Click to enlarge

I’m only seeing this on an intitle: search that includes the word design and wraps quotes around the phrase.

intitle:design works fine
intitle:”design” leads to the error message above

intitle:”web company” works fine
intitle:”web design company” leads to the error message

I’ve been trying different queries around the word design with and without quotes for the last hour and always the same results. Is it a glitch? Is this known? It’s new to me. Are virus and spyware applications really that concerned with the word “design” to the point that Google is blocking the query.

Anyone seeing something similar?

When deep in my web logs there arose such a clatter,
I logged into cPanel, what could be the matter?
Away to Excel I flew like a flash,
Tore open the data and thought of the cash.

Unmistakable footprint of a busy web page
Showed the luster of activity in spite of its age,
When, what to my wondering eyes should I see,
But a miniature robot, crawling A, B, and C.

An undefined program, so lively and quick,
I though in a moment it must be a trick.
More rapid than eagles its code blocks they came,
What was this user-agent with unrecognized name?

64.68.92.29!
72.14.207.99!
The referrers kept coming and I hoped they would stay,
Don’t dash away! dash away! Oh don’t dash away!

For I knew that these robots were only the start,
To many more visits into my shopping cart
So into the index the scrapers they drew,
Servers full of content, and a little spam too.

And then, in a fortnight, I saw in my logs
That traffic had come to visit my blog.
As I wrote another post, with contextual ads,
My bank account did grow, more money I had.

It all seemed so easy, this cash flow at hand,
How was I to know most considered it spam;
Ad blocks as menus, and more ads as text,
Who needs real content when you’re paying the rent.

When it finally happened I cursed my bad luck,
My traffic was gone, I screamed out “Oh
Why did it happen, and happen to me
An update called Florida, I was not filled with glee;

Back to the drawing board I started anew,
And built another site with ads from Yahoo;
Google had loved me and now it did not,
But never would I yield to some spidering bot.

My profits returned, still it wasn’t the same
Each night in my sleep I would hear the bots name;
Googlebot oh Googlebot, please come back to me,
I promise I’ll be good, come back and you’ll see;

The bot it did come with a new sheriff in town
Matt Cutts was him name and he wore a big crown,
Fighting spam was his game and my he was good,
At detecting hidden text and a bad neighborhood;

He wrote in his blog, to his team gave a whistle,
When spam is too much, well launch another missile.
But I heard him exclaim, as he continued the fight,
SEARCH TRAFFIC TO ALL, IF YOU BUILD A GOOD SITE.”

Merry Christmas Everyone!

The previous link is clearly a tongue-in-cheek answer to all of the above questions. It’s funny and worth the minute or so to follow the design evolution. It’s also an indication why you see so many of the elements on the final design present on so many sites. There’s a lot of truth in this bit of humor.

Danny’s post seems to confirm these last two with examples of The Stanford Daily site and the site of graphic designer David Airey. These two cases along with a few others that have been talked about the last few months might indicate that Google is taking things to a new level in fighting link buying.

• Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google

Loren Baker disagreed with Danny’s conclusions.

Personally, I find the Stanford Daily as being a horrible example of a site loosing Google PageRank and credibility just because of link selling. The reason the Stanford Daily lost its PageRank and was penalized is because of obviously irresponsible and irrelevant link selling. Not link selling alone.

Adam also took issue with Danny, mostly over the choice of the word ‘Official’ in Danny’s post as though everything he was saying had been confirmed by Google. Danny does mention pinging Google and getting confirmation, but as Adam rightly points out that doesn’t make it so.

• Google PageRank Update & Link Selling
• How YOU, the Web Marketer, are Led to Slaughter by “Industry Leaders”

Both Aaron Wall and Michael Gray have been critical of Google’s reaction to the whole issue. Aaron advises

If you are a webmaster assume that Google is lying to you and ignore them.

I agree to a lesser extent. I’m not sure you need to assume Google is lying, but it’s a good idea not to rely solely on Google for your traffic. Google is showing that it will take all that traffic away if they decide they don’t like something you are doing on your site.

Michael compares Google to the RIA and sees Google as desperately trying to hold onto their growing monopoly of online advertising. I do think much of Google’s moves are designed to spread fear since it’s impossible for them to discover every case of link buying. Since some paid links will go undetected Google is trying to scare site owners away from the practice.

• Google is Becoming Wikipedia Without the Talk Page
• Why Google is the Recording Industry of the 21st Century

A big part of the debate is Google’s recommendation to use the rel=”nofollow” attribute on all links for which you receive money. Earlier in the week Matt Cutts started a thread on the Webmaster Central Google Group on the appropriate uses for nofollow, though oddly absent was any mention of paid links. Loren again followed up making mention of what Matt had previously stated on his own blog.

If you sell links, you should mark them with the nofollow tag. Not doing so can affect your reputation in Google.

• Appropriate uses of nofollow tag — popular pick
• Google’s Matt Cutts on Appropriate Use of NoFollow

My favorite posts from the week all come from Jennifer Layock’s series. Jennifer’s first post looks at the history of nofollow from it’s beginnings as a way to combat blog comment spam to it’s evolution as a way to protect yourself from Google penalties. Part 2 discusses whether or not Google’s policies will be enforced across the board or if some sites will be immune from penalty. She also talks about why the warnings from Google that all of this was coming are not a defense for what they are doing now. Part 3 explores the options Google has and why she thinks they’re choosing the wrong one. Part 4 is coming, though not available as I’m writing. I’ll add it once it becomes available.

If you read any of the posts I’ve linked to here please read these. Jennifer has done an excellent job of covering the issues and I’d say my own views align closely with Jennifer’s views.

• NoFollow is for Blog Spam…no Paid Text Links, wait…Paid Ads…Aww Heck, Just Stop Linking and Let Calacanis Decide the Rankings – Part One
• NoFollow is for Blog Spam…no Paid Text Links, wait…Paid Ads…Aww Heck, Just Stop Linking and Let Calacanis Decide the Rankings – Part Two
• Part Three – NoFollow is for Blog Spam…no Paid Text Links, wait…Paid Ads…Aww Heck, Just Stop Linking and Let Calacanis Decide the Rankings

Many will tell you that regardless of what Google wants, says, or does, link selling and buying will continue, though it will be driven further underground. I completely agree. Google will never be able to determine if some links are bought and sold. If you and I were to speak on the phone and you agreed to pay me something to add a link to your content how would Google distinguish that link from any other. Sites link to each other all the time and in many cases it’s impossible to determine if money exchanged hands for the links. As part of this round of paid links talks we’re getting more on how to profit selling links and how to stay under the radar if you are.

• How to Profit from Google’s War on Paid Links
• 7.5 Rules of Selling Links – How Not to Get Penalized

Barry Schwartz collected some links from earlier in this week and posted a roundup. Some I’ve already linked to above, but most will be new. If you still want more open your favorite rss reader and visit any seo blog you subscribe to. Chances are there’s at least one post on the subject from the last few days.

• The Big Paid Link Roundup

What Do I think About Paid Links?

I have to admit it’s easy to get lost somewhat in this debate. If you ask me I’ll tell you what Google is doing is absolutely wrong, but I wonder if they have the right to be wrong in the way they are. I’ve always maintained that Google is a business and they have every right to do what they want with their business. Google doesn’t owe you or me or anyone else a certain rank in their results. We have no right to expect traffic from Google.

Still I think Google is wrong. I’ll hold to things I’ve said in the past about paid links

• Google vs. Paid Links
• An Update On Paid Links

And add that Google is showing an uncharming arrogance through all of this not befitting a company that claims to do no evil. They’re overreacting to a problem and are going to hurt many honest businesses in the process. It’s true they don’t owe you ranking, but we all know how important the traffic Google sends can be. While I maintain Google has a right to do what it pleases with it’s business I also maintain that they should never penalize a site for something it shouldn’t reasonably be expected to know.

The average mom and pop site has no idea what a nofollow attribute is. The average mom and pop probably has no idea there’s even an issue with buying and selling a link. And in all honesty there’s no reason why they should. If someone approaches mom and pop to pay for a link in their sidebar or footer mom and pop might very well see it as a nice way to help with the costs of the site. Why would they think there’s anything wrong in accepting the deal and why should they know Google could come down on them for not adding a nofollow?

Google may have the right to do what they want, but should they punish honest people for their own mess. Let’s face it Google won’t penalize big name sites if they choose to sell links. Google needs those big name sites in their index. But Google will punish you and me and mom and pop for doing the same thing they’ll let large corporations get away with.

Google should not punish people for making reasonable decisions and it’s beginning to look like that’s where they’re heading if they aren’t already there. The obvious solution would be to discount any link Google discovers has been bought and sold. Give it no weight whatsoever in the algorithm as is their right. Google could even go so far as to discount links it only suspects of having been bought and none of us would be any the wiser.

Google is also being very hypocritical given they sell more links than anyone through AdWords. Of course one way to hold onto your marketshare is to scare everyone else out of the market. You can’t profit from a link on your site unless that link happens to come from AdSense and Google gets its cut.

Google is taking things to the extreme with it’s FUD campaign. It’s an indication they really can’t detect link buying all that well and instead of trying to figure out how they’re going to scare you away from using them instead. Google wants you to clean up the mess they created for themselves by making you worry about what will happen if you don’t.

I wish Google would realize that despite their efforts link buying will continue. Paid links will become harder to detect and they won’t go away. What might go away are some honest businesses that get caught up in Google’s fight and never understand what happened. Google could easily put much of this debate to rest by openly stating what they plan to do when they discover a site selling links. They prefer the uncertainty since the uncertainty will scare many away from the practice.

Like it or not this issue isn’t going anywhere any time soon.

I haven’t been able to reproduce this. As you can see in the image I was not signed into iGoogle, but I had the iGoogle generic page loaded.

Has anyone else seen this? Is Google starting to aggressively push personalized search.

I still have reservations about personalized search. I appreciate the ability to turn your search history on and off as well as the ability to remove specific sites from your history or clear the whole thing. I doubt most people will ever know they can control their search history to any degree let alone be aware their searches are being stored.

Realize that Google would like to better understand whether you want to know about fishing or musical instruments when you type ‘bass’ and your search history will tell them which is more likely what you’re seeking. But I think personalization based on your past searches can lead to you seeing an ever shrinking corner of the web in search results.

Personalized search isn’t going anywhere and we need to understand the seo implications of personalization. As long as Google doesn’t rerank things too much I’m fine with the idea of personalization and see how it can deliver better results. I still wonder if there’s a danger with personalized search in keeping many people from expanding on their current knowledge.

The privacy issues with your search history should be of concern as well. Yes Google does give you the ability to turn that on and off, but your history will still reside on Google servers after you’ve paused things. They may not be tied to your email address, but having them all tied together through a common IP has been shown not to be a reliable source of maintaining your privacy.

Have a look at the video. If you understand how personalized search works you probably won’t find a lot new in it, but you might be interested to know Google’s public stance on privacy. If personalized search is just a term you’ve seen others talking about and if you’ve never seen your search history you should check out the video. Its a quick and clear explanation of what personalization’s all about and how it affects your privacy.

Whether I agree or disagree with Google’s stance I appreciate their willingness to be more transparent on the issues of both privacy and personalized search.

This isn’t exactly a complicated technical video and I suspect many of you will be somewhat familiar at least with IP addresses and cookies. The main points in the video are that while Google collects your IP address when you perform a search they can’t pinpoint who and exactly where you are and that the cookie they set is meant to track your preferences such as how many results to display in the search results.

Here’s an image of the log Google will put together based on your search

The video also mentions how after 18 months Google will anonymize a part of the log. They will remove the cookie information and also the ‘D’ block of the IP address as seen in the following image.

What’s a little misleading is that neither of these pieces of information has much to do with your privacy. The preferences in the cookie aren’t meaningful and Google can find out just as much information from the ‘C’ block of the IP as they can from having both the ‘C’ and ‘D’ blocks.

It’s important to note that this video is meant only to explain basic privacy concepts, which it does do well and that Google is planning to release more privacy videos like the information they collect when you register for a Google account or what info they collect when you search while logged into your account. Those are the videos I want to see.

While the information in this video goes only so far, I want to give Google some slack. I think Google gets more flack over privacy issues than they deserve mostly because as the market leader they have the most data and if their proposed purchase of DoubleClick goes through the potential information they’ll have will be staggering. But it should be remembered that when the U.S. government demanded search engines hand over data it was only Google that refused to comply.

Having all that information does make Google a fair target and you only have to remember the debacle with AOL releasing supposedly anonymous search data and the subsequent identification of at least one person within that anonymous data to understand that it’s important to protect the privacy of searchers.

Fair or not Google will take the most heat over privacy concerns as the market leader and I suspect this video and the ones planned are meant to counter the perception that Google isn’t doing enough to protect the privacy of its users. Privacy concerns are becoming one of the battlegrounds for market share in search. Whatever their motivation this video is a step in the right direction towards transparency.

Watch the video and share your thoughts.

From Danny’s post:

By and large, it was less important pages that ended up in the supplemental index. If Google’s main index — containing what it considered the best or most important pages — didn’t seem to have a match, then Google would look to the supplemental index for listings.

and

Pages in the supplemental index could, did and do rank — but only generally if there’s not much to be found in the primary index.

As much as Google would like us to believe otherwise, a page in the supplemental index will get less traffic from Google than were that same page in the main index. Knowing which pages are in the supplemental index allows webmasters to identify potential problems with those pages and sometimes with the site as a whole.

If it were simply a matter of not enough links pointing to a page then this wouldn’t be such a big deal. We all know or should know that links help pages rank and we should be looking to bring links into our pages and our site as a whole. But sometimes the problem has nothing to do with links. As I’ve mentioned on several occasions last summer this entire blog went supplemental due mostly to Google indexing the feed of each post along with the html version of the post. Admittedly most of the posts at that time had very few links, but a quick fix to my robots.txt file pulled all of the posts out of the supplemental index and placed them back in the main index. Traffic to the site increased about 1500% in less than a month.

The problem was more than links or a lack of them. Seeing the supplemental label is what led me to understand the nature of the problem and find the solution. As recently as today Michael Gray posted about WordPress comments being seo unfriendly and the issue and solution are the same. Content goes supplemental in ways that might not be apparent at first and the label in the results helped in the discovery of potential problems.

Google, though, has chosen to remove the information. Their reasons are

The distinction between the main and the supplemental index is therefore continuing to narrow. Given all the progress that we’ve been able to make so far, and thinking ahead to future improvements, we’ve decided to stop labeling these URLs as “Supplemental Results.”

Narrowing the gap is an admission that there is a gap. It’s also vague in that it’s not quantifiable or meaningful. If you and I are currently 10,000 miles apart and we take a step towards each other we’ve narrowed the gap between us. We’re hardly any closer to each other.

Google would like us to believe the goal is to bring the two indexes closer to each other in the future until the distinction between them is virtually non-existent. If that’s the case then why have the supplemental index at all? What purpose would it be serving?

We’re being told the reason for dropping the label is that it’s not important for us to know and Matt Cutts doesn’t want people fixating on their supplemental pages. More likely the reason the labels are going away is that Google wants to hide the fact that there is a difference and will continue to be a difference between the two indexes.

In all fairness to Google it’s still possible they’ll give us a way to determine supplemental pages in some fashion through Webmaster Tools. And even if Google doesn’t people will still find a way. At the moment there’s another simple query you can use to find your supplemental pages. It will probably stop working before long, though. Jim Boykin has ideas on another way to find supplemental results. Google sent Danny a way to discover supplemental pages as well.

First, get a list of all of your pages. Next, go to the webmaster console [Google Webmaster Central] and export a list of all of your links. Make sure that you get both external and internal links, and concatenate the files.

Now, compare your list of all your pages with your list of internal+external backlinks. If you know a page exists, but you don’t see that page in the list of site with backlinks, that deserves investigation. Pages with very few backlinks (either from other sites or internally) are also worth checking out.

I agree with Danny that it would be better to simply select the “export supplemental URLs” option, but I’m sure more ways will follow to determine or at least approximate supplemental pages.

The best solution is to return things as they were. Failing that the next best alternative would be a quick way to see supplemental pages through Webmaster Central. Regardless of what Google would have us believe the information about which pages of a site are supplemental is helpful and worth knowing.

Since MONOLITH didn’t openly mention the sites in question I’ll refrain from mentioning them here as well. However if you read through the thread it’s easy enough to figure out. Hint: Look at the linked image.

You’d want to believe potential customers could figure things out when they arrived at the competitor site, but you never know. And if your competitor added a single line like company ‘x’ is now company ‘y’ to the landing page they could easily steal your business.

Is hijacking a your competitors brand in this way legal? It’s definitely shady. What can you do about?

What You Can Do To Keep Your Customers

Legally I have no idea, but I do have some suggestions to help potential customers find you instead of your competitor when they search for your name. Most importantly make sure you have a listing in Maps and all the other local search services. Next make sure your listing ranks first for your company name. This shouldn’t be too hard and part of MONOLITH’s problem appears to be the lack of a link to a website. At the moment the company website is a single coming soon page, but while the site is waiting I’d change the coming soon message to the company’s contact information and then include the link on the Maps listing.

That really should be enough to ensure you rank first for your company name, but if for some reason it doesn’t work you can try optimizing for these 10 likely elements of Google’s local search algorithm.

Even if you’re ranking #1 your competitor’s phony listing will still be there. One thing you might do is add a review to their listing where you simply point out where to really find your company. That might lead your competitor to fill out reviews on your listing, but the more they lie the worse they’re going to look.

Ranking first or adding a review still doesn’t remove the phony listing. I’d like to believe Google will remove it once it’s made aware of the problem, but I have a hunch they might not. And like I said I don’t know the legality of this situation. I’d also like to believe one phone call from a lawyer would have the competitor remove the listing, but again I have a hunch it would take more.

Regardless of how Google and the legal system deals with the issue it’s clearly in your best interest to list your business and make sure it ranks above the phony listing. Most people will click the first result and finding your business never notice your competitor’s hijacking attempt. Still it’s pretty troubling how easy your competition can steal your customers, especially if your company has no online presence.

After a couple of emails to the Analytics team they responded with the suggestion that it might be a Firefox extension causing the problem. Fortunately for me I had only installed a couple recently and was able to quickly identify the Compete Toolbar as the culprit. Still Michael is right when when he said in a comment

this should be a lesson, using programming that depends on client side code or functionality is a dangerous. You have no way of knowing what is on an end users machine, and how it will interact with your JS or AJAX application.

There really isn’t any good reason why you shouldn’t be able to use both Analytics and the toolbar. And forcing use of Analytics in IE is not a reasonable solution. You shouldn’t have to make a choice between the two. In this case the choice for me was easy since I’ll use Analytics more than the Compete toolbar, but that ease of choosing won’t always be the case with every application.

Had the problem been with the Web Developer Toolbar I’d be looking for a new stats package.

JavaScript, particularly when it’s incorporated as Ajax is a very cool thing, but it’s important to keep in mind that your application might not work for everyone and if you happen to break a popular extension your application and your site might not get the love it deserves. Most people will only know your site doesn’t work and not come back.