Thursday, August 23, 2007

Google Bowling

What is an SEO going to do when a certain competitor ranks better and it seems impossible to catch up with him? He’ll either increase his regular SEO efforts even more, or think about using black hat SEO. Lately, a black hat SEO technique called “Google Bowling” has attracted the attention of the SEO community.

What is “Google Bowling” aka “reverse SEO“?

Google BowlingGoogle Bowling“, also called “reverse SEO” is a technique, based on the simple fact that there is a second way of getting on top of the Google search results:

- increasing your own rank
- decreasing your competitor’s rank

Google Bowling is an SEO technique that is capable of decreasing a competitor’s rank in the Google Search Engine.

How does “Google Bowling” aka “reverse SEO” work?

Is it really possible to decrease a competitor’s rank without touching his website? - Yes it is possible.

Google Bowling exploits the ranking penalty algorithms that Google applies to websites that are playing against the rules by spamming other websites with inbound links.

To bowl a website from the top of the Google results, an opponent needs to spam a huge amount of other websites with links to the target website in a short amount of time, to trigger Google’s Anti-Spam algorithms. If the efforts are successful, Google will think that the target website is trying to illegitimately increase their rankings through spamming and apply a ranking penalty to that website, dropping it from the top search results or even making it completely dissapear from the SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages).

Due to the huge amount of spam links needed for a successful Google Bowl, I believe that it is impossible to Google Bowl manually. From what I have heard, Google Bowling is mostly done with automated website spamming software which targets forums or blogs with comment spam.

Is Google Bowling easy?

I haven’t done Google Bowling myself and I am not planning to do it, but from what I have heard and from my knowledge about the Google Algorithms, it should not be an easy task due to the huge amount of successful spam needed within a short period of time.

Is Google Bowling legal? Should I try this?

No. Do not try to Google bowl your competitors. This is definately an illegal activity and you might get sued for this. You have been warned…

Protection against Google Bowling

At the moment, I cannot think of any useful protection against Google Bowling except that Google finds a way to adjust their algorithms to make Google Bowling impossible.

I can imagine that it is also hard to prove Google Bowling as a victim, but if you should have any evidence that a competitor is trying to Google bowl your website, I would recommend to contact your lawyer to take care of this.

Tuesday, August 7, 2007

Common Error Codes Indicate to The Problem

Some Important Error Code indicate the Problem

200 - OK / no error
301 - Redirect
302 - Redirect
400 - Bad request
401 - Unauthorized. This page requires a login+password.
402 - Payment Required
403 - Forbidden.
404 - Page not found
405 - Method Not Allowed
406 - Not Acceptable
407 - Proxy Authentication Required
408 - Request Timeout
409 - Conflict
410 - Gone
411 - Length Required
412 - Precondition Failed
413 - Request Entity Too Large
414 - Request-URI Too Long
415 - Unsupported Media Type
416 - Requested Range Not Satisfiable
417 - Expectation Failed
500 - Internal Server error
501 - Not Implemented
502 - Bad Gateway
503 - Service Unavailable
504 - Gateway Timeout
505 - HTTP Version Not Supported
0 - Some network connection error. Most likely it is a time out. Don't worry about it if it happens with a few pages.
990 - Blocked by your robots.txt file.
999 - Undefined error. Something went wrong, but we don't know what.

Thursday, August 2, 2007

Supplemental goes mainstream

When Google originally introduced Supplemental Results in 2003, our main web index had billions of web pages. The supplemental index made it possible to index even more web pages and, just like our main web index, make this content available when generating relevant search results for user queries. This was especially useful for queries that did not return many results from the main web index, and for these the supplemental index allowed us to query even more web pages. The fewer constraints we're able to place on sites we crawl for the supplemental index means that web pages that are not in the main web index could be included in the supplemental. These are often pages with lower PageRank or those with more complex URLs. Thus the supplemental index (read more - and here's Matt's talk about it on video) serves a very important purpose: to index as much of the relevant content that we crawl as possible.

The changes we make must focus on improving the search experience for our users. Since 2006, we've completely overhauled the system that crawls and indexes supplemental results. The current system provides deeper and more continuous indexing. Additionally, we are indexing URLs with more parameters and are continuing to place fewer restrictions on the sites we crawl. As a result, Supplemental Results are fresher and more comprehensive than ever. We're also working towards showing more Supplemental Results by ensuring that every query is able to search the supplemental index, and expect to roll this out over the course of the summer.

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." Of course, you will continue to benefit from Google's supplemental index being deeper and fresher.