Mangler: 1, Mofo: 0

Okay so my previous bout with The Mangler was basically a loss. Here’s what we were trying to achieve:

HTML title: 200 pipes + keyword
SERP title: Some Alternative Title That Does *NOT* Contain the Unique Phrase

…and here’s what happened instead:

HTML title: 200 pipes + keyword
SERP title: keyword – SEO Mofo

In other words, we wanted Google to throw away our HTML title and generate something completely different–something that does *NOT* include our unique phrase–but instead, Google merely threw away the pipe characters and displayed our unique phrase by itself. This gives us some basic insight into how The Mangler mangles, but it’s not the answer we’re looking for.

I’m going to update the title content to something trickier and try again. First, I’m heading over to Google’s help page for a refresher on what it considers to be characteristics of a crappy title…

Okay, according to Google, if you want to minimize your chances of being visited by The Mangler, your title content should follow these basic guidelines:

• Make sure every page on your site has a title specified in the <title> tag.
• Avoid vague descriptors like “Home”.
• Avoid unnecessarily long or verbose titles.
• Avoid keyword stuffing.
• Avoid repeated or boilerplate titles.
• Brand your titles concisely.

New HTML title

With those guidelines in mind, here is how I’ve structured my title for Round 2:

“If Google changes your SERP title, does the original title content still count?”

+ (100 pipes)

+ (the first half of the Gettysburg Address)

+ keyword

+ (the second half of the Gettysburg Address)

+ (100 pipes)

+ (ten occurrences of “- SEO Mofo – Home”)

+ (100 pipes)

Let’s get it on!

Okay, Mangler, touch gloves and let’s dance…

I was reading a discussion thread in the SEO Training Dojo about how Google doesn’t always use the content of a page’s title tag to generate that page’s SERP title. (For those of you who aren’t Dojo members, you can get the gist of it via this article by Dave Harry about how Google changes your page title in search results.)

In the discussion thread, esteemed SEO professional-slash-SEO radio celebrity Terry Van Horne brought up an interesting question, which I’ll paraphrase for you:

If Google changes your SERP title, does the original title’s content still count towards the page’s relevance score?

That’s precisely the question I’ll attempt to answer with this post.

The Setup

I’ve created a post (i.e., the thing you’re currently reading) with a title that is specifically engineered to bother Google. That is, it intentionally tries to trigger Google’s newfangled Title Mangler algorithm, which theoretically generates more-relevant SERP titles when the original title tag content sucks.

For this experiment, the title I’ve chosen contains 200 pipe characters, followed by a unique phrase that currently returns 0 search results in Google. (I know from experience that Google hates pipe-stuffed titles.) The unique phrase is only mentioned in the title; it is not in the page content itself (and let’s keep it that way, ye commenter of little thinkitthroughedness).

The goal here is to see if Google will return this page for search queries that contain the unique phrase–while refusing to display the original title in the SERPs.

I wanna play too!

Itching to verify the results of this experiment for yourself? Of course not, you lazy bitches! But for the 0.01% of you who might be curious…here’s how you can play along:

1. Find the “unique phrase” at the end of this page’s title. If you’re viewing this page in a typical desktop web browser, then the page title is probably displayed at the top of your browser window. If not, you can find it by viewing the HTML source code of this page and looking at the content right before the </title>.
2. Search Google for that phrase (wrapped in quotes).
3. Did Google return this page in the search results?
4. Did Google display a SERP title that’s different from what I used in the title tag?
5. If you answered yes to #3 and #4, then you might conclude that Google does in fact count original title content towards a page’s relevance score, even if the Title Mangler deemed it useless!

Even if that’s true…so what?

If Google refuses to display your ugly, keyword-stuffed title in its SERPs–but it still gives your page credit for having keyword in the title–then the time-consuming task of balancing SEO-friendly and User-friendly just got a helluva lot easier, didn’t it? Think about it…

I could change my home page title to something like:

The Web’s best search engine optimization website offering optimal SEO tips to search engine optimizers opting to optimize their search engine optimisation options.

…and thanks to Google’s title mangler, my SERP listing would show something completely different–probably something like this:

SEO Mofo

Maybe that’s not the best example, but your mileage may vary depending on what alternative title signals you feed to The Mangler. Like what, you ask? Well, I know of at least 3: create a User-friendly DMOZ title, start the page content with a User-friendly heading tag, and/or point links to the page with User-friendly anchor text.

If this exploit works, is the potential benefit worth all the extra effort?

Highly unlikely. But remember: SEO isn’t about ROI, it’s about proving to yourself that you’re smarter than those assholes in Mountain View.

1/27/2012, 17:50 GMT: Okay, my bothersome title is apparently too easy to unfuck, since The Mangler simply hacked off the leading string of pipes and used the unique phrase as the alternative title. This unfortunately prevents us from making any kind of logical conclusion (I’ll explain why in the next post), so I’ll need to rethink my title content and try again. Click the link below to see what happens in Round 2.

SERP Experiment No. 6 »

<h2>Google Snippet Experiment No. 4</h2>

The purpose of this experiment is to see if Google has changed the (server-side) character limits of SERP titles and snippets. I’ve been seeing SERP titles with more than 70 characters (which has historically been the limit), and I suspect the new logic is tied to the overall width of the title’s block element (limit is set at 512px via CSS). The reason width has become more important than character count is because Google’s Instant Preview feature needs that screen real estate set aside for it.

The weird thing about width-based limits is that different browsers render certain text characters at different widths (including spacing between them). For example, look at the difference between how Firefox and Chrome display 100 pipes…

It’s possible that Google completely ignores character counts now and only cares about the rendered width. To test whether or not this is true, I’ve used a title and meta description on this page that consist mostly of pipe characters. I’ve used Chrome to make them as long as possible–without exceeding 512px wide. (Note that in Firefox, they definitely do NOT fit inside 512px, for reasons shown in the image above.) The title of this page is 154 characters long, and the meta description is 478 characters long–but in Google Chrome, they both fit…

↑ Click the pic, yo!

Okay, now let’s see what happens…

booooooo!

Looks like Google deemed my title useless and used the first non-useless heading on the page, with my site name tacked onto the end. Pfffft. I’ll change my h2 tag slightly–to verify that this is indeed what Google is using–but other than that, I’m leaving this post as-is. I’ve realized that the best SEO experiments are ones that I can leave up and anyone can verify the results at any time. The next variation will get its own post. See you then…

UPDATE: Confirmed that Google is using <h2> tag for title. See image below.

SERP Experiment No. 5 »

The Quick Answer:

Title

As many characters† as you can fit into a block element that’s 512px wide and doesn’t exceed 1 line of text.

Snippet/Description

As many characters‡ as you can fit into a block element that’s 512px wide and doesn’t exceed 3 lines of text. (These limits are for normal queries; long queries have higher limits.)

Display URL

70 characters or less and can fit into a block element that’s 512px wide.

† usually ~70 characters or fewer
‡ usually ~156 characters or fewer

The DIY Answer:

Don’t take my word for it; use the bookmarklets below to figure it out for yourself! Just drag each bookmarklet onto your bookmark toolbar (in other words, save these like any other bookmark), adjust your Google search preferences to show 100 results at a time (optional), search for something in Google, and click on one of the bookmarklets (with Google’s SERP still active in your browser).

The Long Answer

It has been awhile since I’ve updated my Google SERP Snippet Optimization Tool, and Google has been constantly redesigning their SERP interface since then, so I figured I’d run some tests and see if the maximum character counts have changed.

To figure out the max values previously, I had manually copied + pasted random SERP content into Excel and rigged up some custom functions/filters to count characters. That’s kind of a pain in the ass, especially since Google changes their interface roughly 87 times per day, so this time I wanted to use a test method that’s easier to update.

I decided that the best solution was a bookmarklet that I could run directly from a Google search result page (and distribute to others, so they can verify results for themselves). I wrote a JavaScript function that traverses the SERP DOM, scrapes the Title content from each listing, counts the characters, measures the width, throws everything into a nice-looking table, and then automatically finds the maximum character count and maximum width (in pixels). Then I modified the bookmarklet to work with snippet content (aka, the meta description content) and the content of the displayed URLs (i.e., the URLs shown in green text).

Find a bug…get a link!

If you find bugs, errors, etc. while using these bookmarklets, then please let me know. As an incentive, I’ll give a big fat juicy backlink to anyone who reports a legitimate bug they found in my bookmarklets.

Known Issues

CSS-generated Ellipses Might Be Hiding Characters

Google’s SERP titles use a CSS property called text-overflow with a value set to ellipsis. This CSS declaration causes some titles to display fewer characters than are actually in the DOM node. In other words, if a title exceeds the 512px maximum width, the overflowing words/characters will be hidden from view in a web browser (i.e., replaced with an ellipsis), but the underlying HTML code will still contain the entire title. Therefore, in some instances, my bookmarklet will show a character count that is higher than the number of characters Users can actually see. (I’ve tried to program the title bookmarklet to highlight these instances (i.e., table rows) with a red-tinted background color, but I haven’t thoroughly tested this yet.)

Quick Answer Was Half-assed

The limits stated in the “Quick Answer” section are not 100% accurate. I’ve seen several anomalies that I have yet to investigate. If you run a bookmarklet and discover a SERP listing with character counts that defy the stated limits, then feel free to leave a comment about it. However, if you want to earn a link, you need to explain why the anomaly occurred. That is, simply identifying a discrepancy isn’t enough.

Google Instant Breaks Jump Links

If you have Google Instant enabled in your search settings, then your search results are probably being served from the URL: , in which case the on-page anchors (i.e., the arrow links in the left column of each table row generated by these bookmarklets) will not work as intended. That is, instead of jumping to that SERP listing, you’ll be taken to the Google home page (more accurately: something that looks like the Google home page). If you want the jump links to function correctly, go to your Google search settings page and toggle the Google Instant predictions option to OFF.

Google Chrome Complains About Inserting Non-secure Scripts Into HTTPS Pages

Github Pages apparently don’t support https requests, so these bookmarklets have to insert the external .js files via normal http requests. Depending on whether or not you’re signed into Google, the SERPs might be https…and if they are, some browsers (e.g., Chrome) are going to be all like WTF. Just ignore it and proceed anyway. I won’t steal your identity and empty your bank account, I promise.

Fork me, report issues, & view the code on Github

You may have noticed that these bookmarklets do not execute the JavaScript code directly. Instead, they insert a script tag, which references external .js files hosted on Github. I did it this way for a number of reasons:

1. Github can serve the files faster and more reliably.
2. I can update the .js files on Github and magically update the functionality of everyone’s bookmarklet.
3. You can use Github to submit bug reports, fork the code, make comments, etc. You won’t…but theoretically you could.
4. Using Github makes me feel smarter and better than you.

1/18/2012, 20:15 GMT: Changed bookmarklets to use document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0] instead of document.head. Thanks to Fabian Salomon for this suggestion.

1/18/2012, 21:25 GMT: Fixed a bug in the snippet character counter that was caused by setting the initial value of the minChar variable too low. Thanks to Stefano Gorgoni, who is a professional SEO and certified Google Analytics expert in Malta, Italy, for reporting this bug.

1/18/2012, 22:50 GMT: Added info to the Known Issues section. Thanks to Alan Bleiweiss, a search marketing professional, author, blogger, industry speaker, sustainable SEO best practices advocate and forensic SEO site auditor, for bringing this to my attention.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I proudly present my entry into the 2nd Annual Bad Ass SEO Guest Blogging Contest:

Using JavaScript to Hide Content: Advanced White Hat SEO?

In the article, I suggest some best practices for hiding text content from Users. Don’t assume it’s black hat SEO until after you’ve seen the working example. It might just be the single greatest example of white hat hidden content the World has ever seen. (It’s so amazing, I even created a new sub-domain for it!)

I’m also working on a follow-up article that exposes a website that is hiding text content in a not-so-white-hat kind of way (TEASER: the perpetrator is a really big company who works with Google). I’ll publish that here on my own blog as soon as it’s ready. Until then, go read my contest article, spread it around, comment on it, retweet it, print it out, fold it into a miniature human, and snuggle with it.

Oh yeah, and I’d like to thank the following people/companies for sponsoring this year’s contest…

With all the patents, research, and academic papers that are attributed to Google/Googlers, especially in the area of natural language processing, you would probably guess that Google is really good at understanding English. I mean, just looking at this list of papers written by Googlers should give you an idea of the relative importance of this topic. Or…just check out this amazing graph I made for the sole purpose of helping you understand said importance.

Considering the fact that Google has been obsessing over natural language for something like 15 years–combined with the fact that they have more query logs, search history, and indexed content than any other organization in the World–you might expect them to ace a test question like:

Please sort the following documents into 3 groups (Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced), depending on their reading level difficulty.

Seems simple enough, right? So I tested Google, using the search query [darren slatten]. According to Google, only 3% of the documents in its index (that are relevant to [darren slatten]) are considered to be “Advanced” reading level material. Curious to see what Google marked as “Advanced,” I clicked to filter out everything else. The results were nothing short of embarrassing (for Google, not me). Here is how the top 10 results looked:

1. scraper site that picked up a post that contained my name
2. a directory of people that contains someone with the first name “Darren” and someone with the last name “Slatten,” but doesn’t mention me specifically anywhere (henceforth written as “a directory of names”)
3. a directory of names (Excel spreadsheet format)
4. a directory of names (Excel spreadsheet format)
5. a directory of names
6. a directory of names
7. a directory of names
8. a directory of names
9. a directory of names (site appears to be Polish or Swedish, judging by the snippet, but I couldn’t get the page to load)
10. a directory of names (site is in Spanish)

If you want to try this test with your own search query, here are the steps (at least until Google changes their entire search UI…probably 5 minutes after I publish this article):

What results did you get? Is it just me or does Google suck?

It has been brought to my attention that a certain Dubai SEO company, nestled amongst the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and just a stone’s throw from Abu Dhabi, Umm al-Quwain, Ajman, Fujairah, Ras al-Khaimah, and Sharjah–all of which contain internet marketing companies offering SEO and related search engine optimisation services–has taken the liberty of copying my prized Meta description content and using it on their own website, without my permission and without proper attribution. This post is my response.

Don’t Hire Thieves to Do Your SEO

Any SEO company–in Dubai or elsewhere–that blatantly steals content from other SEO’s websites…is one that should be avoided at all costs. Website owners in search of “affordable SEO packages and link building services” are more susceptible to being scammed by marketing firms like the one shown above.

Don’t Hire a Liar

Stealing content is nothing new…but in this particular instance, the thieves actually got someone at ZDNet to write a 2-page article about how clever their Meta description is (yes, the one they stole from me). Making matters worse, the guy who stole my content actually had the nerve to stop by ZDNet’s article and start talking about the “other” work he’s done regarding SERP snippets!

Does Your Dubai SEO Speaking English!!?

A subtle warning that this company either doesn’t understand English grammar… or simply lacks confidence in their SEO skills:

Cheap Imports

Here’s my original SERP snippet, followed by a cheap imitation from Dubai:

Advanced Online Reputation Management Warfare

If you made it this far, congratulations. Here’s the method to my madness…

Did you notice that I never mentioned the Dubai SEO company’s actual name? The name is only used in the images’ alt attributes and in the <title> of this article. The reason for doing this is simple: I want to force Google to use this article’s Meta description for the SERP snippet.

Since this article’s Meta description is yet another meaningless sequence of W’s and underscores, Google sees it as a “last resort” option for displaying in the search results. Therefore, if I want my special hand-crafted description to be displayed when someone searches for Majed’s shady SEO company by name, then it can’t appear in the page content–otherwise, Google will show the on-page occurrence of the keyword being searched for. Ultimately I’m trying to rank this page for the company name, using only the title, alt attributes, and the anchor text of all those inbound links you’re about to point at this page. :D

If everything goes as planned, the results of this Google search will include something like this:

One Last Request

If you tweet about this post or link to it, be sure to use the company name in it. And for the love of everything holy…don’t mention it in the comments, unless you want me to hack your website to pieces.

…and by website I mean family.

Updates

Due to a typo in my custom PHP function–the function that said DO NOT put date stamps on the comments of this post–my snippet was date raped. :(

I fixed my code, removed all dates from this post, and within just a couple of hours…Google had recrawled the page and un-raped my snippet. Looks best in Firefox; doesn’t work in IE. Click image below for full size.

In my article, titled Advanced SEO for Affiliate Marketing Links, and the follow-up article, titled Hey, Matt Cutts, I’m using JavaScript to hide links from Google, cool?, I discuss an SEO strategy that some sheep people consider to be gray hat or even black hat SEO. The basic concept involves using JavaScript functions to create links, placing the JavaScript code in an external file, and then blocking googlebot from accessing it, using robots.txt. The end result: only your users can see your JavaScript links; Google sees plain text.

In those articles, I discussed how to use this technique in a way that improves the user experience and prevents the passing of PageRank through paid links (as is required by the Google Webmaster Guidelines). One of the things I heard from the ignorant, self-righteous fucktards naysayers of this technique was that I shouldn’t block googlebot from viewing my JavaScript code, because Google is smart enough to “figure things out” for itself.

Also, in the past I’ve asked Matt Cutts if there’s any reason why I shouldn’t Disallow googlebot from crawling external JavaScript files. In his response, he advises people NOT to block Google and says the cost in bandwidth required to serve JavaScript files to Google is insignificant.

The following example shows that both arguments (Google understands JavaScript and it doesn’t cost you anything) are flawed and confirms my recommendation to Disallow googlebot from reading your JavaScript code (regardless of what the code actually does).

The code example below is from Google Instant Previews Experiment #01 – When is the Screen Captured? It is not from an external .js file–it is defined in the page’s <head> section. In other words, this is one of the few times I let Google see some JavaScript code…and you can see for yourself just how well Google has figured it out.

	function showImage(int) {
		int = ((int < 10) ? "0" + int : int);
		var parentID = "update" + int;
		var updatePs = document.getElementById("updates").getElementsByTagName("p");
		var image = document.createElement('img');
		var imgID = "image" + int;
		var imgURI = "/img/google-instant-preview-" + int + ".png";
		var imgALT = "Google Instant Preview #" + int;

		for (var i = 0; i < updatePs.length; i++) {
			var imgObj = updatePs[i].getElementsByTagName("img");
			if (imgObj[0]!=null){
				imgObj[0].parentNode.removeChild(imgObj[0]);
			}
		}

		image.setAttribute("id", imgID);
		image.setAttribute("class", "preview-image");
		image.setAttribute("src", imgURI);
		image.setAttribute("width", "302");
		image.setAttribute("height", "585");
		document.getElementById(parentID).appendChild(image);
	}

What the script actually does is it allows me to easily update that post by adding images to the rollover, using simple CSS classes/ids. But that doesn’t matter; what matters is that Google has pulled an arbitrary string from the code and is treating it like a link URL.

In other words, Google isn’t curiously testing the string to see if it’s a URL–no, Google is boldly declaring: This is definitely a URL, and I’m definitely counting it as a link, and therefore you definitely have a broken link on this page.

Bottom line: Google sucks at understanding JavaScript, and there’s a real possibility that its reckless misinterpretation of your script will end up causing damage to your website’s rankings, its crawl rate, and/or its depth of indexation.

…Case Letters

Ok, I admit it…I just wanted an excuse to bring back my awesome Google character. But while you’re here, I’ll use this opportunity to bitch about how sloppy Google’s SERPs have become!

In case you haven’t noticed, Google has started really butchering page titles in its SERPs. In the good ol’ days, Google would simply read the content of a page’s title tag and use that as the snippet title. It was virtually guaranteed that whatever you saw in the SERPs was actually coded in the page’s <title>. The occasional exception was if the page was listed in DMOZ, then sometimes Google would use the title from the page’s DMOZ listing.

Recently though, Google’s brilliant engineers have decided that webmasters cannot be trusted to come up with their own page titles. That’s right, sometimes Google’s users see an appealing title in the SERPs, but when they click on that result…the page content is disappointing. (Imagine the outrage!)

Google engineers–instead of admitting that their relevance algorithms BLOW–blame this poor user experience on webmasters’ inability to write accurate titles. The solution? Ignore the real page title, and show a made-up title that Google has algorithmically deemed more-appropriate. Unfortunately, Google fabricates page titles like it handles synonyms: half-retardedly.

This brings us to today’s example of Google suckage. As far as I can tell, the example below is some kind of bug in Google’s automatic snippet generation. As you can see, the page title and content use camel case for WordPress and TweetMeme, but Google has inexplicably changed them to all lowercase in its snippet. I can’t find any other URLs that share this phenomenon. If anyone has an explanation or further examples, please comment.

I’d like to start this article with a public service announcement:

Right now, the single greatest threat to your personal privacy is Google. No matter how many “privacy tools” they create, no matter how much “control” they claim to give their users, and no matter what any of their blog posts, help pages, or policies say…YOU ABSOLUTELY CANNOT TRUST GOOGLE WITH ANY OF YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION.

If you’re still living in a world, where Google puts Users first and everything else follows, then you need to stop for a second and pull your head out of your ass. Google is on a mission to organize the World’s information and make it universally accessible–this includes your personal information. Even if it’s unintentional (like when Google Street View eavesdropped on people using wireless networks, or when Google Buzz put womens lives at risk) or unwilling (like when government officials and law enforcement request private records–sometimes without regard for proper procedure), the fact remains: Google’s mere possession of your personal information is a threat to your privacy and security.

At the end of the day, the only way you can know for sure that Google isn’t misusing your personal information…is if you never gave it to them in the first place. Google would like you to believe that they only collect the information necessary to bring you “better products and services,” but that simply isn’t true; here are two examples of search engines who truly put Users’ privacy first, by refusing to track their search activity in the first place:

DuckDuckGo StartingPage

New Google Profiles Drop Support for Anonymity

Now that my public service announcement is out of the way, I’d like to share some interesting information I found, relating to Google profiles. This is one more example of how Google tries to play the it benefits users card whenever it conveniently draws attention away from the fact that they’re forcing our hand. I’ll just paste the content from Google’s help page and let you draw your own conclusions. Well…except for the missing “be” at the end; I’ll point that one out for you. The rest…you’re on your own.