But well, all’s not gone. Matt Cutts here tells you a simple formula on how to rank #1. Watch the video and get your SEO guns going ablaze.

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As a justification for this probable move he cited a few reasons :

“What concerns me is the types of things that people are doing with them. They get far off topic, or the fact checking is really poor. The infographic may be neat, but if the information it’s based on is simply wrong, then it’s misleading people.”

He also mentioned, “people don’t always realize what they are linking to when they reprint these infographics. Often the link goes to a completely unrelated site, and one that they don’t mean to endorse.”

So to summarize, three reasons why Google might be discounting infographics links in future are :
Infographics could be far off topic in relation to what the business is dealing with
The fact represented in the infographics is really poor – resulting in misleading info
People don’t realize what they are linking to when they republish an inforgraphics

And for these Google might discount all infographic links. Really ?? Are you kidding me? It is completely ridiculous and it seems Google is increasingly getting the God complex.
Google has always mentioned about creating extraordinary content that people would love to link to and now when people have identified a definitve form of such content they want to discount those links.

Let’s take a more detailed look at the points mentioned above..

1. Off topic Infographics : Yes, this could definitely be  a valid reason to discount the links. If we are dealing with SEO and publish an infographics on the most influential political leaders of the world, there is every reason and justification for Google to devalue any link that the site gets through it and they also have the capability to judge this contextual relevancy of the graphics to the overall theme of the website.
2. Poor Research Data : How is Google going to determine the quality of the research data ? In an infographics all research data are graphically represented and while Google might have really advanced their capability to read and understand image, I don’t believe it is anywhere close to interpreting graphically represented research data. The only option is manual verification – that is not a scalable and feasible process given the volume of infographics published and also, two different reputable sources could have two different value for same data point, what if Google looks at a source other than the one you used for infographics ? Does that make your depreciate the data quality of your infographics ?
   
   
3. People don’t realize what they are linking to why republishing infographics :  Really ? Webmaster’s and content editors are that foolish ? Someone who maintains a good quality website ( because that is already a prerequisite for the link to be valuable) would definitely be wise enough to know and check what they are linking to. For a second, let’s accept that webmasters are foolish enough to link to a website without checking it. In such case whose responsibility is that ? When I am linking to a website from my site in whatever form, it is my responsibility to check what I am linking to, if I am linking to something wrong / irrelevant / unethical that should go against me and not the site I am linking to. So in this case, if at all Google has to take any action they should take it against the re-publishing website and not the site that created the infographics.

I have worked on several infographics for different projects and website and know for sure an infographics with this data or poor graphics would never succeed ( yes, we tried that too and learnt from the mistake).

How infographics get links ?

Let’s look at how infographics get their links. Once you create an infographic, the first thing that you do it is publish on the social media channels and as it starts getting shared, it catches the attention of bloggers who start republishing. Now the prerequisite here is the infographic getting “shared” and that only happens when it is of certain quality and actually provides some interesting/ useful information for the readers. So if the content isn’t of good quality it wont get shared, neither would it get substantial number of links. And when people have endorsed the infographics through social sharing ( and consequentially by linking) – why does Google have a problem with it  ?

Of course there are other ways to get links for infographics, like mailing to bloggers directly, doing press release etc but even there anyone who republishes an infographics would definitely spend a couple of moments to evaluate the quality of it and when Google’s discounting these links seems like a sheer disrespect towards people’s judgement. This is an unbelievable arrogance resulting from Google’s monopoly in the search space.

Is Google Socially Blind ?

Search engines today are increasingly relying on social data and in this case social data could be one of the key indicators of the quality of the infographics. Should we / Do we have to believe that Google doesn’t have access or capability to judge the social response to a page ? and when they see a major positive reaction, isn’t that enough to tell them about the quality of the content ?

The Embed Code Issue 

Google can definitely have some problem with the embed codes that are provided with infographics, as that proactively suggests the link and poses an opportunity for the publishing site to get the same anchor text link. However, with Penguin in place it should not be a tough job for Google to work out the anchor text bit. But if there is no embed code provided there will be a ton of people copying and republishing infographics without crediting the original source – what happens then ? We have seen Google crediting authority websites when they republish some great content that was originally created by some lesser known sites and while most reputed bloggers do provide necessary citation to source, I have encountered two cases where two extremely reputed authority sites have published our infographics without any credits ( they did add a link to us, only after we requested them to mention us as the source). For one of those infograpics Google still ranks that authority site above our site even though the original site has received enough links and social mentions. In this situation, can a business investing in creating a good infographics really afford not to use an embed code ?

I look at providing embed code as an initiative to make the content more linkable. If you are creating a good content that you know people are going to love and link to, what is wrong with making it a little easier for them ?

I can understand if they decide to discount links coming from infographics directories as any one can get a link from those but saying that they might discount links that an infographic receives sounds ridiculous. This is as good as saying that we may devalue the organic links that you have earned by creating some awesome content that loads of people loved, linked to and shared.

This is one of those frustrating moments when I really wish that we had a strong competitor from Google that would make them think twice before contemplating such ridiculous steps.

The post Google May Discount Infographic Links in Future ! Ridiculous. appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

This Google update is going to be the next generation architecture for Google web search and would push multiple dimensions of the search functionality including size of index, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness.

While Matt Cutts have somewhat underplayed the chances of any major change in ranking and defined it as “rearchitecting or rewriting how we index pages” SEO s have already started speculating on the impact of Caffeine update. The blog posts by Matt Cutts and also at Google Webmaster blog seems to echo the same factors – Size, Indexing speed, accuracy”. As a derived conclusion from this I think most SEO s would be able to understand that.

How Caffeine Update Would Affect SEO

a) Size – Apparently means bigger Google index – more competition

b) Indexing Speed – Chances of getting content indexed faster thereby helping with ranking particulalrly for time sensitive content like news, scores etc. Real time search has been the buzz word in the search world recently and I wont be surprised if with this Caffeine update Google takes real time search to the next level.

c) Accuracy -some tweaks to the algo that would focus more on relevancy. To quote Matt Cutts, “Currently, even power users won’t notice much of a difference at all. This update is primarily under the hood: we’re rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure. But some of the search results do change,”

Matt also mentioned that the Caffeine update would be infrastructure wise roughly comparable to Big Daddy Update – so its gonna be a major change but it will be rolled out slowly so regular users wont see much difference, power users might notice a few.

Unlike its prior algo updates, Google this time launched a sandbox environment for testing the Caffeine update at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ however, it seems to be down for maintenance at the moment. Google engineers have been actively seeking top level feedback from users in respect to the differences that they observe in the nature of search results at Google.com and the Caffeine sandbox.

You can check the video below where Mike from WebProNews interviews Matt on Caffeine update.

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What Matt Said about PageRank Sculpting and No-Follow

Earlier No-follow could be used to sculpt PageRank by restricting the flow of PageRank to the no-followed links and the additional PR juice available would flow into the remaining links. However, now no-follow would still prevent PR from moving onto the no-followed pages but would not add additional PR juice to the remaining links, it would evaporate. To illustrate it further look at the highly simplified equations below:

Earlier
PR10 -> 5 Links -> 3 links No-followed -> Remaining 2 links get 5 each

Now
PR10 -> 5 links -> 3 links no-followed -> Remaining 2 links get 2 each
-> Balance 6 for the other 3 links Evaporates

A Concern in the Blogosphere – Losss of PageRank

Sites with too many links (particularly blogs with loads of comments and links in them) might lose PageRank or will have very little PageRank

No Real Concern for Losing PageRank

What Matt said didn’t talk about how a page might lose Page Rank it talked about how the PR is distributed among outgoing links. It has been long stated that PR doesn’t leak. It is just a vote for other sites – when you link to a site you give them some PR power but you don’t lose any of your PR. So if you have thousands of links on your page that would actually reduce your potential to pass PR to other pages but would not affect your own Page Rank.

You can see the original PR formula here . Though I am sure this must have gone through multiple iterations but it would help to understand the basics and confirm the fact that there is no risk of losing your Page Rank by linking to other pages.

So, No-follow doesn’t help PR Sculpting – How does it effects the Web ?

• It becomes more difficult to increase your PageRank now as most pages would get a substantial reduction in their potential to pass PageRank to other pages

• Overall reduction in the tendency to link to other websites as most sites would like to retain their potential to pass PR to fuel their own pages ( through internal navigation). This could actually mean detrimental to the basic principle of WWW.

• Blogosphere gets affected as a substantial part of it involves user generated content and links play a major role in this. So less number of links = less citations, lesser resources

• Old school methods ( pre no-follow era) for PR sculpting like putting links in iframes, Flash, JavaScript links etc would come into play. Google is now rendering basic JavaScript as well, so that might not be a full proof method. Putting not so important links or user generated content area in AJAX would probably add to the list.

• In all likeliness, niche websites would have relatively higher competition – There are authority websites on every industry but in spite of there existence there are various niche websites that survive and do good. This happens not because the authority websites do not have content on those niche segments but because they would often focus more on broader terms that drive more traffic and profit and care less about the niche segments and at times even link to these smaller sites when covering those niche areas. This helps them to retain their focus on the broader terms and maximize profit rather than diluting there effort over a wide variety of keywords. These links to the smaller sites are always no-followed. Now when the sites realize that using a no-follow would not preserve the PR for its own pages and it actually evaporates, they would stop linking to external niche sites and build their own pages on those niches. Because of the website authority, in most cases these niche pages on authority websites would start beating the niche websites in SERP.

I am sure there will be other impacts of this as well; it’s for us to wait and find out. If you can think of any other possible effects of this new Google policy of disabling PageRank Sculpting with no-follow tag please feel free to add in comments.

The post 5 Effects of Google Ignoring Nofollow Based PageRank Sculpting appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

The answer my friend is with Google
The answer is here too.

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Click Image to enlarge

What’s wrong Google ?

Time to think more about Google Algo..

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