billmarshall - 6:58 pm on Nov 23, 2005 (gmt 0)

Tigger said

> This is more aimed towards UK webmasters, are you find > the UK only searches very poor? the .com is bad but
> .co.uk is almost laughable

Agreed, I'm seeing sites which only vaguely mention search words, widely separated and often not in the title, outranking by a mile sites which have the full search phrase in their title and which are highly relevant.
You would think the AND had been taken out of the search and that the title and <h> tags no longer mattered.

My own site which for the last year had a number of top 3 positions for some geographically specific search terms and top 6 for similar but more generic terms has dropped out of the top 200 for most of them and wasn't in the indexes at all from the time J started until a few days ago. Sites I've built and which had credits mentioning my site in the footer are coming up way above it. MSN, Yahoo, and All the Web (an old favourite of mine from way back) all show me very high and often number 1 for these terms. I'm not worried about these results for myself as I wasn't getting useful business from them, but I am worried that G is doing the same for many other searches and while most of my SEO customers haven't been badly affected I have no logical answer to anyone who asks why their perfectly ethical site has disappeared.

G need to get this sorted out or they will lose users. I think I'll go back to ATW for my personal searches.