Today I came across an interesting interview with Google guru Udi Manber.  Udi is the Vice President for search quality at Google. It is challenging position considering the monetary value associated with search engine ranking. There are two things which caught my attention from the interview,

So let me first tell you about Google. At Google we do not manually change results. For example, 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 made that decision not to put that capability in the algorithm—we have to go and actually change the algorithm. That is, 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. That makes the process slower, but it puts a lot more discipline on us and makes it more unbiased.

So what this means is that Google algorithm is continuously changed to tackle spammers, link exchanges, link sales etc. So if someone is clever enough to circumvent the quality parameters of Google, they fix it in the algorithm rather than specifically penalizing the guy. Of course, in extreme cases the site is taken out from search results!

Yes, I told you we launched our 450 improvements. When we decide to launch something, we have a weekly meeting where all those things come together and we look at all the evaluations and we make decisions—revenues and any effects on ads do not come into those meetings. We don’t even know what the effects are.

This is another interesting aspect. Even though majority of Google revenue comes from advertising, the search algorithm is focused only on search quality. It is hard to believe that search engine enhancements are in no way impacted by Google’s interest in the advertising revenue.

I have been experimenting with Google search algorithm for sometime now. One thing is certain. If you have quality articles which are not too short, they get ranked well even if you don’t have many links! Also there seems to be some algorithm which ranks new good content very high initially. During this initial period the content automatically gets linked by a lot of people who reads it through search results. If the content is not good, it won’t get linked and the ranking drops gradually.

Matt Cutts has written a post showing how quick fresh content is indexed by Google crawler. It is unbelievable that it takes only 10 minutes for the content to appear on the search index!

I wonder what kind of an infrastructure they have for crawling the “entire” internet! This also means that google index is almost as fresh as google blog search or technorati (which uses ping service).

I think text-link-ads will have to find a new business model soon. It appears that Google is taking the issue of paid links very seriously and according to this Matt Cutts article, you can now report paid links appearing on a Webpage!

In another post, Matt Cutts talks about the disclosures required if you are going to place a paid link. Basically provide a machine readable disclosure (rel=nofollow) and a human readable disclosure.

As you can guess from my previous articles, I am a strong advocate of rel=nofollow. As a leader of search engines, Google has the responsibility to clean up the paid link menace in its early stage itself. This is the only way to ensure integrity of search index.

The explosion in online advertising and the huge interest generated by blogs have begun to pollute the search results of google and other search engines. In fact “how to make money online” seems to be the most searched term these days. I am not against “making money online”, infact I am trying to atleast cover my hosting expenses via Adsense! But I think search engines should strive for achieving this simple statement - “Content is the King”.

It is a shame that other search engines doesn’t support rel=nofollow. 

Recently I came across the yesfollow project. This is a campaign against “rel=nofollow” attribute usage in blog comments. I can identify with their sentiments, but I don’t agree with them completely. Anyone who adds value to a blog entry by adding meaningful comments do deserve the credit, but only if his comment is related to the content he has on his own site! (For example, if I have a blog on chess and if I comment on a blog which deals with politics, should I get the link credit? I don’t think so!) 

If you are not clear about this whole issue, I will explain it for you.

Whenever you search on a keyword in Google, the web pages returned are based on the Google page ranking. The pages with highest rank will appear first and hence will get more traffic.

Now how is this pagerank determined? One of the key parameters is how many Websites link to your blog or Website. If many people refer your Website, you will have a better pagerank. This is a cool idea and in most cases will ensure that most relevant pages are displayed for a search keyword.

As blogs started appearing in internet scene, people realized that by commenting to blogs, they can increase their pagerank. So spammers started using automated tools to bombard blogs with comments. Soon it was apparent that some mechanism is required to fight the spammers. Then came the “rel=nofollow” attribute.

When “rel=nofollow” is added to a link, Google and other search engines ignore the link for pageranking. This means that there is no advantage in comment spam since your link is worthless.  Soon all the blogging platforms (Wordpress, Movable Type) etc. started added “rel=nofollow” to all the links in the comments automatically.

But unfortunately, this didn’t help in reducing the spam. Spammers have kept their comment bombing on. Sometimes they do get traffic via clicks on the comments.

I do agree with yesfollow that “rel=nofollow” is yet to have any impact on blog spamming. As a blog owner you need to be watchful of spam and should delete it immediately.

But there is a reason why Google wants us to use “rel=nofollow”. Note that relevance of a Web page to a keyword is determined by pagerank. So if I provide a lot of “meaningful and useful” comments on a lot of blogs, I do get a lot of inbound links. But that doesn’t guarantee that my site is relevant to the comment text or search keyword!

Hence if yesfollow becomes  widely used, the pageranking algorithm will have to be modified. Google will have to identify the blog comments and then discount them in pagerank calculation.

Yesfollow guys, pageranking is not to reward someone, but to find sites which is most relevant for a keyword!