Some Interesting Statements from Google VP

Popular Mechanics interviewed Udi Manber, VP of search quality at Google and he had said some interesting things. One that jumped out at me was in regards to directories and the many SERP penalties we have had to endure.

He said Google doesn't adjust search results by hand.

"If we find, for a particular query, that result No. 4 should be result No. 1, we do not have the capability to manually change it." "We have to find what weakness in the algorithm caused that result and find a general solution to that, evaluate whether a general solution really works and if it's better, and then launch a general solution."

You can read a bit more on my SEO News Blog

 

Matt Cutts clarifies some of those statements here

 

They don't manually change serps but they do manually penalize/remove sites.

 

I'm wondering if that's actually true about them manually penalizing sites...perhaps it IS all algorithmic, unless deemed spam.

So are directories caught in an algorithm, or are the deemed spam???

 

I don't think algorithms can be used to detect paid links.

 

I betcha they can detect alot of them. Some would be near impossible to detect, I admit, but with enough data (like Google has), I don't think it would actually be all that hard.

I'll give you an interesting case study. I have a free niche directory I'm building. It doesn't sell links, and it hasn't bought any. The domain is an old domain I picked up with a few links pointing to it from its previous life; nothing major. It ranked a bit for it's niche term, then fell out of the top 1000 results. Gone. That was about the same time I pointed links to it from my blog (no bought or sold links there) and from another blog I had in a related niche to the directory. The related blog did buy and sell links, and became penalized, all about the same time. I removed the links pointing to the directory on the related blog and added my directory to the "My Sites" section of my blog instead of just the blogroll section.

The directory now shows up in the SERPs.

 

You can never be sure.
but it looks like your "related" blog became a bad neighborhood and affected the directory, still hard to imagine a single link can cause such a penalty.

 

One of the things in the interview that is important to note is the 450 algo changes google experimented with last year, I assume they are still doing it and that is why it is hard to target why a site drops out of the SERPs and why it comes back.

 

Well, I was surprised when I got the penalty, to be sure. I mean, I didn't buy or sell any links! The site is clean, albeit underdeveloped. And I should make clear that the blog that sold links didn't link out to unrelated or crap sites, and didn't sell a whole lot of links in the first place.

True. But in my instance, the timing is awefully coincidental if it doesn't mean anything...

 

Maybe so. Still, I would be hesitant to submit (bid) to most of the bidding directories as most to have dollar and pound signs plastered all over them.

 

but they do manualy adjust pagerank.

Pagerank is used for your google position. So ... they adjust search results by hand

My site was having a penalty -50 and a Pagerank penalty. Afther reinclusion request, they didn't change my penalty -50 but they give me back my Pagerank.

 

If they had algorithm to detect paid links,then my directory would not have got PR4!

 

Matt Cutts

So they do actually change the results but only for some bad/spam sites..

 

It's not really changing the algorithm for a site, it's changing the algorithm for a specific set of search results. They see a set of results, and it looks wrong, so they go back to the algorithm to tweak it and make it better.

 

All this stuff is just more reason to focus on Yahoo and MSN traffic.

 

I can't imagine if they ever would completely change the whole set of algorithm.

 

Why not? You don't think they work at making their search results better? As pointed out, there were quite a few algorithm changes last year...

 

agreed

agreed.

I think they rely on the jealous idiots of the web to do this for them.