protozoider - 6:53 pm on Jul 7, 2004 (gmt 0)

My problem is that I have worked very hard and done a lot of research to understand how it all works. The site is completely relevant to the search terms we center on. Our sites have only links related to ours and they all have a good rating. My only question is if Google runs off hits as well. Some of the sites above ours have little to do with the same products but have a description that would throw you off and think it is what you're looking for. I know Google wasn't intended to be free advertising but for those of us who struggle day by day to get the sites up there and keep them there, we more than pay for it with our time. What doesn't make sence to me is that our sites come up first or near first on all the other big search engines but on Google all you get is unrelated junk most of the time. The problem is most people still use Google, otherwise I would stop trying. When you do absolutely everything Google tells you to get good placement and it doesn't work, you can't help but think that they are even wrong. My keywords are in the title, description, keywords, text at the begginning of the page, links, and alt tags. I never over do it either. I've used plenty of SEO programs, none of them worked to get me any higher on Google. It's obvious I'm not the only one with these problems, and Google never gives me a straight answer. Maybe Google is broken, maybe its too big, maybe they don't know what to really concentrate on to index sites. I just know it doesn't work anymore.