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The Supplemental Index is enough to drive any webmaster nuts, even one who was partially sane when she started. And now Google’s own webmasters needs to figure their way out of Supplemental Hell. A view from the Google site command shows Google having a huge number of supplementals. This belies much of what has been said by Google about the index.

You’ll notice that Google even has a number of “session ids” in their URIs. I wonder if the webmaster over there will be in trouble today if the search rankings plummet?

One thing I learned from blogging, is if you mention a person’s name, they come’a'running. I’ve seen this over and over again. It’s not a surprise, people use Google Alerts or something similar to scan for mentions of their names, so any post you make will be found by the curious. Well Emilio Estevez used to Google his name, but no more.

In his more masochistic moments, Estevez admits that he types his name into Google. “It’s a cruel world out there. I’ve been at the unpleasant end of that poisoned pen. When journalists think that actors don’t read what is written about them, they are mistaken. I would put my name in a Google site and see what came up and often it was very hurtful. Hollywood is guilty of turning out shit. I’ve turned it out myself, but what the journalists don’t do is to take a moment to think that maybe this actor has got a family and he has got to feed them.”

Sort of a sad viewpoint, really. We should understand that sometimes Emilio Estevez has to put out “shit” because he has to “Feed his family”. Poor guy.

But this just goes to show you that even celebrities read blogs, and they cry.

The saying a sucker is born every minute definitely applies on the internet. This time “savvy internet marketers” got caught with their pants down. According to Google MouthPiece Matt Cutts during an interview with John Battelle, paid links are almost always devalued. But I don’t get the impression that the process is done automatically, at all.

I’ve said this before in a few places, but I’m happy to clarify. Google does consider it a violation of our quality guidelines to sell links that affect search engines. If someone wanted to sell links purely for visitors, there are a myriad number of ways to do it that don’t affect search engines. You could have paid links do an internal redirect, and then block that redirecting page in robots.txt. You could add the rel=”nofollow” attribute to a link, which tells search engines that you can’t or don’t want to vouch for the destination of a link. The W3C decided to add a “INDEX, NOFOLLOW” meta tag to their sponsor page, which has the benefits that the sponsor page can show up in search engines and that users receive nice static links that they can click on, but search engines are not affected by the outlinks on that page. All of these approaches are perfectly fine ways to sell links, and are within our quality guidelines.

Too bad for the 146 Major Supporters of the W3C. Such luminary firms as “Wedding Favors”. LOL.

So I’m fascinated by these people who purchased text links for $1,000 (or more each), and now have absolutely no benefit from it. Obviously “Wedding Favors” was looking to rank for the term. Doing a search for the term in Google (as well as Yahoo and MSN) doesn’t show them in the Top 10 at all. Was the $1,000 spent an effective link buy? Heck no.

They could have spent $1,000 much more effectively, and not gone after the type of link they bought. First off, 146 “Major Supporters” means you’re getting 1/146th share from the link popularity. That’s too many links on one page for that kind of payment. Oh well, I guess they can live and learn. And talk about mixed signals from Google. On one hand they “can stop a page from passing PR”, and on the other they need the webmaster to flag the links as “paid”. Sounds like a highly ineffective method.

You can read the whole interview with Cutts. In it, he basically admits that Google can’t fight spam with algos and needs to add human intervention. We shall see.

How long does it take to remove pages from Google’s cache?

I added the meta tags to do so, as described in this post about eliminating your pages from Google’s cache, and am starting to see results already, less than 5 days later.

As Google re-indexes the pages, it drops the Cached copy. This doesn’t affect the current snippet at all. So basically it’s just a matter of time until all or your pages are dropped from the cache. The time will primarily relate to the amount of incoming backlinks your website has, and the amount of your PR. Give it a month or so on an unpopular website.

I haven’t seen any changes in the rankings of the pages I’ve eliminated from the cache. I’ll keep my eye on it and report back with any details I have.

Google keeps a cache of every web page you make. The cache copy is basically a copy of your content, as it appeared on a certain day in time. This “snapshot” can remain active for quite some time, perhaps even indefinitely. For many websites this might not be a big issue. But for other websites, you may not want to allow Google to have this copy.

Possible reasons for having Google exclude your web pages from their cache:

1) Potential legal reasons – storing information you may want changed later can be a big problem. You probably can’t sue Google either, as the cache has been found to be fair use.
2) You receive no financial or implied benefit from keeping the pages in there.
3) Phantom pages live on, long after being changed or removed

So, if you decide to exclude Google from cacheing your website, what measure can you take?

It’s quite easy, actually. Add the following code between your “head” tags at the top of your HTML documents.

<meta name="robots" content="noarchive">

The change won’t be instant. It make take several weeks for Google to find your new instructions and honor them. I’ve began experimenting with this on several websites, and will report my results when I have some. If there’s no negative consequences from removing the first few, I’ll take all my sites out. I really dislike the idea of Google’s “permanent record”.

For background information on the Google Cache:

• Google Cache raises copyright concerns
• Google’s explanation of Google Cache

The legal issues are at least worth glancing over, especially for newbie webmasters.

Google does something that I really hate. They base way to much of their algo on unknown historical data, and once they get info about your website screwed up, you’re screwed. They don’t seem to ever get over Supplemental pages, they just hang onto them forever. I’ve known people who handled death and divorce better than the way Google handles a 301 or 404.

Google, LET IT GO, man. When a webmaster deletes a page, just move on. Maybe the page sucked. Maybe the webmaster was high on crack on when he wrote it, and doesn’t want it there. But for whatever reason, why can’t Google just safely assume a webmaster knows the pages on their website are not there?

Whoever the genius is that thought of the “Supplemental Index” is one of those people thought of as a pack rat. He’d rather store all the info then throw any of it away. I mean why not, he figured. Storage space is getting cheaper all the time so it’s easier and cheaper to store info all the time. But why place so much EMPHASIS on old data?

That’s where I think Google has really gone wrong. They’re unforgiving of old mistakes and overly willing to “trust” domains that could easily abuse them. Their current method of crawling and ranking is really crappy, IMHO.

What do you think of Google these days?

Google has been into the idea of making web applications that operate like an O/S for awhile. And it’s hard to argue with the logic. They can pick up new customers and hurt Microsoft in the process. That’s they type of one two punch that any company will like. Google has done this before, but this time they aim squarely at software.

The online search leader said it has created a software platform to run basic business activities — based on programs it already offers separately. The move marks a stepped up challenge to rival Microsoft Corp. as the software giant prepares to upgrade its Windows and Office franchises.

The move follows their basic plan of giving away the software free so they can make it up on advertising. Since Microsoft would also be hurt by the move, Google could kill two birds with two stones.

The current bundles apps are already running. The whole Google Apps for your Domain. It’s typical of the latest Google product releases. It is free, but there is a premium addition would allow you to remove ads. It’s a bit confusing at first glance.

I’m less than impressed with Google, as always, but maybe this time will be different.

I’m not a real big checker of Google Data Centers, but there are changes afoot concerning backlinks. Check out 64.233.187.104 to see the new backlinks.

This is a typical strange backlink update from our friends at Google. These links are a “random sample” of the links you have, so it’s very tough to see which links are counted, and why. It’s typical Google paranoia, but that’s what made them number one, so they won’t be changing it soon.

I also see ranking changes on those data centers, so big changes are probably heading our way shortly. Run for your lives

One thing you have to hand to Google: they really are imperious in their actions. They know they rule the online world, and they never seem to stop for a second and listen to anyone’s concerns. The growing concern over click-fraud won’t be an issue that can be laughed off, and it won’t just disappear overnight. Yet Google, really doesn’t think they have a problem with click-fraud, after all. They aren’t concerned by what I consider to be a very alarming statistic:

According to a report in June by Outsell Inc., 27 percent of advertisers surveyed said they had reduced online ad spending because they could not be sure that the clicks were from authentic users

I’m well aware why they did it. I also cancelled my spending with Adwords in the past over the same concerns. It’s easy to be concerned. It doesn’t take much high tech effort to do click-fraud. In fact a large family and a few family members or friends would be enough. But there’s people well beyond that activity, preferring to built click botnets with infected computers. Picture an army of zombies clicking around the clock, sucking your bank account dry. Suddenly, the rosy picture of online spending that Google has been painting isn’t quite so pretty.

Google is fighting back, aiming words of disagreement at the accusers:

The reports “have led to vastly inflated estimates” of the problem, said Shuman Ghosemajumder, Google’s product manager of trust and safety. “We saw media reports and data from consultants submitted by advertisers and it didn’t make any sense. This report details the flaws and explains the discrepancy. We want to help consulting firms.”

But one part Google needs to understand fast: it’s people’s perception of the problem that matters most. Whether the reports are inflated on not, people now think of Google as having the issue. Personally, I’ve been feeling the crunch in the last 45 days as advertisers “appear” to be pulling some support from the program. Add to this uncertainty the fact that Google has also been releasing a great number of experimental advertising products, and you have to wonder how close the end really is.

As a customer of Google’s, I was completely underwhelmed with their customer service. Paying them was a sterile procedure, and I’m sure it only makes sense to people to continue to pay as long as they get results. But these people also need assurances that the problem of click fraud is not being ignored.

Time will tell just how big this issue gets, but I think it looms extremely large right now.

That’s exactly what the gang at the Adsense Blogspot have done. Make sure that your ads are in the hot zone. As the post quite rightly points out, the closer the ads are to the hot zone, the more likely they are to be clicked, which is what will increase your income.

The most general tip I can give is that an ad placed above the fold is “hot,” and one placed below the fold is “cold.” I’m not sure if that rhyme at the end will help you remember this, but I sure hope that it does. Beyond that, you need to start thinking about your site design in order to create the “hottest” ad placement.

They also included a link to their heat map, which, if you haven’t seen it already, is a must.

Basically get the surfer to see the ad. Especially important is placement above the fold. If the surfer is leaving your site anyway, why not get him to click on an ad? Might as well make a quid or two off the cheeky fella.