Adam Lasnik Exclusive SES Interview

For #1800 I have a good one...

So everyone knows I'm in London at SES London 2008. I ran into Adam Lasnik, http://www.lasnik.net/professional/ and Google's Search Quality Team yesterday and was able to pin him down for a few minutes for two (which was actually 4 or 5 - Sorry Adam!)

I asked about companies buying backlinks and how they were identified. I also asked another member (Fili) of the Quality Team earlier in the day.

Adam said that Google identifies these via the reporting tool in your Webmaster Central account. More info can be found here from the other day and thankfully I had. Its a great article.

At this point Adam mentioned a new program gearing up for Webmaster Central Blogspot is coming soon
Basically he said that it makes no difference whether you report it once or 500 times, they receive it once. It's put into a queue and is sorted that way.

They also look at historical trends and major fluctuations. This isn't saying that they automatically flag it, as in the case of a hot topic that draws a sudden traffic surge, but that is passes through a system that I'm guessing 'marks' it for review.

Then I asked if sites that have duplicated pages on separate Google Search extensions like .co.uk and .es (I flubbed and calld it .sp. instead) and Adam said that it wouldn't create a penalty for duplicate content. He asked if I had seen the new article on Webmaster Central regarding the thread about duplicate content caused by URL parameters and that I should keep my eye on the blog because they were coming out with something new for members. So now is a good time to sign up and add it to your RSS feed.

Adam also mentioned that getting a problem search result looked at within the quality control team is easy. While all the Search Quality Team carouses over the related Google Group blogs they often look at many others for one reason or another. I'm guessing they are referring to signature links maybe? Or maybe they meant URL's that are posted. At any rate, I'll be posting there a bit more in the future. Google Groups

Lastly, redirecting excessive URL's with 301's may result in a penalty. I couldn't really get him pinned down on a number, but I'll be doing a little homework on the forums to try and nail an educated guess together. If anyone has hd this type of penalty could you email me here and let me know the details?

Ok its almost 10 and I have a few sessions I want to poke in on and see if I can track down DaveN (Dave Naylor) and Mike Grehan.

Check back soon!

GaryTheScubaGuy

Interesting about the 301's . Is he referring to same domain 301's or 301'ing many domains to 1 domain?

I can see problems if it's many domains to a single domain as you could knock out competitors doing this.

Yep buy 200 expired domains and do a redirect to a competator..... i iamgine all they could really do is stop LJ transfer if excessive redirects are 'flagged' otherwise google bowling would be back with a venegence....

Interesting!

As far as I know and had it confirmed from a few other senior members of this forum that multiple internal 301's don't cause a penalty [at least it didn't used to when I inquired]

Even Rand Fishkin blogged about this last year in his blog.

I have also tried this personally and though I experienced temporary dip in ranks - eventually the pages to which other internal pages were redirected rose higher in the SERPs.

So I guess we need to have some more evidence to believe that having multiple 301 internal redirects can cause a penalty.


Talking about 301 redirecting multiple external sites to a single site or page - well that doesn't hold water either, coz had this been the case then people wouldn't have benefited by redirecting expired domains to their sites and pages and also as Gazzy said, anybody can redirect multiple crappy expired domains to their competitor site/s and get them in trouble.

So I guess we need to get more evidence and inputs from Google to start believing this - also if Gary can get more information on this issue, that might prove useful as well.

Gary your hear this??

I have some info to provide in this regard. My company website is pretty old, and it has over 200 pages having a 301 redirect on them. Total pages on the site are about 300 active. I don't think we've ever been penalized because of the 301s - we are usually on the front page in Google for a niche that is pretty competitive.

I did once get an 301 redirect error message in Google Webmaster - but I think that was caused because I had 301 redirected a page over to another page already having a 301 redirect on it. Doh!

Just back from SES.

Only have a minute as I'm headed out, so to alleviate the confusion, Adam was saying domains not URL's. That was my mistake.

Cheers

We need more clarification! otherwise it looks like Google Bowling is back in town.