You come across some really weird SEO advice

http://www.wmfieds.com/blog/index.php/archives/3

I'm having a hard time even thinking about this one. Adsense spiders hit the gmail pages? That would be totally efficient.

 

Is it a joke or something real?

 

ROFL That's retarded. The reason your gmail has a PR is because of all the strong backlinks to google.com/mail/ etc. It doesnt work on an individual basis.

 

I need a drink

 

Definetly not true =]

 

It looks like speculation presented as fact.

Gmail could probably be used in some way to gather data on websites, and there's no reason why Google shouldn't use all the data at their disposal in order to refine their SERPs. Maybe they will in future. It's not a bad way of discovering which links are being sent out and followed, and which things people don't want to see. It's the kind of data that they could use to identify spam sites which may need a manual review.

 

Wow, I can't believe they're giving this secret away. I charge for letting people know to leave lots of documents with their keywords and URL laying around for the Google spiders in their house. The best part is, the less you tidy up your house, and the more documents you leave laying around, the more your house gets spidered!

 

I'm almost convinced that this was some sort of reverse psychology link baiting.

 

Interesting theory...

Please forgive me for not yet including references..
But it may be of interest ...
I read that recent ( or not so recent, I believe it was around the 911 incident ) legislation made emails stored over a certain age public domain and open to "data diving" so to speak. Shortly after which the trend to giant email accounts became very evident. Our private messages may not be as private as we think. I am not sure as to the authenticity of the article i read so I need to investigate a bit, before taking it too seriously. If anyone has come across anything on this subject I would like to know more...

 

Making them public domain would mean overturning the copyright laws of most of the western world. That's just silly.

I don't think of Gmail as private (which is the main reason I don't have an account). If it's spidered in order to send out ads, it's not exactly confidential, is it?

That said, I have always considered email as like sending a postcard. Your email provider has access to it, as does anyone who hacks them, or hacks or has access to your computer, and anyone who can listen in anywhere along the connection (the whole Echelon thing for all you conspiracy theorists out there). Not to mention the times that someone forwards your email to everyone on their contact list, either accidentally or on purpose. Email has never been private.

 

i higtly doubt that gmail is spidered, although i have once thougt of a very simiiar ideas as this.

 

Hi all,

I am the author of the article. The article is all theory presented as fact. Though, the theory does hold weight.

In order for Google to deliver relevant Adsense ads the page content must be spidered (by Adsense bot). There is no way for Google to deliver relvant contextual ads if the content of the page is not taken into consideration. Therefore, this makes it a known fact that Gmail pages are spidered (not indexed).

As for the PR it is gained from the value of the domain (gmail.com), but every account has an unique identifier which (I believe) can be used similar to being a different page/site. 1 link sent to each gmail account equals 1 link on 1 page. The more Gmail accounts you communicate with the more pages your link will have to gain the shared PR value. You cannot simply send an daily email to Gmail account which contains an anchor text link, as this would only count as 1 link on 1 page.

Ask yourself this, why doesn't your Yahoo!, Hotmail, or other accounts have any PR value??

I have been researching this theory for about a year now, it is my conclusion that Google is adding value to links within Gmail. Randomly check your SPAM folder and pick an email which is continually sent to the SPAM folder, if the email has any links look for it in the Google SERPs, nine times out of ten the domain name will not be found in the SERPs or have 0 PR value (not a third-party sub-domain, such as geocities, but a natural domain). Now the reverse is for links/domains constantly found inside your inbox. And I don't believe this is because the SPAM domains are flagged by a third-party such as SpamCop, SpamHaus, etc. I think Google is sufficient enough to rely on its own results.

Think about it, the links/domains found in your SPAM folder are not links/domains that you would want to click on in the SERPs. If they are not good enough for email why are they good enough for search! I am almost positive Google realizes this and puts value on links found within Gmail. It's a simple measure of Inbox vs. SPAM.

My theory may sound far-fetched but Google is cunning and I am certain they have this written into their algorithm, if not then they will in the future. It's about being one step ahead of the game...and I think this is at least 2 steps.

If you don't believe then all I ask is that you test the theory and see what happens. I am currently re-testing the theory. I stumbled upon this accidently, because I included keyword-rich anchor text links to one of my past sites in all my email communications. I had an heavy Gmail userbase and it seemed that I was getting PR value from the Gmail accounts as well I ranked high in the Google SERPs for the keyword phrase. Unfortunately, there will be no true way to know if this is fact unless Google puts it out there, but I am convinced of my theory.

 

thats pretty freaky, however logical and makes sense

 

Most...stupid...theory...ever

Adsensebot has nothing to do with the googlebot. Do you even know how Google works?

 

Good theory or not, the Adsense bot was caught indexing recently. Will find the references if you want.

 

The Adsense bot has been know for helping the Googlebot in some ocasions, but it does not help to boost rankings in any way, neither does it help you get indexed faster, it is just sort of checking what already is cached.

 

Yes, I do know how Google works. And the theory is on point IMHO. Have you even tested the theory to ciritize? If not, your lost...my gain!

 

Actually, it's fairly easy to prove / disprove: send yourself a link to a unique URL, track the accesses. My bet is that you'll never see any Google activity on that URL. Going from indexed pages to email spam and drawing a connection based on that alone is a bit far fetched in my opinion.

Also remember that Google does not have to crawl it's own content. It can use tools to extract keywords / context from a page (and in the case of gmail, it only uses the message sent) and trigger ads from that. There's no need to crawl or index the page at all (and anyway, how could Google crawl your mailbox? you can't access the URL when not logged in; a spider can't either). And then, remember that PR is based on the PAGE, not on the site: the PR8 from mail.google.com/mail/ is for the main page, not for a specific message. The PR displayed is - for dynamic pages - just a very rough guess (and in the case of gmail, just the PR of the root page).

John

 

I'm with softplus - how should the googlebot crawl your mailbox if not logged in?

And I also think it's easy to test: just include a unique word as linktext to a website and see if it ever gets ranked for that - I don't think so...

 

Actually, the Adsense bot is the Googlebot -- they use a crawl caching proxy which means that it will try to crawl the content once and re-use it for whatever "bots" would have accessed it. It makes cloaking to the Googlbot or Adsense-bot a bit harder though