without traditional credit show up as delinquent on account of late utility, medical, or other bills.

The key general finding is: Of those with credit files, an astonishing 35% have debt in collections.

Study Synopsis

5.3% (Roughly 1 out of 20) of people with a credit file are at least 30 days late on a credit card or other non-mortgage account (e.g., automobile loan, student loan). In other words, they have debt that has been reported as past due to the credit bureau.
The share of people with debt past due ranges from 4.6% in the West, North Central, and Middle Atlantic divisions to 7.5% in the West South Central division.
Three states have less than 4% of the population with debt past due: Utah, Washington, and New Jersey.
Three states have more than 7% of the population with debt past due: Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi.
Nearly 40% of the high-concentration census tracts in the country are in Louisiana or Texas.
Areas with lower household incomes have more people with debt past due, but the correlation is only -0.3. So, while income matters, the concentration of delinquent debt is not simply an income story.
Of those with credit files, an alarming 35% have debt in collections.
Debt in collection ranges less than $25 to more than $125,000. The average amount owed in collections is $5,178.
Nevada, which was hard hit by the housing crisis, tops the list of past-due states: 47% of people with a credit file in Nevada have reported debt in collections. The District of Columbia and an additional 12 states (11 in the South) are over the 40 percent mark: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and West Virginia.
At the low end are three Midwestern states - Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota, with 20% of the people with a credit history now reported debt in collections.
Among the largest 100 MSAs, only six have fewer than a quarter of people with debt in collections reported i n their credit file. None are in the South: Minneapolis - St. Paul, Minnesota (20.1%), Honolulu, Hawaii (21.0%), Boston, Massachusetts (22.4%), Madison, Wisconsin (22.6%), San Jose, California (23.0%), and Bridgeport, Connecticut (24.5%).
At the other extreme, five MSAs have at least 45 percent of people with collections debt reported in their credit files : McAllen, Texas (51.7%), Las Vegas, Nevada (49.2%), Lakeland, Florida (47.3%), Columbia, South Carolina (45.2%), and Jacksonville, Florida (45.0%).
An astonishing 70% of census tracts have at least 25% of people with reported debt in collections. In comparison, less than 1% of census tracts (40) have at least 25% of people with debt past.

Debt Past Due

Debt in Collections

Average Debt in Collections

click on any chart for sharper image

The report concludes ...

Financial distress is a daily challenge for millions of American consumers. Nearly 1 2 million adults — 5.3 percent of Americans with a credit file — have non-mortgage debt reported past due, and they need to pay $2,258 on average to become current on that debt.

Further, an alarming 77 million Americans — 35 percent of adults with credit files — have debt in collections reported in their credit files, with an average debt amount of nearly $5,178. Debt reported past due, and in particular reported debt in collections, is more concentrated in the South.

In addition to creating difficulties today, delinquent debt can lower credit scores and result in serious future consequences. Credit scores are used to determine eligibility for jobs, access to rental housing and mortgages, insurance premiums, and access to (and the price of) credit in general (Federal Trade Commission 2013; Traub 2013).

High levels of delinquent debt and its associated consequences, such as limited access to traditional credit, can harm both families and the communities in which they live. This brief contributes to our understanding of financial distress in America by exploring the spatial patterns of delinquent debt in the United States. Future work will explore the drivers of financial distress and those factors influencing its spatial patterns.

Interestingly, the concentration of delinquent debt to income has a negative 0.3 correlation. In a footnote the study reports "The correlation between average household income and average amount of debt past due (amount required to become current on that debt) is even lower at -0.1."

I called the Urban Institute and asked for an explanation as to how the percentage in collection can be so much bigger than the percentage past due. The answer has to do with a definition of terms and also with charge-offs.

Appendix Figure A.1 Explains

Note: Federal regulations require creditors to charge-off revolving credit accounts (e.g., credit card accounts) after 180 days of payment delinquency. Uniform Retail Credit Classification and Account Management Policy, 65 FR36903-01 (June 12, 2000).

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Ukrainians Ordered to War, Women Burn the Military Writs

Posted: 29 Jul 2014 01:42 AM PDT

The war in Ukraine is going so well that soldiers are unpaid and men are ordered to serve whether they want to or not.

Hats off to a group of women who confront a Ukrainian soldier and burn military writs right in front of the soldier's face.

Writ Burning Video

Video link: Ukrainians Burn Writs

Transcript

Woman to Ukrainian soldier: Who are you?
Soldier: I am the head of the local recruiting center.
Woman: Why are you bringing military writs?
Soldier: It's an order from above. I can't explain all the details but you can read about it on the internet
Soldier: When did you get the writs?
Very disgruntled woman: Yesterday evening.
Another Woman: This one we got recently.
Soldier: Yes, we're sending those to put the potential recruits under control.
Yet another woman: We don't need it. We don't need any war.
Multiple women chime in with the same thing at once about not wanting war.
Very disgruntled woman: We've been told that the police will handle those who refuse to sign the writs for mobilization. What does that mean?
Soldier: It's an official order for total mobilization.
Another woman: We've been told those fairy tales many times. They told us those who refuse to go to war will go to jail for 5 years.
Soldier: I ask you, did we take anyone to war so far?
Woman: When you take someone it will be too late to worry.
Another woman: We've never been on Maidan. We didn't touch anyone. We don't need it.
Very angry man gesturing: Take your recruit list and make sure no one will be taken to war.
Soldier - finally admitting the truth: They will take your sons anyway.
Same angry Man: Who will take them?
Soldier: The state
Same angry man: We don't give a damn about your country and your war!
Large group gathers writs and sets them on fire.
Background conversation: mostly untranslated but also containing We are sickened of the authorities.
More background conversation: The authorities flee like rats from a sinking ship, but they come here and take our sons and send them to death. They all made the mess and now they need us to clean it up.
Fire takes hold
Another woman: Those who wanted all this, let them go to war! We never needed this nor Maidan.
Cars stop, many more people including more men watch on the periphery.
Writs go up in ashes. Many still confront the soldier

Congratulations!

Congratulations to all those who told the soldier to go to hell. No better way than burning draft papers and refusing to serve.

Musical Tribute

Video Link: Country Joe at Woodstock

Quotes

Voltaire: "It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."

Tom Robbins: "There are many things worth living for, a few things worth dying for, and nothing worth killing for."

Thought of the day: The Vietnam war would have ended years before it did if everyone would have refused to serve. A big F U was called for. Too few did it. My number never came up, but I am proud of the fact I resolved not to go. And I assure you I wouldn't have. History has proven that point of view was the correct one.

By the way, I disagree with the second quote. Killing in self defense or defense of your family makes perfect sense.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

"The President Wants to Meet You"

Featured

"The President Wants to Meet You"

This summer, President Obama has been traveling around the country meeting with everyday Americans who have written him about what's going on in their lives.

Ahead of the President's trip to Kansas City today, Press Secretary and Kansas City native Josh Earnest called a few hardworking Americans and invited them to have dinner with the President.

Watch the Press Secretary call some letter writers -- and hear their reactions:

Unraveling Panda Patterns

Posted: 28 Jul 2014 05:16 PM PDT

Posted by billslawski

This is my first official blog post at Moz.com, and I'm going to be requesting your help and expertise and imagination.

I'm going to be asking you to take over as Panda for a little while to see if you can identify the kinds of things that Google's Navneet Panda addressed when faced with what looked like an incomplete patent created to identify sites as parked domain pages, content farm pages, and link farm pages. You're probably better at this now then he was then.

You're a subject matter expert.

To put things in perspective, I'm going to include some information about what appears to be the very first Panda patent, and some of Google's effort behind what they were calling the "high-quality site algorithm."

I'm going to then include some of the patterns they describe in the patent to identify lower-quality pages, and then describe some of the features I personally would suggest to score and rank a higher-quality site of one type.

Google's Amit Singhal identified a number of questions about higher quality sites that he might use, and told us in the blog post where he listed those that it was an incomplete list because they didn't want to make it easy for people to abuse their algorithm.

In my opinion though, any discussion about improving the quality of webpages is one worth having, because it can help improve the quality of the Web for everyone, which Google should be happy to see anyway.

Warning searchers about low-quality content

In "Processing web pages based on content quality," the original patent filing for Panda, there's a somewhat mysterious statement that makes it sound as if Google might warn searchers before sending them to a low quality search result, and give them a choice whether or not they might actually click through to such a page.

As it notes, the types of low quality pages the patent was supposed to address included parked domain pages, content farm pages, and link farm pages (yes, link farm pages):

"The processor 260 is configured to receive from a client device (e.g., 110), a request for a web page (e.g., 206). The processor 260 is configured to determine the content quality of the requested web page based on whether the requested web page is a parked web page, a content farm web page, or a link farm web page.
Based on the content quality of the requested web page, the processor is configured to provide for display, a graphical component (e.g., a warning prompt). That is, the processor 260 is configured to provide for display a graphical component (e.g., a warning prompt) if the content quality of the requested web page is at or below a certain threshold.
The graphical component provided for display by the processor 260 includes options to proceed to the requested web page or to proceed to one or more alternate web pages relevant to the request for the web page (e.g., 206). The graphical component may also provide an option to stop proceeding to the requested web page.
The processor 260 is further configured to receive an indication of a selection of an option from the graphical component to proceed to the requested web page, or to proceed to an alternate web page. The processor 260 is further configured to provide for display, based on the received indication, the requested web page or the alternate web page."

This did not sound like a good idea.

Recently, Google announced in a post on the Google Webmaster Central blog post, Promoting modern websites for modern devices in Google search results, that they would start providing warning notices on mobile versions of sites if there were issues on those pages that visitors might go to.

I imagine that as a site owner, you might be disappointed seeing such warning notice shown to searchers on your site about technology used on your site possibly not working correctly on a specific device. That recent blog post mentions Flash as an example of a technology that might not work correctly on some devices. For example, we know that Apple's mobile devices and Flash don't work well together.

That's not a bad warning in that it provides enough information to act upon and fix to the benefit of a lot of potential visitors. :)

But imagine if you tried to visit your website in 2011, and instead of getting to the site, you received a Google warning that the page you were trying to visit was a content farm page or a link farm page, and it provided alternative pages to visit as well.

That " your website sucks" warning still doesn't sound like a good idea. One of the inventors listed on the patent is described in LinkedIn as presently working on the Google Play store. The warning for mobile devices might have been something he brought to Google from his work on this Panda patent.

We know that when the Panda Update was released that it was targeting specific types of pages that people at places such as The New York Times were complaining about, such as parked domains and content farm sites. A follow-up from the Timesafter the algorithm update was released puts it into perspective for us.

It wasn't easy to know that your pages might have been targeted by that particular Google update either, or if your site was a false positive—and many site owners ended up posting in the Google Help forums after a Google search engineer invited them to post there if they believed that they were targeted by the update when they shouldn't have been.

The wording of that invitation is interesting in light of the original name of the Panda algorithm. (Note that the thread was broken into multiple threads when Google did a migration of posts to new software, and many appear to have disappeared at some point.)

As we were told in the invite from the Google search engineer:

"According to our metrics, this update improves overall search quality. However, we are interested in hearing feedback from site owners and the community as we continue to refine our algorithms. If you know of a high-quality site that has been negatively affected by this change, please bring it to our attention in this thread.
Note that as this is an algorithmic change we are unable to make manual exceptions, but in cases of high quality content we can pass the examples along to the engineers who will look at them as they work on future iterations and improvements to the algorithm.
So even if you don't see us responding, know that we're doing a lot of listening."

The timing for such in-SERP warnings might have been troublesome. A site that mysteriously stops appearing in search results for queries that it used to rank well for might be said to have gone astray of Google's guidelines. Instead, such a warning might be a little like the purposefully embarrassing "Scarlet A" in Nathaniel Hawthorn's novel The Scarlet Letter.

A page that shows up in search results with a warning to searchers stating that it was a content farm, or a link farm, or a parked domain probably shouldn't be ranking well to begin with. Having Google continuing to display those results ranking highly, showing both a link and a warning to those pages, and then diverting searchers to alternative pages might have been more than those site owners could handle. Keep in mind that the fates of those businesses are usually tied to such detoured traffic.

My imagination is filled with the filing of lawsuits against Google based upon such tantalizing warnings, rather than site owners filling up a Google Webmaster Help Forum with information about the circumstances involving their sites being impacted by the upgrade.

In retrospect, it is probably a good idea that the warnings hinted at in the original Panda Patent were avoided.

Google seems to think that such warnings are appropriate now when it comes to multiple devices and technologies that may not work well together, like Flash and iPhones.

But there were still issues with how well or how poorly the algorithm described in the patent might work.

In the March, 2011 interview with Google's Head of Search Quality, Amit Sighal, and his team member and Head of Web Spam at Google, Matt Cutts, titled TED 2011: The "Panda" That Hates Farms: A Q&A With Google's Top Search Engineers, we learned of the code name that Google claimed to be using to refer to the algorithm update as "Panda," after an engineer with that name came along and provided suggestions on patterns that could be used by the patent to identify high- and low-quality pages.

His input seems to have been pretty impactful—enough for Google to have changed the name of the update, from the "High Quality Site Algorithm" to the "Panda" update.

How the High-Quality Site Algorithm became Panda

Danny Sullivan named the update the "Farmer update" since it supposedly targeted content farm web sites. Soon afterwards the joint interview with Singhal and Cutts identified the Panda codename, and that's what it's been called ever since.

Google didn't completely abandon the name found in the original patent, the "high quality sites algorithm," as can be seen in the titles of these Google Blog posts:

The most interesting of those is the "more guidance" post, in which Amit Singhal lists 23 questions about things Google might look for on a page to determine whether or not it was high-quality. I've spent a lot of time since then looking at those questions thinking of features on a page that might convey quality.

The original patent is at:

Processing web pages based on content quality
Inventors: Brandon Bilinski and Stephen Kirkham
Assigned to Google
US Patent 8,775,924
Granted July 8, 2014
Filed: March 9, 2012

Abstract

"Computer-implemented methods of processing web pages based on content quality are provided. In one aspect, a method includes receiving a request for a web page.
The method includes determining the content quality of the requested web page based on whether it is a parked web page, a content farm web page, or a link farm web page. The method includes providing for display, based on the content quality of the requested web page, a graphical component providing options to proceed to the requested web page or to an alternate web page relevant to the request for the web page.
The method includes receiving an indication of a selection of an option from the graphical component to proceed to the requested web page or to an alternate web page. The method further includes providing, based on the received indication, the requested web page or an alternate web page."

The patent expands on what are examples of low-quality web pages, including:

Parked web pages
Content farm web pages
Link farm web pages
Default pages
Pages that do not offer useful content, and/or pages that contain advertisements and little else

An invitation to crowdsource high-quality patterns

This is the section I mentioned above where I am asking for your help. You don't have to publish your thoughts on how quality might be identified, but I'm going to start with some examples.

Under the patent, a content quality value score is calculated for every page on a website based upon patterns found on known low-quality pages, "such as parked web pages, content farm web pages, and/or link farm web pages."

For each of the patterns identified on a page, the content quality value of the page might be reduced based upon the presence of that particular pattern—and each pattern might be weighted differently.

Some simple patterns that might be applied to a low-quality web page might be one or more references to:

A known advertising network,
A web page parking service, and/or
A content farm provider

One of these references may be in the form of an IP address that the destination hostname resolves to, a Domain Name Server ("DNS server") that the destination domain name is pointing to, an "a href" attribute on the destination page, and/or an "img src" attribute on the destination page.

That's a pretty simple pattern, but a web page resolving to an IP address known to exclusively serve parked web pages provided by a particular Internet domain registrar can be deemed a parked web page, so it can be pretty effective.

A web page with a DNS server known to be associated with web pages that contain little or no content other than advertisements may very well provide little or no content other than advertising. So that one can be effective, too.

Some of the patterns listed in the patent don't seem quite as useful or informative. For example, the one stating that a web page containing a common typographical error of a bona fide domain name may likely be a low-quality web page, or a non-existent web page. I've seen more than a couple of legitimate sites with common misspellings of good domains, so I'm not too sure how helpful a pattern that is.

Of course, some textual content is a dead giveaway the patent tells us, with terms on them such as "domain is for sale," "buy this domain," and/or "this page is parked."

Likewise, a web page with little or no content is probably (but not always) a low-quality web page.

This is a simple but effective pattern, even if not too imaginative:

... page providing 99% hyperlinks and 1% plain text is more likely to be a low-quality web page than a web page providing 50% hyperlinks and 50% plain text.

Another pattern is one that I often check upon and address in site audits, and it involves how functional and responsive pages on a site are.

"The determination of whether a web site is full functional may be based on an HTTP response code, information received from a DNS server (e.g., hostname records), and/or a lack of a response within a certain amount of time. As an example, an HTTP response that is anything other than 200 (e.g., "404 Not Found") would indicate that a web site is not fully functional.
As another example, a DNS server that does not return authoritative records for a hostname would indicate that the web site is not fully functional. Similarly, a lack of a response within a certain amount of time, from the IP address of the hostname for a web site would indicate that the web site is not fully functional."

As for user-data, sometimes it might play a role as well, as the patent tells us:

"A web page may be suggested for review and/or its content quality value may be adapted based on the amount of time spent on that page.
For example, if a user reaches a web page and then leaves immediately, the brief nature of the visit may cause the content quality value of that page to be reviewed and/or reduced. The amount of time spent on a particular web page may be determined through a variety of approaches. For example, web requests for web pages may be used to determine the amount of time spent on a particular web page."

My example of some patterns for an e-commerce website

There are a lot of things that you might want to include on an ecommerce site that help to indicate that it's high quality. If you look at the questions that Amit Singhal raised in the last Google Blog post I mentioned above, one of his questions was "Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?" Patterns that might fit with this question could include:

Is there a privacy policy linked to on pages of the site?
Is there a "terms of service" page linked to on pages of the site?
Is there a "customer service" page or section linked to on pages of the site?
Do ordering forms function fully on the site? Do they return 404 pages or 500 server errors?
If an order is made, does a thank-you or acknowledgement page show up?
Does the site use an https protocol when sending data or personally identifiable data (like a credit card number)?

As I mentioned above, the patent tells us that a high-quality content score for a page might be different from one pattern to another.

The questions from Amit Singhal imply a lot of other patterns, but as SEOs who work on and build and improve a lot of websites, this is an area where we probably have more expertise than Google's search engineers.

What other questions would you ask if you were tasked with looking at this original Panda Patent? What patterns would you suggest looking for when trying to identify high or low quality pages? Perhaps if we share with one another patterns or features on a site that Google might look for algorithmically, we could build pages that might not be interpreted by Google as being a low quality site. I provided a few patterns for an ecommerce site above. What patterns would you suggest?

(Illustrations: Devin Holmes @DevinGoFish)

miercuri, 30 iulie 2014

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