Yes, it's prepostorous. But, if it did happen, here are some items I might take on, both on the relevance boosting side and from a webmaster relations angle.
First, spam killing and relevance boosting:
- Hire a team of 5-10 SEOs to watch the top known "spam" arenas. These guys/gals would watch over searches like those in my sing-a-long-spam post, identify naughty websites and the techniques they used and make a list for engineers to deal with algorithmically.
- Shred the sandbox for unique phrases (no more SEOmoz not ranking for the term SEOmoz - if you come up with a term, no matter how low quality your links are, you should still be ranking for it).
- Kill the value of the DigitalPoint Co-op in ranking websites (it's hard to believe it's gone on this long). I'm a big Shawn Hogan fan (and I love the forum and tools), but the crap sites I see ranking who use it make me cringe.
- Set up an annual SEO contest for the search engineers - each person gets to register a website (or use a subdomain) and play the SEO game for cool prizes or just respect. The experience alone would be invaluable in having engineers understand the ranking process from the other side (it would probably improve relevancy, too).
- Put a perma-bug in Dave Naylor's head while he was sleeping so we could hear everything he says.
- Write our own version of SEOmoz's Beginner's Guide and put it on the Google website - this would help eliminate a lot of questions/misconceptions people have about SEO and largely shut down the SEO companies that give the industry a bad name (Internet Advancement, what?)
- Run a check of all domains with a /index.html or /home.html variant and remove all instances where the /index.html is the indented result beneath the www domain (it's a total waste of space)
- Set up "batphone" lines with the following people - Aaron Wall, Todd Malicoat, Michael Gray, Greg Boser, Claus, Thomas Bindl (and probably a few others). There would be a Google engineer "receptionist" who would jot down their questions, concerns and noticed issues and make those part of the daily/weekly whiteboard meetings.
- Think hard about my interface design - this guy makes some good points and this guy is right on the money.
OK, enough free consulting, now for the webmaster relations initiatives:
- Start showing accurate link counts again
- Make API results accurate and increase daily queries allowed to 5,000
- Possibly set up a Yahoo! style Site Explorer
- Show penalties/bans/problems with a site right in the search results for a URL or domain - indicate the issue, and where to find guidelines on how to fix. I'd also probably set up penalization periods (like jail time) for offenses so a guy who keyword stuffed would get 2 weeks before he could apply for re-inclusion, while a guy who hijacked a URL would get 12 months.
- Clone MC (probably need at least 6 of that guy) and dispatch them around the SEO/webdev world to get feedback
- Give straight answers about the algo - I honestly don't see it hurting to say "we don't consider Wikipedia links valuable, even though they're not nofollowed" or to issue statements like "No. The DMOZ does not provide more value than any other link of its caliber."
- Offer a Google webmaster toolbar that allowed for direct reporting of certain situations like "you missed a 301 here" or "this content is AdSense spam" or even "this duplicate content isn't the original"
Obviously, not all my ideas are 100% serious, and I'm not going to be swapping day jobs anytime soon, but it's fun to imagine. So... What would you do if put in charge of search at Google?
Nice post, randfish. There's a lot of good meat there. Mind if I pass it around inside Google? :)
Thanks, Matt - it's all yours. Feel free to use as best you can. Have a good vacation, too!
If I were the head of google search for the day, I would probably just make myself really rich.
but hey, we can't all be white hat.
I'm making t-shirts that say "Randfish for President!"
Seriously good, valuable advice for both the googler and the (I'm-not-a-) spammer. If it were me, I'd put the design and ad placements at the top of my list to improve the user experience. Ask.com commercial said "Just because google is more popular doesn't mean it's better" or something like that. I'd have to agree.
Only other thing I'd add to the list is to go completely corporate and offer class-based (and not monthly spend based) certification exams, a la Microsoft, for the different programs of google. I could see classes for API, Adwords, Appliance admin, Best Practices Webmaster/SEO, navigation and crawlability, how to effectively spam, err use, Google Base. A course taught by Google or a Google licensed center for Google programs would be invaluable to many professionals. Microsoft does it, Cisco does it, Oracle does it, Novell did it, Redhat does it, etc. etc.
(btw - I know Bruce Clay and Jim Boykin and others offer different certifications and I think thats a great start for the industry.)
Yes, coffee did just come out of my nose :) Roadies, you owe me a keyboard~!
Should that site owner be pubically insulted.....;Keyword Stuffing is perfectly acceptable, what right does any search engine have to tell a Website owner how many times keyword can be repeated on a page.
The practical way to resolove this would be to set a limit per page of how may times a repeated keyword could affect the Algos - percentage wise.
So if a site has 500 words - perhaps after a certain percentage of repeats - it would NO longer effect the algoritms.
BUT DO NOT DEPRIEVE THE PUBLIC FROM GETTING ACCESS TO VALID INFO via GOOGLE - Because tactics are disapproved of. Just decide how that page should NOT RANK for those search terms.
And of course, the term SPAM is so overused that it is now as an ambiquous term as any could possibly be.
What some may consider Spam, may be valid information to others except of course in egregious cases.
Search Engines that repeatedly place two, three of four sponsor links above the Organic SERPs, have absolutely no credibility with a holier than thou attitude.
It is so-o sad that Search Engines Web is not in charge of Google. It would become PERFECT in a matter of months!!
Brilliant post, all around. With the exception of Matt and GG, it seems that Google makes it very difficult for various web experts to give feedback...and a discussion group allowing uninformed amateurs to speculate on answers for other uninformed amateurs is NOT the solution!
Poor Matt gets hammered with every kind of question from every level of webmaster...punishment for being one of the 2 out of 10,000 or so Google employees brave enough to allow the outside world to talk to them!
Michael.
Great Post!
Can you do a second one about being in charge of the advertising programs for a day?
Well said! The only good not showing all backlinks does is make people use Yahoo instead.
I'd also like to add another point to the list and that's the dreaded: "Cancel AdSense account that run spam sites". It would help stop so much spam it's silly.
I would support you being there for many more days than one, Rand. You have some great initiatives there. It's all part of being customer-centric rather than product-driven as Google is. It's also acknowledging that webmasters are customers too. There have been some cracks in that authoritative almost-godlike facade. However there's a long way to go.
Despite giving MC a hard time you really do have to hand it to him, and a lot of other folks at the plex. Around the IPO there were some dark days of communication. I see a lot more open discussions from Matt, and some of the other Google folks monitoring the blogs and forums.
I'd love for them to start an "ask a googler" blog or some other such site. Have some experts in the field submit a handful of questions about an area every week and publish the answers, it would be a really nice webmaster resource. You could field open questions, but there's the is this a single site issue or an representative of some section of the web as a whole problem to contend with. What would also be fun is a google integration case study. Similar to the adsense profiles but more in depth. How is this person using one of Google's tools to solve a problem, what steps did they take to implement it, what were the end results, and how can I use this to make my sites better.
Agreed, Michael - he's made a huge difference for them and their PR profile industry wide.
I liked the jail time idea Rand, with a link to specific guidelines (even to that SEO Beginners guide) -- that would probably clear up a significant amount of support e-mails; plus, it would make some of us think they are less arrogant and more helpful.
Good suggestions, especially the one about accurate link counts. Personally, I would cut ties with ebay. No more worthless ebay links in the results and no more ridiculous ads like this:
Peace Of Mind Looking for Peace Of Mind? Find exactly what you want today. www.eBay.com
My observation about the DP coop is that Google are tackling it by reducing the number of indexed pages on sites that show the adverts. There is discussion over here.
Also in Matts post yesterday he said: Linking to a free ringtones site, an SEO contest, and an Omega 3 fish oil site? I think I’ve found your problem. I’d think about the quality of your links if you’d prefer to have more pages crawled.
What better way to link to poor sites than to run the coop? Probably 50% of the entire adverts have been for seo contests over the last month.