David Naylor

This piece mentions "No manual intervention" and backs that up with some reasons why Google supposedly doesn't have any manual intervention in the ordering of search results.

If that's true, then does that mean the eval.google.com "secret" back-end application supposedly used by teams of moderators to manipulate search results was a fabrication or just not under the principle of "manual intervention"? Or, do activities two years ago not count in the principles shared today?

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/29726.htm
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/01/1532216&tid=217
http://www.searchbistro.com/index.php?/archives/19-Google-Secret-Lab,-Prelude.html
http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/is-eval-google-back-on-track.html

Marissa Meyer is also supposed (and a big stress on /supposed/) to have said that Google has 10,000 people checking search results for relevance:

http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2007/06/26/GoogleScalabilityConferenceTripReportScalingGoogleForEveryUser.aspx

I'm going to have to strongly disagree with at least the "useful" adjective in this statement. I would concur that if the click-through-rate and impression data were accurate or consistent with other data sources that claim to show the same thing (Google Analytics, log file analysis, Google AdWords campaigns) it would be phenomenally valuable.

However, as it stands, my digging suggests that not only are the numbers dramatically different between other sources and GWMT, they're not even consistently different (at times, the multiples of variance can range from 0.5X-3X).

A number of good posts have been written on this by the webmaster/SEO community already:

http://www.distilled.co.uk/blog/seo/new-google-webmaster-tools-keyphrase-data-is-70-useless/

http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/google-webmaster-tools-2.html

..:: Loop Detection?? ::..

Are you supposed to implement your own cycle detection?

If not, how deep is the cycle detection that 80legs offers?

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There are plenty of HoneyTrap[1] OSS projects which will quickly rack up lots of $$$ if the 80legs spider is backlisted.

For those who don't know, these projects create deeply linked pages, and sometimes create infinite cycles. They are trying to hinder spammers, but may hinder 80legs too.

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[1] http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/stopping-bad-robots-with-honeytraps.html

Once upon a time it was possible to get a clean (not rel=nofollow) link from one's Twitter profile: http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/twitter-backlink-tip.html

Presumably for anti-spam reasons, Matt Cutts (of Google, and regular Hacker News commenter) implied in a tweet that Twitter would want to fix this: https://twitter.com/mattcutts/statuses/865610396

I think this implies - in my opinion rightly - that Google want or wanted links on Twitter to have the nofollow attribute set.

I’ve been looking into this to see if it will have any positive/negative affects for my employer. Came across this useful tool for comparing results side-by-side: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=766281

Additional analysis by some well-known SEO’s:

http://www.seobook.com/google-caffeine

http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/google-caffeine-and-seo.html

http://www.vizioninteractive.com/google-caffeine-a-comprehensive-analysis/