CrankyDave

This certainly seems to be the new battle cry. And not just any links, high quality non-reciprocated links. And not just a few of them, lots and lots and lots of them. Don’t want to? Don’t expect your site to be incleded in Google’s index.

You don’t have to go far to hear the disdain of site owners, webmaster and SEO’s who’s pages are dropping like flies in the face of Big Daddy. Is this the way Big Daddy is really supposed to work or is this really about a lack of storage capacity. Is Big Daddy a Dud?

I decided to go and reread about Google Sitemaps this morning. Here’s what Google has to say…

Improve the visibility of your URLs on Google

Google Sitemaps is an easy way for you to submit all your URLs to the Google index and get detailed reports about the visibility of your pages on Google. With Google Sitemaps you can automatically keep us informed of all your web pages, and when you make changes to these pages to help improve your coverage in the Google crawl.

With Google Sitemaps you get:

Better crawl coverage and fresher search results to help people find more of your web pages.

A smarter crawl because you can tell us when a page was last modified or how frequently a page changes.

Detailed reports to learn more about how Google directs traffic to your site and how the Googlebot sees your pages.

Really? Better crawl coverage? A smarter crawl? Improved visibility? I seem to be missing the part where it indicates ONLY if you have enough links of the right kind for your site to be deemed worthy.

I truly see nothing that indicates to me this is about relevancy. All I see and read is about popularity. No more no less. And not just any kind of popularity, popularity among the popular people. Reminds me of politics. It’s not what you know, but who you know.

Dave

On March 16th 2006, Matt Cutts chronicaled the Big Daddy infrastructure roll out at Google. Early results of the crawling/indexing upgrade debuted in January and was completed by the end of March 2006.

Matt characterizes Big Daddy as…

more comprehensive (by far, in my opinion) than the previous crawl/index.

Yet, Big Daddy refuses to index certain sites in their entirety based upon how many and what type of links they have. How is this more comprehensive?

I’m rather frustrated about reading how the Big Daddy timeline and functionality has proceeded as expected, as I watch pages that show up in the regular index one day and the supplemental index the next. Back in the regular index and then back into the supplemental index again. Is this how Big Daddy is supposed to work?

Matt’s synopsis…

CrankyDave, the supplemental results are typically refreshed less often than the main results. If your page is showing up as supplemental one day and then as a regular result the next, the most likely explanation is that your page is near the crawl fringe. When it’s in the main results, we’ll show that url. If we didn’t crawl the url to show in the main results, then you’ll often see an earlier version that we crawled in the supplemental results. Hope that helps explain things. BTW, CrankyDave, your site seems like an example of one of those sites that might have been crawled more before because of link exchanges. I picked five at random and they were all just traded links. Google is less likely to give those links as much weight now. That’s the simple explanation for why we don’t crawl you as deeply, in my opinion.

What exactly does how often a page is crawled have to do with what index it belongs in? What exactly do links to a site have to do with what index a page belongs in?

Matt went on to say…

I picked five links to the domain at random and they were all reciprocal links. My guess is that’s the cause. I mentioned that example because CrankyDave still has an open road ahead of him; he just needs to concentrate more on quality links instead of things like reciprocal links if he wants to get more pages indexed. (Again, in my opinion. I was just doing a quick/dirty check.)

I see. Sites that choose to exchange links with good, relevant sites will be “punished” by having fewer pages indexed.

And in his opening post, Matt refers to a Health Care directory…

- Some one sent in a health care directory domain. It seems like a fine site, and it’s not linking to anything junky. But it only has six links to the entire domain. With that few links, I can believe that out toward the edge of the crawl, we would index fewer pages.

Let’s see, only 6 links so this site gets “punished” too.

Quite frankly, I don’t find this type crawl/index more comprehensive. I consider “penalizing” sites because they have too few links or happen to exchange links with highly relevant sites, by refusing to index all the pages of the site, a serious regression. One link should be enough to get any site crawled and indexed. How you rank them is another matter altogether. Which incidentally, brings up another question. How can you penalize a site for having too few links or reciprocal links and still pass on the ranking advantage of those links? How exactly does this make sense?

By intentionally penalizing in this manner, Google is forcing webmasters and site owners to force linking just to get their site crawled and indexed. This is lunacy.

PhilC over at the SEO Forum has a terrific perspective on this called The Madness of King Google that’s well worth the read.

Google has decided to deprive searchers and site owners by refusing to index good and useful pages based upon the number and kind of links they have. How is this a good thing?

Dave

Far too often I read comments on SEO forums like “use meta keywords to help your Google rankings” or “reciprocal links are dead”. Granted, often these are comments made by a “newbie” trying to be helpful who, after being politely corrected, know better and don’t continue to pass incorrect information.

Sometimes these comments are made by a “self proclaimed SEO” who registered their domain a week or two ago and decided to sell their newfound abilities to the world without a clue as to what it is they’re doing. This is another rant altogether and I invite you to visit Feydakin for his take on the matter.

Finally, and most annoying, is the “professional” SEO who posts such declarations. One such declaration was made in this Thread over at WPW. A “professional” member of the community cried reciprocal link pages “do not work” and that reciprocal links and reciprocal link pages “are dead.” Kinda reminds me of Chicken Little racing around crying “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” Big difference here is Chicken Little is not billed as a “professional sky falling expert”.

Despite repeated requests to provide a single verifiable example indicating that reciprocal links are dead, they produced none. Zero. Not a single solitary example to back their claim. Talk is cheap. If you’re going to talk the talk, you best be prepared to walk the walk. They were not.

There was some real solid information in the discussion that insued. Not about how or why reciprocal links are dead, but how and why they DO work. Anyone considering a reciprocal linking campaign should really take the time to read what DomainDrivers had to say about reciprocal linking in the thread. Some really good insights and solid “Do’s and Don’ts” when it comes to reciprocal link marketing.

So, if you’re going to make such bold claims, you’d better be prepared to back them with solid verifiable examples. If someone comes along who happens to be able to do so to the contrary, don’t be surprised if they tell YOU to “Put Up or Shut Up!”

Dave

You know what I’m talking about. Dandelions. That lovely sea of yellow across the lawn, that turns puffy white ripe with seeds. A gentle breeze is all it takes to spread the noxious seeds aloft to further bastardize your lawn.

Some of us work hard to keep the nasty things out of our yard. BUT some of you simply don’t care. After all it is your yard. You’re welcome to grow the nasty things if you wish. Right?

WRONG! Guess what Captain Green Thumb, you can’t keep the lousy things in only your yard. Obviously, you won’t be happy until the entire neighbor glows in yellow. Not really rocket science going on here. Perhaps you’d rather keep wondering why the neighborhood block party always seems to fall when you’re on vacation. Kill the damn things already!

If any of you are avid gardeners like I am, there’s not too many things that suck the joy out of gardening like having to pull weeds. Gardening shouldn’t be about having to pull weeds. Yes you can go out and buy all sorts of stuff to help. I say… start saving your newspapers.

Cover your rows with 2-3 sheets of newspaper. Be sure and leave an 8″-10″ square around the base of each of your plants uncovered for watering. For larger plants like tomatoes, I’d suggest leaving a larger opening of say 12″-14″. Save up some grass clippings and cover the newspaper with them. Note: It’s really a good idea not to use clippings from areas infested with that nasty yellow flowering weed. The newspapers and clippings will not only keep the weeds from growing, they’ll help keep the moisture in and the soil warm. The following year, simply till them back in soil like compost.

It takes a little extra time to do this when planting, but for the rest of the summer you can enjoy tending to your garden and all of it’s vegetable goodness instead of pulling weeds.

Hope this helps! Now GET OFF MY LAWN!

Dave