I didn’t write a blog post about it, but I did write something exclusive for my readers on Google Buzz (those few of you out there) as a test case, posting a link from that page to one of the most poorly indexed sites known to the internet, which happens to be owned by Google.

Paydirt

Here is the link to the seo test page I kept on this domain, linked from my top navigation.

This is the post on Google Buzz that has a link to a single page on Vark.com where I answered someone’s question.
If you examined the code on Buzz at the time it was posted it was all funky javascript. Now the link to Vark is clearly visible within the HTML.

Here is the page indexed in Google

Profiles Updated

Google updated their profiles around 3rd March 2011 so this page may have been indexed a while back and I missed a Google Alert. It does however add some credence to the notion that someone giving you a +1 may at the very minimum give you some kind of indexation benefit. Whether that will pass anchor text or other signals remains to be seen from further tests.

Any claims from before March 3rd 2011 of a direct ranking benefit or even indexation benefit from Google Buzz should be questioned.

I can’t even pinpoint within my data as to when this foolish or unfortunate incident occured because well… just look at the data.

That is nigh on 5 years of Google Blogsearch referral data, though because of the long time range it is listed as sampled data. There may be some traffic sources I have missed – variations of url depending on how Google were displaying blogsearch pages, but that is referrals from http://blogsearch.google.com

• In the past when I have checked at various times (though admittedly it has been a while) I had ranked well in blogsearch.
• There have always been so few referrals that I have more or less ignored Blogsearch
• The only blogsearch I have used are for links to me – in the WordPress interface, and occasionally to grab more results than WordPress displays – it has always been unreliable
• Blogsearch picks up links from all kinds of things
  • blogroll links
  • comments
  • if you send a pingback and a blog displays them, it will come up in blogsearch too

Because of all of these factors I had always assumed that the idea of using noindex on a feed of any kind was to prevent that feed appearing in Google’s primary organic results.

A pretty Feedburner feed isn’t a terrible landing page, but it is possble to do better. I have even written about using my feedburner URL when leaving blog comments in the past, as in some ways it immediately signals you want people to subscribe more so than linking to a blog.

Other RSS search engines were indexing my feed content – Technorati, Blogcatalog, Icerocket – my feeds were being read by my readers, picked up by various Twitter robots etc.

And of course my content remained indexed in Google’s primary organic index.

But then a few days ago I was browsing a little and looking for additional sources for a story followon, and noticed I wasn’t listed for previous coverage. I hadn’t been specific in the title that I was related… but there wasn’t a lot of competition.

Then I discovered this:-

My first thought for 5 minutes was somehow for some crazy reason I had become penalized in Google Blogsearch – then I rationalized it in thinking it must be something to do with noindex settings in Feedburner.

You see I had never equated noindex with a blog search engine – every other blog search engine which sent me traffic was still picking up my content and sending me traffic.

Google Indexing RSS Feeds

There is still a very real need for a way to tell Google…

“Hey Google, this is my RSS feed – you can index it for Google Blog Search, but I don’t want it to appear in the organic search results.”

3 years ago Google were saying they were working to remove RSS feeds from organic search.
3 years later feeds from Feedburner are still appearing in organic search results.

http://feeds.feedburner.com all the results seem to have been removed
http://feeds2.feedburner.com there still seems to be plenty of feeds within the search results

Information About & Help With Feedburner Since Google Acquisition

On a scale of 1 to 10 Google Feedburner Support gets a 2 – it is a free service, Google monetize it providing Adsense for feeds, but don’t expect anyone to answer support queries in the Google groups from Feedburner.
Documentation is sparse – hardly updated in the over 3 years since Google bought Feedburner… but then there haven’t been too many visible changes other than adding Adsense. I am sure there have been changes to help with scaling, especially how it eventually was made easier to integrate with Blogspot, but very little for anyone else.

Feedburner Noindex Controls

So this I believe is the culprit

This is the code that gets added to the RSS feed.

<xhtml:meta xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" name="robots" content="noindex" /><meta xmlns="http://pipes.yahoo.com" name="pipes" content="noprocess" />

That data is still not transferred to feed items that are shared within Google Reader or feeds such as tags created there – which can get fed to other places and indexed.

The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing

I have explained my whoopsie, but somewhere in the Googleplex they are a little confused over what they are doing as well.

Blogsearch isn’t the only search for my Blog posts

For instance there is Google Buzz

Now remember – Google is treating the noindex on my RSS feed as being an instruction to not include my content in Google BlogSearch…. so you would expect that instruction to be universal for the RSS content.

Those were taken from the PUBLIC timeline of Buzz. That is content that Google isn’t indexing on Blogsearch due to a noindex in the XML.

I also have my full content being fed into Facebook and being indexed and made searchable within Facebook, but at least that is my choice.

The only way to prevent content being shared and indexed is currently to block Google Reader from accessing feeds. I have been trying for over 4 years to get Google to introduce more publisher controls for sharing… as it would be easy to share private content from Google Reader by mistake… with Pubsubhubbub it can be broadcast by mistake to your 1000s of Buzz subscribers instantly.
This is possibly why Google have never introduced support for http authentication.

With their current stance for sharing freedoms, it doesn’t make sense for them to treat the current xml declarations as an instruction not to index the content in Blogsearch, as the content is in Buzz anyway. It should be treated as just a noindex for the page.
Alternatively they should add support for x-header noindex, then noindex in the XML would be for search engines, and it should travel with each content item, even to Buzz, possibly with no way to share the content.

1. Responding rapidly to situations

Not just with a social media celebrity such as Leo, but with all users with problems. Quite often a user familiar with Buzz will just @message one of the Google Buzz Team if something needs some kind of interaction with an engineer to resolve, but quite often the Google Buzz team members get involved without being prompted.

2. Direct interaction

In many ways it reminds me of Friendfeed who were already in many ways looked on as underdogs compared to Twitter and only gained significant traction when Twitter was down. Just like Friendfeed the creators of Buzz are participating in the conversation and in many cases they are leading the conversation as well.
They are users, and creating a platform they want to use.

3. Scale & Community

Obviously Buzz isn’t yet at the same scale as Twitter – it is quite possible it is at a similar scale to Friendfeed. The funny thing is I saw lots of people writing smart comments in replies to Leo’s anguish such as “What’s Buzz?” as if it is insignificant.
There was also this comment in a post on Cnet

Only a few social-media services truly matter at the scale at which Google likes to operate, and Buzz is clearly not yet one of them.

The thing is Cnet isn’t relevant to Buzz – you will rarely see any Cnet content there. Actually you only see Techcrunch content on Buzz because people share it in a fragmented way, or syndicate tweets of Techcrunch to Buzz. Mashable has a much more focused strategy in place and you will regularly see 100+ comments to a Mashable post on Buzz, and they will often be far more interesting than the comments on the blog itself.

Ultimately with any software platform you don’t attempt to scale until you are ready for it. Buzz may not even remain within Gmail long-term, but I have a feeling it will have significant longevity, because Google are not siting on their hands.

4. Speedy of Implementation

Bugs seem to get fixed rapidly on occasion

Google Buzz Team – @Leo Laporte – Thanks for reporting this issue — and sorry we didn’t get to the bottom of it until today. You helped us uncover a very rare bug that has existed for a while, one that only someone with a ton of followers was likely to uncover.

Here’s what happened: If one of your followers deleted their Google Account (this probably happened around August 6th), Buzz failed to deliver your post to all of your followers. Your post still existed in your Buzz stream, it just wasn’t sent properly to the people who wanted to see it.

We’re in the process of fixing this bug now, and it should be resolved in the next day or two. We’re really sorry that you had this experience and really thankful that you reported it to us so we could fix it.9:00 pm

How dare Google ship a product with bugs – how dare they have bugs even 6 months later?

5. Free As In Open

This was pretty much the ethos of Friendfeed as well, but Google have a very much open approach with Buzz. This comment from DeWitt Clinton to me just typifies the approach.

DeWitt Clinton – @Andy Beard Also, we’re going out of our way to make it easy (and free) for anyone who wants to index or archive Buzz posts and comments to do so. We’re using standard Atom and ActivityStreams and PubSubHubbub — if someone wants to build a search engine around Buzz, just subscribe to the hub and off you go, no contract required:

http://code.google.com/apis/buzz/v1/using_rest.html#firehose

Stayed tuned for more features like this coming soon. This type of decentralized, open approach is central to the core values we have in mind for Buzz.

To be honest I am a little freaked out by the concept of a Google Engineer suggesting I build a search engine on top of their platform APIs and mentioned that a little thater in the conversation thread, but the concept intrigues me.

Update

Good to see that the new features in the search API have now been officially announced. (via Techmeme)

Guess what Leo? It happens on both Buzz & Twitter – Facebook as well. They couldn’t scale and cope with millions of followers & friends without it.

Interactions

So Leo is missing the interactions he used to get when Buzz first started.

I think part of the problems is that everyone has added their Twitter, Friendfeed, refeed of Tweets via Friendfeed, Google Shares, refeed of Google shares from Friendfeed etc. You can also add extra laters and add in your Mybloglog feed of your Friendfeed for good measure.

At the same time most of those people have left Google Buzz – they left their litter behind but they are not there interacting, thus even a online media celebrity such as Leo gets drowned out.
And if he didn’t, he would probably drown out all other conversations like happened with many celebrities early in the life of Buzz.

Google has to get Salmon working with true canonicalization & threading of all these conversations fast – I would also suggest removing share totally, and just using a “like” equivalent for now. Encourage one canonical conversation.
You will still get some fragmentation due to Google Reader – but reader should never have had conversations anyway ;p

Memories

I am old… very old… 4 decades old. (that is just a decade short of half a centuary)

For me remembering things is important.

I am naturally reasonably good at remembering certain kinds of information. I remember conversations I have had on Twitter from a year ago, even 2 or 3 years ago.
Sometimes however the details are a little vague and I want to find them again… and I can’t.

They have disappeared into a black hole and I have no way to retreive them.

I described Twitter as having Alzheimers 6 months ago when I left Twitter

Friends keep on asking when I am coming back – the answer is when I can find my conversations, otherwise they are meaningless to me.

I can probably find syndicated copies of my Tweets on other services, but that isn’t the same as you lose context, plus those services are most likely on life support – who really expects Friendfeed to be around for another 12 months?

Whilst the number of interactions I have on buzz are significantly less, part of the reason is that I don’t push for interaction there.
I have seen friends like Chris Lang absolutely killing it on Buzz – he drives traffic to buzz from his email list, he pulls in experts to conversation by referencing them (which at the same times promotes these people to his audience) and he hasn’t seen a slow down in conversations because Google Buzz is his chosen battle ground or stomping ground and he is leveraging all its possibilities.

Everything you publish on Buzz still exists

You can search on it using is:buzz in Gmail and you will always be able to find it.
Finding conversations other people are having about your content on Buzz isn’t easy, and a huge negative with Buzz is that it takes forever to import an original post.
Often it takes 2-3 hours for a fresh blog post to appear on Buzz as an imported feed – that cripples Buzz.

To hell with whether the content you create is syndicated or not, or whether there were responses. Well responses are nice, but ultimately unless there is a long term record, what you wrote didn’t even happen.

Just like “Pictures or it didn’t happen” at least with Google Buzz the words are recorded.

Imagine in a few years you want to find something you said – on Twitter you won’t be able to because their search sucks, and they block Google with robots.txt – the import of backdated Tweets into Google just doesn’t seem to be happening and it is quite possible the tweets no longer exist.

Would failing to store tweets be the social media equivalent of burning books?

Facebook’s Achilles Heel

Without a doubt it is search – finding conversations on Facebook is just a pointless exercise which is why I can’t understand why it is popular for family interaction. I can understand it for students, but I still reference email exchanges with my family from 5 years ago.
I would never entrust those kinds of exchanges to Facebook.

Just Social Media Magic Roundabout?

People just hop from one platform to another like the seasons – hell I just submitted someone else’s content to Sphinn for the first time in 2 years and have no idea why I did it, other than lots of the people I communicate with daily are still there and the story was actually news (plus it linked to me :) ) – if you are a YouTube search optimization freak you might want to take a look.

Feel free to comment on Buzz as well and Chris has an active conversation with back story here.

I wonder when will be the first time a buzz conversation gets listed on Techmeme.

But I am giving Twitter a chance… 7 days

Last time I decided to leave a community where I was highly active was actually 2 years ago when I left Sphinn over moderation issues – at the time I was in the top 3 users. I haven’t been actively involved there since.
(note: I will be releasing the premium content I was discussing for free sometime in the next few weeks as those I told have had a nice 2 year window to exploit it – I never charged for the info)

2 years ago Sphinn was pretty much my default “misc” feed reader – in some ways Twitter has replaced it – you know… that place you go to read cool stuff you wouldn’t have otherwise seen because you can’t cope with reading everything.

The Final Straw For Twitter

Twitter have been progressively screwing up their SEO for a few years, but sometime early this morning they took it one stage too far.
It was first noted by Jeff Bentley
who is a dodgy search marketer so obviously I trust linking to him a lot more than linking to Twitter where you can’t trust the links.

It was also spotted by Malcolm before I published a few other tweeters – he wasn’t going mad, but I probably am.

What Twitter are saying in this most recent change is that the people I associate with and have regular conversations with on Twitter are not to be trusted, and that all juice should go to their blogroll icons in the sidebar which are the people I most recently followed – really funny with accounts that autofollow people back is that most of the blogroll links on their accounts are to spammers.

There are people I follow purely for competitive intelligence or communication – some of them I would never link to from this blog or would nofollow, but on Twitter it is just too inconvenient to use other methods.

I realise Twitter content when syndicated can result in followed links, after all I have been pimping my Tweetglide blog (which has 6x as many tweets indexed in Google as my Twitter account) and if I was to feed tweets to my account on Google Buzz, they would be clean links there as well (though maybe they don’t pass juice)

I also realise now content is being piped directly to Google from Twitter, that whether it has nofollows in public might not have any negative effect on the ranking benefit of any links to content, because Google is gaining clean data.

However I find Twitter favouring the links in the sidebar over the links to people I talk to insulting.

The thing is now Twitter are giving data to Google, Google have no interest at all in crawling Twitter in a traditional manner.

A cache date of over 10 days ago for a PR6 site is quite frankly laughable.
You can see very clearly that in that screenshot the links between people I am talking to don’t have a nofollow.

Every time I look at the Twitter website all the nofollow links make me want to vomit.

Deletion?

I have thought about it for the last 8 hours and it is the only viable solution – if I maintain the account then people will use it to contact me, it is prominently in the SERPs and I have close to 8000 organic followers (I never autofollowed, offered incentives etc)
I will probably leave the account live, but I will delete all the people I am following and all the tweets and then post something generic pointing people to appropriate pages such as my contact page.

All Or Nothing Twitter

If Twitter want to nofollow, it should be all the links or none of them – yes all those “blogroll” links and links to lists need to be nofollowed as well. They could go all the way and nofollow everything with nofollow in the header, but that would be extreme.

The alternative is to remove nofollow completely and let Google sort it out by themselves… they are good at that.

2 very simple acceptable options

Most likely you may want to follow me on Google Buzz, as I expect my Twtter account to become an empty corpse in 7 days

Twitter Nofollow conversation on Buzz

Testing

Here is a link to a public Buzz indexing test I am running – I have others running in private