Comments on: The (non)sense of Google’s Reasonable Surfer model

By: Web Design in Maidstone

Web Design in Maidstone — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 15:41:18 +0000

copy and paste is fine if you show that it is a quote and where it comes from… then it strenghtens your message to the world

… nothing is black or white

By: Eduard Blacquière

Eduard Blacquière — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 13:03:09 +0000

@Sean
There indeed are many examples of this behavior..

@Dave
Thanks for dropping by and addressing the issue even better. It’s exactly the (missing) context that gets people talking about the wrong stuff.

I totally agree that Bill does an awesome job and always carefully describes what search engines MIGHT do.

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 12:37:15 +0000

Hiya Edward – thanks for riding along on this one. I often tend to remind peeps of the phrase, “Patent Pending”. It is not unusual to see a company using a technology with the ‘patent pending’ label. I can’t see why search engines would be any different. In fact, I’d imagine they do a ton of (real world?) testing on it before even writing it up for patent submission. This in turn means that anything from 2004 has likely mutated beyond it’s original state long ago.

And context is another issue. Because so many SEO’s tend to regurgitate or worse, embelish, they tend to see each patent in a void. They don’t consider the OTHER patents/methods that may have superseded the one currently being written about. There is no context. On that note, Garrett (French) and I decided, based on that post, to compile the link signals from EVERY major patent I can get my hands on from Google. To put some context into it and show how VAST the concept of disseminating it truly is. It should be an interesting exercise.

And it is rarely the ‘cut and paste’ portion of Bill’s post that get me going. It is the posts which reference some new change (MayDay, Vince etc…) at Google citing one of his/mine posts as the reasoning. It is reckless and ignorant. Even Bill tries his best with things like “may” “might” “could be” etc… that’s the responsible route.

Anyway, thanks for helping me fight the good fight! Always appreciated

By: Sean Carlos

Sean Carlos — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 10:42:42 +0000

Yesterday there were also a lot of tweets seeming to say that Google changed the title length to 70 characters – it has been that for years.

There is also a related phenomenon which I call “Google Says” based on the kids game “Simon Says”. This is where Google makes an announcement and many rush to focus on it as the best thing since sliced white bread. Examples include better flash indexing (but better doesn’t mean good!), the use of rel=”canonical” and the latest info on site speed as a ranking factor. My article on this: http://www.antezeta.com/blog/google-says

By: Eduard Blacquière

Eduard Blacquière — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 10:09:33 +0000

In the same category Google’s recent ‘May Day’ update got a lot of attention from the SEO community as well. Dave Davis does a good job putting this in perspective as well:

View From The Other Side Of The May Day Update