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.
Reader Comments
Hawaii SEO: Nice, a PageRank assembly line. I've had a similar picture in my head ever since people started noticing the sandbox effect.
Tom Royce: 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.
Aaron Pratt: As for going supplemental, Matt Cutts has clearly stated that sites go supplemental simply because they don't have enough PageRank. I have also seen sites with bad structure go supplemental because they don't divert PR correctly.
Jim Boykin: Aaron, I've seen folders of webpages that were PR6's, and then tossed to Hell.
Brandon Hopkins: Jim, that theory would indeed make sense. In fact it would make more sense than Google penalizing a site. If a site fails one of the tests then it obviously wouldn't be relevant.
Bill Hartzer: As always, Aaron, Tedster, and Jim have this thing nailed. Great post, Jim.
