Google Webmaster Central Blog

I'm the guy whose site this is all about - iPadInsight.com. I only used that specific search in the forum thread because I discovered that was the single point on which the Adwords reviewer had judged that my site didn't produce original content. I sent back the results of the same search showing that links were either from legit aggregator sites (like alltop.com) linking back to my original review, or from a number of scraper sites that rip my content. Even when the review was overturned for Adwords I was told it would leave a black mark against my site because it had already been marked that way. Great system.

Soon after all that hassle, my site suddenly lost 60% of its traffic. From what I can gather, mine is one of the quality sites that produce original content that has been mistakenly penalized in the Panda / Farmer / Whichever Other updates.

Among the reasons I say my site is a quality site that produces original content, in accordance with this post at the Google Webmaster Central Blog (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html) and with all the logic I can apply to the subject, are:

-- The site contains over 1,700 posts published in the last 15 months. I wrote around 1,550 of them myself. The remainder are written by three other occasional authors, who are colleagues and friends of mine. There's no 'outsourcing' of content creation or anything of that ilk.

-- I spend tons of hours every day researching and…

A couple of things:

1) webtorrent [1] will be used to build the next generation of The Pirate Bay. Media companies will have to realize that suing teens for infringing copyright is not an option, since participating in file sharing is no longer a deliberate act when WebRTC is enabled by default.

2) io.js [2] will heavily influence the future of Node.

3) Angular 2.0 will probably be released at the end of the year [reference?]. People might start establishing an Angular fork (similar to what happened in the Node world).

4) Full stack Google: Angular, Dart and Go.

5) We'll find out if there is a tech bubble [3].

6) One of the following will happen: 1) Developers might tend to use bigger and bigger frameworks, or 2) substack-like extreme modularization (current situation in the npm-world).

7) People will move away from native app development. [4]

8) More frameworks will evolve to "reinvent" the DOM. DOM updates will still be expensive as hell. React was just the beginning.

9) Everything will be a SPA. Now that Google executes JavaScript [5], there is no more reason to render websites on the server. (Unless you're using HN, where 50% of the users are using Lynx).

[1] https://github.com/feross/webtorrent
[2] https://github.com/iojs/io.js
[3] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/17/technology-bubble-uber-snapchat-buzzfeed
[4] Disclaimer: I work for famo.us. These are my own thoughts and might not express the thoughts of the company I'm working for.
[5]…

You raise a good point though, SSL/TLS Certs are trying to deal with two separate problems:

1. Over the wire encryption (which this handles)

2. As a bad, but the best we've got site identification system for stopping phishing mechanism.

Currently, for even the cheapest certs (domain+email validated) - the CAs will reject SSL cert requests for anything that might be a phishing target. Detecting "wellsfargo.com" is pretty easy, where it gets tricky is things like "wellsforgo.com", "wellsfàrgo.com" etc. Which if I'm looking at this right will just sail through with LetsEncrypt.

I suspect we're going to actually end up with two tiers of SSL certs as the browser makers have started to really de-emphasize domain validated certs [1] like this vs the Extended Validation (really expensive) certs, to the point where in most cases now having a domain cert does not know green (and maybe doesn't even show a lock) at all.

As a side note, Google had announced that they were going to start using SSL as a ranking signal [2] (sites with SSL would get a slight bump in rankings), from this perspective the "high" cost of a cert was actually a feature as it made life much more expensive on blackhat SEOs who routinely are setting up hundreds of sites.

1 - Screenshots: https://www.expeditedssl.com/pages/visual-security-browser-ssl-icons-and-design

2 - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html

1) stop "reading up" on SEO on the internet. really. just stop it. now.

80% of everything written about SEO on the internet is bullshit (this means 8 out of the 10 articles you have read reduce your knowledge about SEO (and the web in general))

2) never ever mention the word page rank again. page-rank is thought-cancer (and does not mean what you think it means)

3)
your site is indexed via your IP address http://173.254.8.113/, this site ranks for your obscure long tail search term. make a canonical tag to your main domain. then our site will rank for your obscure long tail search term. to understand canonical tags go to http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ch/2010/09/seo-starter-guide-updated.html download the PDF and read it front to cover.

4)
if you want to understand SEO, read a book http://www.amazon.com/Search-Engine-Marketing-Inc-Companys/dp/0131852922

last but not least: stop worrying and complaining about scrapper sites. they are here to stay. try to make the best shop website around.

and as a side note: with a high probability your blogpost will - from now on - rank for "high quality Bitcoin hat" as it reached the front page of HN (it will get distributed a lot, via scrappers, HN web-app-websites, ...) and the blog post has - compared to your shop start page and your shop page - textual content.

Syndication is an old term that just means running the same article in multiple outlets. For example, George Will's column is syndicated across a ton of different newspapers. The National Board of Realtors syndicates content through hundreds of local publications by providing articles for free.

For SEO purposes it's a little different and not always easy to manage. This is a good article that I've found that talks about some of the practical issues that can pop up: http://smepals.com/small-business-seo/how-content-syndication-can-be-devastating-small-business-seo-and-website-traffic?

Yeah, title is a little negative, but it's still got some useful details on how to manage it intelligently.

Not everyone who will syndicate or scrape your stuff will be willing to follow the rules. A lot of people will not even understand what you're asking them to do, so you'll have to spell it out for them as didactically as possible.

If you can get them to follow the rules, it can be an effective way to 'borrow' the traffic and link equity for a certain page or post.

More on rel=canonical from Google: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html

And a Moz discussion: http://moz.com/community/q/syndication-link-back-vs-rel-canonical

tl;dr: Yes they are indexed separately, and yes it's up to site owner to decide which content may be indexed for Google News -- via proper META tags and robots.txt.

There is an important difference in UI between Google Web Search and Google News: the Web Search presents a very short snippet of text and link, while Google News presents a bit more of the news content. Effectively, Web Search directs viewers straight to the original website, while News lets them just browse Google News, sending less traffic to the original website. [1]

Which means Google News may provide less ad revenue to original website -- probably the crux of the problem here.

To handle that, Google provides two different bots: one with user agent `Googlebot', the other with `Googlebot-News'. If a website wants its content only in Web Search, and not in News, it's supposed to return proper /robots.txt -- and that does the trick. Way quicker and cheaper than any lawsuit!

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/new-user-agent-for-news.html

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[1] but hey, less is more! whoever makes it to the original site via Google News has clearly show elevated interest in the news piece, and thus should be worth more to ad providers.