Surviving Rankings, Re-Rankings, Filters and Google Hell.
Posted Friday, April 6th, 2007. Filed under Google.
I was reading Aaron Wall today, who had been reading an interesting thread on Webmasterworld, and made comments on his blog about different links having different goals: more and more pages are getting thrown into Google's supplemental results, and Google may be getting more aggressive with re-ranking results based on local inter-connectivity and other quality related criteria.
After reading most of that Webmasterworld thread, the best meat of it comes from Tedster, who theorized that a preliminary set of results is returned, but then one or more factors undergo further testing, and the preliminary set is re-ranked according to multipliers determined by those tests. If your url doesn't make the preliminary set, re-ranking won't help you. If it does, but fails one of the tests, your score can be multiplied down, sending your rankings on a nose dive. This could account for the yo-yo behavior of going from page 1 to the end of results and back again, and the large numbers of urls being sent to the Supplemental Index to keep the primary index less unwieldy.
I've had this picture in my mind of a row of Google servers: data is gathered and fed to the first computer that ranks pages based on PageRank, the next recalculates based on TrustRank, the next reorders based on interconnectivity of the community, then more filters and more reordering, with different datacenters weighting each prior reordering slightly differently.
With that picture in mind, like Aaron, I see obtaining different links with different goals: getting trusted links from trusted sites to raise trust value, getting links from subpages that have direct trusted backlinks to help trust and power, boosting co-citation site neighborhood by getting links on pages that link to other sites in my neighborhood, and boosting co-citation page neighborhood by putting other trusted links next to my own links.
As far as Google Supplemental Hell goes, here's something else I've experienced: if you publish 300 pages today and 3 months goes by with no links to any of them, guess where they might be going? I've seen entire folders go to supplemental hell after hundreds of pages were published in one day with no links for the first 3 months, and seen other new folders survive that got just a small handful of nice backlinks early on. Moral: publish a new folder, get some of those pages some trusted backlinks, and hurry.
In other news: I'll be away all next week for SES in NYC, speaking on the "Linking Strategies" panel on Friday at 9am.
April 6th, 2007 at 10:41 pm
Nice… A Pagerank assembly line.
I’ve had a similar picture in my head ever since people started noticing the sandbox effect where a new website would rank well for a few days and then disappear for the next 18 months.
April 7th, 2007 at 8:17 am
I agree, and it explains why having a network of quality sites is more important than ever. If you can have 5-10 high quality sites that provide backlinks to your new sites they seem to stay viable in the rankings and not get sandboxed.
Then they will be in a position to get organic ranking much easier.
April 7th, 2007 at 1:14 pm
As for “going supplemental” if you follow Matt Cutts he has clearly stated that sites go supplemental simply because they do not have enough pagerank. I have also see sites with bad structure go supplemental because they do not divert PR correctly.
You got to take everything said in the past with a grain of salt, this stuff changes by the minute.
*runs off to look if high PR pages go supplemental*
April 7th, 2007 at 2:28 pm
Aaron, I’ve seen folders of webpages that were PR6’s…and then tossed to Hell.
April 7th, 2007 at 5:11 pm
Jim, that theory would indeed make sense. In fact it would make more sense that G penalizing a site. If a site fails one of the tests then it obviously wouldn’t be relevant…
April 8th, 2007 at 9:44 am
nice research on Google.. Keeep it up …so that we will come to know some tricks to rank high on Google
April 8th, 2007 at 1:14 pm
Aaron, I’ve seen folders of webpages that were PR6’s…and then tossed to Hell.
Same here with sites where these pages have had stable high rankings for years.
Add one more server to the equation that factors in local search data.
Time for a few micro sites instead? Requires more link building effort, but easier to reduce the filters.
April 8th, 2007 at 1:39 pm
I agree, and it explains why having a network of quality sites is more important than ever. If you can have 5-10 high quality sites that provide backlinks to your new sites they seem to stay viable in the rankings and not get sandboxed.
April 8th, 2007 at 5:30 pm
So maintaining a network of websites is the way to avoid SI hell and other common filters of demotions? I think not.
April 8th, 2007 at 6:50 pm
It’s possible to maintain multiple sites without having a “network”.
April 9th, 2007 at 12:23 pm
As always, Aaron, Tedster, and Jim have this thing nailed. Great post, Jim.
Tell me this, though: where does Google LocalRank play into all of this? I’m assuming it’s the part that says, “Ranking search results by reranking the results based on local inter-connectivity”.
April 9th, 2007 at 12:25 pm
By the way, if anyone’s interested, I found this calculation, which is part of LocalRank:
NewScore(x) = (a+LocalScore(x)/MaxLS)(b+OldScore(x)/MaxOS)
April 10th, 2007 at 3:06 am
Great Article - I rarely find a blog post I can read the whole way through without missing a beat. I have to say that this whole re-ranking stuff going on, is beating me up on the phones mostly. I get calls from clients with “omg I’m not number 2 anymore” or “I can’t find my page anywhere on google”. After the Last 2 months of refreshes, my clients now understand and simply send me a polite email “is google dancing again?”, believe it or not, it’s much easier to call a refresh a small dance kinda like the hula - when I speak to my executive clients - they just want one word and nothing more - of course I sit and pull my hair out because I just don’t know where we’ll be after the refresh. Eventually we settle into our usual #2 or #3.
Today, I’m on a different datacenter than the midwest and east coast, so I’m seeing my sites way up at #1. After reading this blog, I now completely understand what’s happening and I’ll just have to do my own dance come those client emails tomorrow.
April 17th, 2007 at 8:33 am
Google dumped me reason “Unknown” . I’m seeing similar posts frequently. I think there is always a reason behind it.
April 23rd, 2007 at 7:17 am
nice post.
about supplemental Hell..
~Is it ok to make a post that only contains links to other pages of your blog?
~Will social bookmarks help?
thanks.
May 1st, 2007 at 12:26 pm
Hey Jim, your in Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/2007/04/29/sanar-google-skyfacet-tech-cx_ag_0430googhell_2.html
May 20th, 2007 at 11:03 am
Hi we seen many sites Online on SEO stuff. but urs is Bit Uniq and U r posting near to Real concept of SEO.
Thanks Keep it up.
I say u r SEO GURUS….
August 20th, 2007 at 11:25 pm
At Google, I see one more server at the end of the line that acts like that gopher smash arcade game. It tries to keep down sites that are always popping up through the many holes left by the system.
September 14th, 2007 at 3:26 am
I am being tossed and turned in a Google dance. I see you mention a few rules that I will take heed and try and implement to see if I can stabilize myself and get back on the path to glory.