Kind of like Jaan. You know how when you do a Google search, you might want to be at the top of the page. I write about that.

I've been curious if the update might hit news blogs like the Huffington Post or even our own Search Engine Land blog. We have original content, but we also summarize stories that are written by others.

Personally, I never want to outrank an original source that we might simply be summarizing. We do that to help spread the news, but I'm not expecting it to generate much search traffic. If we win in search, I want that to be with our original content or when we add substantial value.

To see if we were hit, I went into Google Analytics, then to Traffic Sources, then to Search Engines and drilled into Google. Any slap should register as a drop in traffic related to keyword searches on Google. I looked from Sunday, Feb. 20 through what data is in today.

We went up a bit on Monday, Feb. 21 from the weekend, as you'd expect during the work week. We went up slightly on Tuesday and stayed at that level through Friday. The change rolled out on Wednesday and was announced Thursday. Details on that in my SEL post:

http://searchengineland.com/google-forecloses-on-content-farms-with-farmer-algorithm-update-66071

So, for us, it seems to have done nothing. No harm, no gain.

That's so tough, I'm going to go with a browser-based one, Quirk SearchStatus. PageRank info, nofollow highlighting and much more.

I'll take a link, any link, regardless if it's nofollow or not. It's a potential visit.

As for whether Google counts nofollow links, I tend to think it does in some cases. I think Google figures out ways on its own to decide if it wants to trust a link. Some links that are "follow" might still get discounted. Some that are "nofollow" might get counted, if Google decides to trust them.

That's my own opinion, pure speculation and I'm pretty sure is 100% opposite of the official Google view.

FYI, here's a good example of where "nofollow" makes no different. Go search for something on Google Realtime search, say "macbook air."

Right now, I get a "Top links" section that lists the official site. Same thing if you search for "samsung galaxy," you get a section like that with two links, one to gameloft.com and one to the LA Times.

Google Realtime search primarily harvest links that are shared on Twitter, where links get nofollow. And yet, Google is counting up all these nofollow links shared on Twitter and calculating which ones are most important, in order to reward them with the Top Links display. So the links in this instance are most definitely being counted -- and my assumption is that the weight of authority of those tweeting them is adding to the ability for the links to do well.

Well, not putting out a full feed is also good advice. Too many people good or bad that that as an invitation to reprint your stuff. Summaries won't stop it, of course, and some believe you'll lose readers or not gain as many -- though I still haven't seen any solid proof of this on the readership front.

There's nothing new, but I thought it was a cute way to remind people of some things to avoid, including cloaking, which I thought was generally well defined.

Jill Whalen pointed out to me another good article that hit Sphinn on this topic last month: Google Power User Tips: SERP URL Parameters. That was from Stephan Spencer over at our Search Engine Land site, and you definitely want to check it out as well, especially for all the explanation he provides. What can I say? I love hacking the URL stories!

Twitter has no reason to die out. Even if people didn't converse, it has turned into a useful "one-way" broadcast mechanism like email or RSS (both of which are also still alive, despite being pronounced dead many times).

Rather than being useless, I think Twitter's almost an essential now. If you don't have a Twitter account, it's like you don't exist in an important world, you lack a telephone number or web address, if you will.

I think it's important that you use Twitter in a way that makes sense for your business, however. Plenty of gurus will tell you that you're doing "Twitter" wrong, but there's no exact right way (though there are behaviors that are generally wrong).

I think Marty's getting a little too excited in his piece, though I agree with the basic concern that the tool has a lot of issues. I moderated the session, and I plan to do my own write-up in the future. But here's some of my take.

First of all, Google hasn't "broken ranks" with "15+ years" of open source search engine tradition in providing keyword data. The first few years, we could hardly get any. When we did, it was largely through Overture. The Google AdWords tool followed suit and continues to be a key resource. Nor did anything in the session come out as a sudden change. While Google's had interface changes, the real issue to me is that under the hood, things are buggy.

A key example was when I did a live search for "easter baskets," and the tool reported back something like 30,000 searches per month worldwide. Worldwide! In the end, the Google rep suggested there's probably a bug there. Similarly, the fact that Facebook didn't list "facebook" itself as the top term, he largely thought it was also another bug.

Key things though, like learning that only terms that are "commercial" in nature are listed -- IE, someone's buy some ads against them -- were a revelation. But that didn't sound new, simply something that had been going on.

The good news, omitted in Marty's write-up, is that Google said they plan to change the tool within a year so that you'll be able to download raw data and for free. Faster would be better, on that front.

Clickfire, one thing you can do now is tweet or like any story. I've been watching that as a sense of how the community feels about the editor picks, in lieu of actual voting. it gives you a proxy you might try.

I especially like this list for grouping the tools into similar categories, putting them into a table and giving overviews. It's not just the usual bulletpoint list.

I read your two paragraph post. We did ask our customers what they wanted, as we've explained many times before. Voting was clearly not want of their top priorities. And our traffic is not down -- after a week, it's the same as it has been.

I'm sorry you miss voting, and I get that, as you appear to be one of the incredibly tiny few who actually voted and for stories that weren't your own. But honestly, voting was like us trying to sell and Edsel car that no one wanted or drove, so we needed a new model.

I'm Getting More Worried about the Effectiveness of Webspam is from Rand Fishkin earlier this year. I didn't agree with all of it, especially some of the reasons that Rand suggests behind his perception that things are worse. But I did agree in general that it feels like quality is down, that you can find crappy content doing well by doing the things Google says you shouldn't do, that will get you penalized.

How The “Focus On First” Helps Hide Google’s Relevancy Problems is my post from September, where I talk about how I'd presenting some of these concerns to Google's search quality team earlier this year. Nine months later, I still had the same concerns -- and could still see stupid techniques still working.

Dear Google...Stop Making Me Look Like a Fool! is from Jill Whalen, one of the most verteran white hatter out there -- and feeling frustrated. Feeling foolish, really, telling people that they should stay white hat in the face of black hat working.

Now all of us -- me, Rand, Jill -- we still think white hat is the way to go. If you're looking for long-term success, a focus on content should carry you through. The bicycle metaphor I once employed years ago should still hold up.

If you think of SEO as a bicycle race, it can be easy for a black hatter to sprint past the white hatter riding a steady pace. But it's hard to maintain that sprint, and you'll fall back and be overtaken.

If you're going the black hat route, you can expect to have to constantly be working to game the algorithm. If you're focused on content, you should do well in the long term, plus you're less likely to be hurt by the speed bumps that Google throws up.

All this is especially so based on the type of site you oversee. Someone with a real business probably is ill advised to follow the tactics of an affiliate marker -- and vice versa.

But still -- having said all this -- I'm kind of with Jill. Google sure doesn't make it easy to preach the white that that you believe in, not when it's easy to find black hat doing well.

Final caveat -- it's not all black hat doing well. These types of arguments that black hat wins have gone on and on and on. What they rarely do is flip things around and talk about how yes, white hat sites win too.

Personally, I think Shannon glosses over the risks much too much, and here's what I commented over there:

Search Engine Watch is fairly white hat, I think. Are you recommending that they should establish a black hat site as well? That pretty much seems to be what you're saying.

Well, why not -- there's no risk, right? Actually, I'm pretty sure a substantial part of the traffic to this site comes from Google. If they employed a secondary black hat site, that's pretty easy to spot, despite what you think. Plenty of people would notice. I sure would.

Gary, I think you need to qualify this much more. It sounds like you're playing in a space where a lead is a lead, and you have no brand that can be identified at the end of the chain. Doesn't matter if you run two, three or more sites. Yep, you'll jump people through hoops to something that converts that isn't easily traced back.

That's a far different thing that anyone with an actual business of their own. I'm not talking big brands. I'm saying anyone with a business they directly operate. If they start running multiple sites, and employing whatever magical black hat tactics that you don't itemize, they stand an excellent chance of being spotted. The big brands will skate on through with a wrist slap. Google can't dump them. The smaller players, they can ask for reconsideration all they want. Google's not going to care.

If those smaller players had been doing well, then doing what you suggest is indeed full of risk.If they're not doing that well already, they might totally buy into the idea that what the hell, they might as well.

I agree, Google ignores plenty of spam and generates a lot of FUD out there. But I also disagree. Plenty of people do just fine with white hat sites, as well -- some have beaten black hat attempts over the years, too. Ironically, in black hat versus white hat, it's nowhere near as black and white as you're making it out to be :)

But I also wonder if there's a trend going on with people feeling like Google's just not keeping up. I'm pondering a piece about this, but my next comment will expand on this more.

Emma, you've always been able to submit your own content, and we welcome that. But we also ask that you submit stuff you think is really exceptional.

Your company apparently believes everything you write deserves to be on the home page of Sphinn, because you submit everything from your blog here, or at least you have. You show no attempt to be selective.

You've done this well before we had voting, and as covered, clearly the people who had been voting on content weren't selecting your material. From what Keri's pointing out, Reddit and Digg don't seem to favor your stuff, either.

My advice to you was from someone with experience in reading content from a lot of sources and trying to decide what's exceptional enough to feature through the editorial sites that I run. By no means was I suggesting that it was an objective measure. It's simply my own filtering process, how I try to figure out what seems to be good stuff versus stuff that's so-so.

Perhaps my system is wrong, and my advice is terrible. But then again, I've overseen successful editorial sites for nearly 15 years now, with substantial readerships that have depended on editorial judgement.

I've taken the time to try and educate you about why, in my opinion, the material on your site might not have been succeeding here, both before and after the voting change. You seem to want to ignore that advice as having no value.

That's fine. But that's not what a mature social media marketer would do. If you're really an expert, and if Sphinn really is important to you (as you suggested it was), then you'd figure out how to craft content that works here, working from the advice you were given.

But that's my take. Again, you're free to do as you please. Best of luck with whatever you decide.

Springboardseo, first -- thanks for your comments. Same for your, Sithburns. And to you, Andy -- it's nice to have you raising points from your perspective.

Springboard, I can see how Jill's comment may have seemed like finger-pointing, but I read it has she further explained -- she's looking at what you're saying (like what others have also said) versus the reality.

Look, who is going to disagree with this statement:

"I like sites where a majority of people have voting to select the best content."

And who is going to agree with this?

"I like sites where a small number of people unilaterally pick what they think is best, regardless of what the majority thinks."

That's how the Sphinn change has been painted. But the reality is that many of the people who said they liked voting simply DID NOT VOTE. And that's of the tiny amount of people here you actually spoke up about the change. Most people who come to the site, about 2,000 or more per day, said nothing.

The most active people here were virtually all people submitting their own content and voting on their own content or content where they had some interest. Not everyone. But that's the bulk of what we saw and were asked to police.

So let rewrite those statements. Who wants to agree with this:

"I like sites where little cliques of people or companies can push whatever they want to being popular, regardless of the quality."

That was the reality. As for the editors, let me rewrite that another way:

"I like sites where a team of knowledgable people go through the "noise" of content that's out there and try to show me some good "signal" that I should pay attention to."

I think that sounds better than the editor system has been painted to be by others.

I'm glad SERPD is there as an option to those who really want to have the voting. As I said over there, perhaps they'll avoid the problems we fought with for three years here, spam and then vote gangs, along with simply declining interest in voting. If so, best for them.

Our experience is that it doesn't work, and so we wanted to try something else here, something we think will be better than what we diligently tried.

Emma, it's not a personal conversation I had with your company. You didn't ask a personal question. You emailed with a business question, asking the admins what was going on with your submissions, concerned that your company was losing traffic.

At virtually the same time, you appear to have come over here and made a comment about the change. Then after that, another person in your company came along and asked me to explain what's quality content, because it's all a "big mystery."

So, I explained it again, for that person as well as for other people in general, who might want to learn from the observations I made. I also clarified that you'd been in touch, had this information already explained to your company and that there was an issue neither of you had mentioned about traffic because that was relevant to the discussion, in my view.

In terms of the traffic you've received, from what I saw in this week's review, it appears that people at your company were submitting your own content. It wasn't just showing up here because someone already in the Sphinn community found your blog and said “Wow, this is so awesome that I’m going to start submitting from it.”

In fact, looking a bit more, I think you submitted the first post from your own company back 41 days ago – and every submit you made since then has been from your own company. Shortly after that, I see two other accounts from others at your company that also have submitted content from your blog, and only content from your blog.

Overall, there appears to be about 50 submissions from people at your own company pushing your own content here. None of those submissions, that I can see, ever hit the home page. None of them, that I can tell, ever gained enough votes from when we had voting to be considered excellent. That suggests that your site wasn’t highly relevant to Sphinn readers. Rather, it suggests they found it lacking quality content.

I offered you advice about what we’re looking for here on Sphinn, as did some other editors. You can accept it, and perhaps increase the odds of being selected. I also think that will increase the odds of your content being seen as outstanding by others. That’s advice being given to you by someone with years of reading through literally thousands of articles submitted to him as an editor. Or, you can decide Sphinn is unfair, has an odd idea of quality and be done with it.

Let's back up a bit, MySEMExpert, because there's some self-interest here that you and Emma aren't declaring.

Emma contacted us earlier today with a concern that two of your submissions this week haven't yet hit the home page and that, as a result, she's seeing a serious drop in traffic to your blog.

OK, that's not the goal of Sphinn, to provide you with traffic. The goal is to provide readers here a collection of interesting, unique or noteworthy stories. We're thrilled that in turn, this means the sites featured get traffic. Honestly, it's really nice to know we can send traffic that way. But it has to be focus on the quality of stories first, not who going to get traffic.

Now, I actually emailed her back, personally, with a long explanation looking at each of the stories in the submissions queue. When you say things are a mystery, either she's not sent that around to your company, or I didn't explain things well, or it's just that you'd really like to push this "mystery" as some type of negative.

Yes, we can't itemize what's going to cause the moderators here to think "ah, great story. we should get that out there." To me, these are things I look for:

• Fresh take on a subject
• Actual news, especially news that isn't already being reported in a variety of other places
• In depth how-to based on actual experience
• A pleasurable reading experience
• Good documentation of what's put out there

Now as to what I told Emma. She asked about two submissions that she put in, and I found that actually, there are currently four from your blog -- because you and another person there have also submitted. So three of you, from the same place, have submitted four items this week. All four items are also the last four items on your blog. So you're submitting eveything.

Even I don't think everything we write at Search Engine Land deserves to be spotlighted on Sphinn, so when everything for your blog is submitted, that suggests that either you think everything you submit is super good or that there's no real attempt to put your very best stuff forward, which is what we ask.

As for what was submitted, from oldest to new:

In Defense Of Google: Submitted before we made the change, only got three votes, so it wasn't going to the home page regardless

8 Reasons Your Business Needs A Facebook Fan Page: As I told Emma, "This is one of those articles I feel like I’ve read over and over again. I’m sure you have, too – and I tend to think people want something fresh and new. On the upside, I agree with the premise. But it sure would have been more compelling backed by some hard data, some first hand information from the author about how they’d used a Facebook fan page. That would be killer over yet another “here’s what a bunch of people do on Facebook” type of thing.

5 Web Design Strategies That Work For Everyone: As I told Emma, "Seems OK skimming it, but it’s not particularly exceptional. Doesn’t mean it won’t make it, but there’s nothing that leaps out and makes me find it a compelling piece, sorry. Personally, I’d have loved a case study or some harder stats. It reads like basic common sense advice, which is fine – but not necessarily something we think should be featured."

Freemium Success Extends Beyond Exceptional PPC & SEO: This seems sort of so-so when I read it. But some of the other moderators might like it better, and maybe it will still make it.

Skimming through your blog, and the number of posts that have numbers in them "10 ways, 7 deadly sins, etc," my assumption is most of what your blogging is made-for-social-media posts. Those, I'm sorry to say, are a dime a dozen these days. Or "A Dozen Way Stories With A Number Of Items Aren't Unique," if I were writing these types of stories.

That's not to say that they don't work, or that they can't be helpful, or that they don't have good content. I just think they don't stand out as much, any more.

I hope that helps a bit in clearing up some of the mystery.

Emma, we've done all that. I can't say it enough. We've encouraged users to vote, we've tweaked our voting algorithm, we've cracked down on votes for stories that seemed poor in nature. It didn't work. It didn't increase voting. All it did was increase hostility toward us from people who submitted and felt they'd been treated unfairly by whatever we did, even when we had people in the Sphinn community asking for it.

So voting is gone. A focus on shining the spotlight on quality content remains.

Yep, saw your comments Andy. Maybe I'll play with that, but I pretty much disagree. The title tag is pretty focused already. First link, there's a good user reason for our first link to be "Home." And for "search engine" in the singular, we have huge amounts of anchor text pointing at us with those words -- huge, and from respected sourced -- but we can't crack that?

Add to this that other terms, you can easily see that gathering up a bunch of links through blog footers, client references etc. makes a difference -- that this is what has helped rank some of those sites, not the overall quality of their content.

That's the core issue to me. Google says do content, and yet you can find things succeeding not because of content but just through gaining links in any old way, which undercuts Google's overall message.

Yep, saw your comments Andy. Maybe I'll play with that, but I pretty much disagree. The title tag is pretty focused already. First link, there's a good user reason for our first link to be "Home." And for "search engine" in the singular, we have huge amounts of anchor text pointing at us with those words -- huge, and from respected sourced -- but we can't crack that?

Add to this that other terms, you can easily see that gathering up a bunch of links through blog footers, client references etc. makes a difference -- that this is what has helped rank some of those sites, not the overall quality of their content.

That's the core issue to me. Google says do content, and yet you can find things succeeding not because of content but just through gaining links in any old way, which undercuts Google's overall message.

Well, I think it's sad a small group of SM gamers destroyed it for the rest.

It's not like we let them. We continually put things in place to prevent that type of skewing. But there simply weren't enough overall votes to ultimately allow things to work.

If you take a place like Digg, you get hundreds of votes coming into a story. It's harder for a small group to game that. Not impossible, but it's harder.

Here, because we didn't actually have much of the membership voting, it was much easier for a small group of people to make anything hot. It wasn't a "community" doing that.

If we actually had a community that was voting, believe me, we'd have renewed our efforts to keep that alive. But the community simply wasn't voting -- nor was what was going hot the "voice" of that community. So we let it go, so we could focus on what the community really seems to want, a nice selection of interesting articles.

And the community can still submit suggestions to us to consider. We love that, and more of our time can be spend on reviewing content than reviewing whether something was vote gamed.

Yeah, I've felt the same way, did a long piece on it at SEL:

http://searchengineland.com/focus-on-first-helps-hide-googles-relevancy-problems-50253

"When poor links like this can produce top rankings, it gets harder and harder to convince people that they should focus on content, that content wins out. I still believe that, by the way. If you’re in it for the long-term, a focus on content is right, in my opinion. But you can see why so many get tempted by the short term gains. They can work."

Miles, the point of removing voiting is pretty much covered here:

http://blog.sphinn.com/20100901-094957.shtml

http://sphinn.com/story/158055

In short, practically no one voted. That left the site open to issues of vote gaming, where a tiny number of people could push anything they wanted to the home page -- which would cause other people to complain about the quality and demand action -- which would cause the moderators to get attacked, sometimes with f-bombs being directed at them, whatever they did or didn't do.

Voting really didn't help build a community to us, nor was it ensuring a great selection of stories. So we've dropped it. Anyone can still submit stories, and collectively, the moderators will decide what they think is worth pushing to the home page. It's not a perfect system, but it's at least as good as what we had, without the negativity.

And for those who really want to vote, the tweet and Facebook buttons allow them to indicate if they agree with the moderator choices.

This is what Perfect Market does, by the way, part owned by Brent's employer, the Tribune Company:

http://searchengineland.com/search-engines-newspapers-perfect-market-46477

I know what Greg answered on that panel; I also know that Matt Cutts is still looking at the situation, in particular with the use of link redirection in the Perfect Market case. It's still on my list to try and and get a clear ruling on this. What Brent describes isn't getting into the link redirection aspect, and that may still indeed be cloaking.

If you're not talking about link redirection, agreed, no issue. Plus, I thought plenty of people were doing this already. There are so many WordPress plug-ins, for example, that do that "Hey I see you came from Google," thing. But yep, it makes sense to remind people that you can indeed do things for visitors from Google, as long as you ensure that Googlebot itself records the same thing.

My worry is that people will forget the latter -- that Googlebot must see the same thing.