A couple of weeks ago I decided to go out for a meal with my wife, we dropped the kids off and headed out to one of our favorite Italian restaurants. As we pulled into the parking lot we immediately knew something was wrong. The lot was empty! This is a well known, family owned, independent restaurant which is always buzzing. I walked up to the front door and peered in. All dark. I scanned the door and windows for an indication of what was going on. Nothing, just the standard postings of the menu and list of business hours.
I trudged back to the car and discussed it with my wife. We made a quick decision and ate at a different place a couple of miles down the road.
The next day, my wife was researching the restaurant and told me that they’d moved a block down the road. My mind was racing: “Why didn’t they post a permanent redirect to the new location?” It seemed like such an obvious solution.
People forget to post redirects to new locations even in real life. In this case, it would have only taken a few minutes to post the new address on a piece of office paper and tape it to the door. They lost my business, reluctantly to another restaurant that day, but we’ll be visiting them again at their new location, at which point I will adjust my mental bookmark.
Over the years a lot of SEOs have gone back and forth over this legendary question:
“Do you optimize for search engines or users?”
From my SEO point of view, it’s a ridiculous question.
We like to ask leading questions, and this either or type question is extremely prevalent in our daily lives:
Do you take the red pill or the blue pill?
Do you cut the red or green wire?
Do we go left or right?
Nikon or Canon?
Chevy or Ford?
Pepsi or Coke?
From an SEO point of view, can you see what’s wrong with all of these questions? They’re written to suggest that you only have two choices, when in fact a creative SEO will be able to come up with a lot more than two answers. SEO is usually not constrained by physical limitations of the real world, as in the questions above.
The most obvious answer to the question is that you optimize for both. The two choices given in the question are not necessarily mutually exclusive, that assumption is inferred by the question. Challenge your assumptions!
Other answers could be:
1) Test and see which wins
2) Take sections of your site and focus each section on either engines or users.
3) Create a similar site and write it the other way, then refer to #1.
You see, even with a question that started off with what appeared to be only two possible answers, within a few seconds, we’ve expanded to many more possibilities. With some more creativity, you can probably come up with a larger selection.
So next time you’re asked a leading question, take a moment, challenge your assumptions, then deliver your creative SEO answer.
Manta.com is starting to build some community tools to help Manta members connect with each other. Since I’m part of this project I’m trying to get some new people involved to give me feedback on the site’s features.
So to show my appreciation, I’d like to offer one hour of my SEO consulting services to anyone who signs up on Manta.com and adds me as a business contact, between now and August 31st. Once we’ve connected, just send me a private message on Manta with some feedback and your website address and you’ll be entered into a drawing to receive one hour of free SEO consulting by me.
[Update]
Well since this post was written, it seems that Google has decided to release something else which it’s calling TrustRank. The original TrustRank confusion was related to detecting and filtering spam, while the latest iteration is to do with calculating the “trust” of users bnased on the quality of annotations, reviews and tags they provide. These signals may be used to reorder the ranks of pages in the results.
Original Post:
If you search Google for TrustRank you will find many blogs and forums talking about it and giving advice and theories about what you can do to alter it, but the fact of the matter is that it just simply does not exist.
At pubcon 2007 Suresh Babu interviewed Matt Cutts and asked him specifically to define TrustRank. Below is the video of that interview.
For those of you not able to watch the video, here’s a transcript where Matt Cutts talks about its origins and confusion between a Yahoo intern’s project and an antiphishing filter Google was developing.
What is trustrank? everybody’s curious about that. It’s kinda nice you asked because it’s good to have a chance to debunk this a little bit. So it turns out there was a summer intern who was at Yahoo and Jan Pedersen and some other people at Yahoo, and they wrote a paper about something called TrustRank; and what it does is it tries to treat reputation like it’s physical mass and see how it flows around on the web and what physical properties does trust have; and it’s really interesting stuff. But it’s completely separate from Google. So a couple of years ago at like the exact same time, Google was working on an antiphishing filter, and as part of that we needed to come up with a name for it and so they filed for a trademark, and I think they used the name TrustRank, so it was a really weird coincidence. Yahoo had a TrustRank project and we had this TrustRank trademark, and so everybody talks about TrustRank, TrustRank, TrustRank and yet if you go and ask five different SEOs you’ll have five different opinions and definitions about exactly what TrustRank is.
If you go to the US Patent and Trademark website and do a trademark search you’ll find this result:
Word Mark TRUSTRANK
Goods and Services (ABANDONED) IC 042. US 100 101. G & S: Computer services, namely organizing information, sites and other resources available on computer networks
Standard Characters Claimed
Mark Drawing Code (4) STANDARD CHARACTER MARK
Serial Number 78588592
Filing Date March 16, 2005
Current Filing Basis 1B
Original Filing Basis 1B
Published for Opposition December 6, 2005
Owner (APPLICANT) Google Inc. CORPORATION DELAWARE 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View CALIFORNIA 94043
Type of Mark SERVICE MARK
Register PRINCIPAL
Live/Dead Indicator DEAD
Abandonment Date February 29, 2008
Enhanced Detection of Search Engine Spam
Inventors: Caldwell; Larry Thomas; (Annandale, VA)
Assignee Name and Adress: Idalis Software, Inc. Annandale VA
Serial No.: 871539
Series Code: 11
Filed: October 12, 2007
System and method for characterizing a web page using multiple anchor sets of web pages
Inventors: Joshi; Amruta Sadanand; (Palo Alto, CA) ; Ravikumar; Shanmugasundaram; (Cupertino, CA) ; Reed; Benjamin Clay; (Morgan Hill, CA) ; Tomkins; Andrew; (San Jose, CA)
Assignee Name and Adress: Yahoo! Inc. Sunnyvale CA
Serial No.: 542079
Series Code: 11
Filed: October 3, 2006
Inventors: Ferrenq; Isabelle; (Saint Lattier, FR) ; Chevalier; Pierre-Yves; (Biviers, FR)
Assignee Name and Adress: EMC Corporation
Serial No.: 522498
Series Code: 11
Filed: September 15, 2006
User-sensitive pagerank
Inventors: Berkhin; Pavel; (Sunnyvale, CA) ; Fayyad; Usama M.; (Sunnyvale, CA) ; Raghavan; Prabhakar; (Saratoga, CA) ; Tomkins; Andrew; (San Jose, CA)
Assignee Name and Adress: YAHOO! INC.
Serial No.: 474195
Series Code: 11
Filed: June 22, 2006
Inventors: Repasi; Rolf; (Sunrise Beach, AU) ; Clausen; Simon; (New South Wales, AU)
Serial No.: 803922
Series Code: 11
Filed: May 16, 2007
Search engine with augmented relevance ranking by community participation
Inventors: Xu; Zhichen; (San Jose, CA) ; Berkhin; Pavel; (Sunnyvale, CA) ; Rose; Daniel E.; (Cupertino, CA) ; Mao; Jianchang; (San Jose, CA) ; Ku; David; (Palo Alto, CA) ; Lu; Qi; (Saratoga, CA) ; Walther; Eckart; (Palo Alto, CA) ; Tam; Chung-Man; (San Francisco, CA)
Serial No.: 478291
Series Code: 11
Filed: June 28, 2006
Trust propagation through both explicit and implicit social networks
Inventors: Berkhim; Pavel; (Sunnyvale, CA) ; Xu; Zhichen; (San Jose, CA) ; Mao; Jianchang; (San Jose, CA) ; Rose; Daniel E.; (Cupertino, CA) ; Taha; Abe; (Sunnyvale, CA) ; Maghoul; Farzin; (Hayward, CA)
Assignee Name and Adress: Yahoo! Inc. Sunnyvale CA
Serial No.: 498637
Series Code: 11
Filed: August 2, 2006
Using community annotations as anchortext
Inventors: Rose; Daniel E.; (Cupertino, CA) ; Mao; Jianchang; (San Jose, CA) ; Xu; Zhichen; (San Jose, CA) ; Ku; David; (Palo Alto, CA) ; Lu; Qi; (Saratoga, CA) ; Walther; Eckart; (Palo Alto, CA) ; Tam; Chung-Man; (San Francisco, CA)
Serial No.: 498682
Series Code: 11
Filed: August 2, 2006
Link-based spam detection
Inventors: Barkhin; Pavel; (Sunnyvale, CA) ; Gyongyi; Zoltan Istvan; (Stanford, CA) ; Pedersen; Jan; (Los Altos Hills, CA)
Assignee Name and Adress: Yahoo! Inc. Sunnyvale CA
Serial No.: 198471
Series Code: 11
Filed: August 4, 2005
So since Google has dropped the trademark, does not have any patent applications for it and Matt Cutts explained the confusion, I think I’d call this myth busted!
I used to work for an SEO agency in Pittsburgh and dealt with a number of interesting clients in a variety of industries, with large and small sites. There were a number of funny incidents that I encountered, which I’d like to recount here, although names will be withheld.
No Google Traffic
After taking on this client I gained access to their webtrends reports and it showed an astounding lack of Google organic traffic. I looked over the meta tags and page content and all seemed to be targeting the right set of keywords to some degree, although onpage could still use some improvement.
I knew they weren’t doing anything advanced like IP delivery so I used Firefox with the useragent switcher extension and confirmed that with my useragent set to googlebot, slurp or msnbot I could browse the site without any problems. After checking the robots.txt I found that googlebot had been disallowed! After asking the client’s developer why they decided to ban googlebot their response was: It was crawling the site too often and there were errors on some of the pages that were leading to open database connections and locking up the server.
Needless to say the developers got a quick lesson in why banning googlebot to mask their programming errors is not good business practice.
Want to hear more stories? Do you have any of your own you’d like to share?
At pubcon I listened to a session by George Aspland about various techniques to optimize PDF files for search engines. Part of his ongoing research is to see whether links within a PDF file pass link juice. To test this, he asked if session members would download and republish one of his PDF files. So here it is. Good luck, it will be interesting to see the results of this test.
While I met a bunch of great people, there were a great deal of people I didn’t get to meet. Some were just rude or didn’t have any time for me (the man with the golden shoes and the offwhite hound dog), but apart from them, most others were polite enough to exchange pleasantries.
For those I didn’t get to meet, feel free to leave a comment, or you can catch up with me (my username is Pittbug) on the SEO refugee forums.
Thanks to Brett Tabke for the free beers, I shall return again next year.
Google webmaster tools was updated on Thursday with some new features. The one that caught my eye was Sitelinks located under Dashboard > Links > Sitelinks. Here’s a screenshot showing the new feature, see if you can spot where I think another updated is needed.
Hint: Hmmm… looks like the developer didn’t have English as his first language.
Ok, I’ll stop poking fun, on to some proper stuff:
Selecting pages to appear as sitelinks is a completely automated process. Our algorithms parse the structure and content of websites and identify pages that provide fast navigation and relevant information for the user’s query…… occasionally you might want to exclude a page from your sitelinks, for example: a page that has become outdated or unavailable, or a page that contains information you don’t want emphasized to users.
1) If Google has not yet crawled the entire site, it’s choosing the sitelinks based on partial data.
2) How does Google define “fast navigation”? Is it referencing the time spent downloading a page? The number of clicks to that page, which is deemed to be relevant to the users’ query? Or perhaps this was just worded in a strange way and what it really means is that by providing the sitelinks they’re providing a faster way for users to get to the relevant information on my site from the SERP.
3) I like that I can exclude a page, but why can’t I add pages as sitelinks? This would be much more useful for webmasters and users, since site owners will most likely know where their traffic goes and more to the point, where they really want to drive traffic.
4) If pages become outdated, it also stands to reason that there may be some new pages which are more valuable, but haven’t been automatically chosen to become sitelinks. (Yet another Google algo to look into…)
5) If pages that are listed as sitelinks become unavailable, I’d hope that Google will automatically remove the sitelinks.
6) Since Google only displays 4 sitelinks in the SERPs but offers a bigger list in GWT, it would be nice to see some examples of queries that bring up different combinations of sitelinks.
7) The anchor text of the sitelinks uses the first 25 characters of the title tag of the page it’s linking to. I’d like to be able to edit that link text to make it more useful for users and ensure some of the links aren’t truncated.
This brings on an interesting point, is it worth optimizing the title tags of pages that are listed in sitelinks? Would it make any difference? All of the ones I’ve seen are pretty accurate and don’t need adjusting.
Reuben has worked in both inhouse and agency SEO roles for over a decade and has lead Manta's SEO team since mid 2007. In his spare time he enjoys playing with his kids and is an avid photographer. Read more about Reuben Yau.
Over the years a lot of SEOs have gone back and forth over this legendary question: 
