AndyA - 8:24 pm on Jan 17, 2007 (gmt 0)

It kind of seems like Google is attempting to turn everyone who has a website into a SEOer. Because if you somehow get caught in this penalty, filter, or whatever it is, you have to learn all about SEO to figure out what to do to get out of it. Ignoring it does not help, it only seems to make it worse.

I guess the days of just building nice looking sites for your visitors, with interesting pages, adequate navigation, descriptive links, and original content are gone. Because the average webmaster is going to make some mistakes, and Google is going to slam them for those mistakes.

I've spent months going back looking at everything that's happened since my site was first impacted in November 2004. And it has never fully recovered from whatever hit it at that time. Yet I see lots of other pages that provide less information than mine rank far above mine.

And during this time, new content is close to non-existent on my site, because I'm spending all my available time trying to figure out what's wrong, and trying to implement a fix. I don't want to be a SEOer. I want to build pages that people can find that will be helpful to them. Yet I cannot do that because I must learn SEO, whether I want to or not, or accept the fact that my site will always be buried in Google.

I do have a following that is devoted to my site, and that makes it somewhat worthwhile, but they have also expressed frustration that they can't find my site in Google. One guy told a friend to Google for a search term on my site. The guy did so, used the exact phrase in the title of the page, the only page on the Internet with that title, and couldn't find it. Out of frustration, he called his friend, who had to go find the URL and give it to him. Both of them were amazed that it wasn't listed in Google. Well, it is: it's at #755 out of 813 results, and I must say that the neighboring URLs that low in the results are definitely "BAD NEIGHBORHOOD". In fact, it's downright embarrassing to be listed among them!

Google is not winning any brownie points with people when things like this happen. I think in some of the niche areas, Google's lack of understanding of the various related search terms, how things meld together, and how seemingly similar things may not be similar at all in the real world, is beginning to show Google's shortcomings.

For instance if you have a site about widgets, with sections for widgets made in 1903, and there are pages for each year, make, model, size, etc., while in an algorhythmic way on the surface 1902, 1904, 1913, even 2003, etc., might seem similar, they are in the real world very, very different. Just the fact that one number changes in a model number can make all the difference in the world. And when you aren't actually SELLING widgets on this particular site, one has to wonder how such a site could be filtered so drastically. Yes, an affiliate link or two is on the site for people to buy widget-related stuff, but most of the content pages have no ads whatsoever on them. 90%+ of the pages on the site have nothing on them that provide income. What the heck is Google filtering?

Google needs to face the fact that not everyone is out to beat them: some of us just want others to be able to find our site when they search for terms our site deals with. I don't have to be #1, but I sure as heck don't feel like I should have to accept being at #755, or #813, or whatever all the time, especially when an eBay auction selling something that ended a week ago is listed above my pages, or when an ad on a national for sale site ranks above mine, and the item has already sold. That isn't relevancy.

So, instead of adding new, original content to my site, here I am futzing with the HTML, afraid to do too much, afraid to do too little, and not at all sure that what I'm doing is fixing the problem in the first place.

I don't think it should be all that hard for Google to determine whether a site is spam or not: if there aren't any ads on 90% of the pages, if there's only one site owned by that person or company, and if the domain is old and paid for years in advance, chances are pretty good that site isn't spamming anyone, including Google. And chances are also quite good that the person who owns that penalized site has no idea they've even done anything wrong. Yet with so little traffic, they don't continue developing the site because they feel no one else is interested in it. So, a site that could have been great stagnates and dies a slow death.

Meanwhile, people are searching Google for terms that that site can address, and they aren't finding it listed. If they go to Yahoo, MSN, Ask Jeeves, Dogpile, etc., they will find it. But only if they look for it there. And with almost half of the search traffic, Google could very well be disappointing a huge percentage of their customers.

In an attempt to deal with spammers, Google has forgotten why people are using Google in the first place: to find relevant sites. Having relevant sites listed at #755 in the SERPs isn't going to help anyone.

(End of rant - sorry, but I'm very frustrated. I just saw a thread on a subscription only online mailing list about how there isn't any information out there about so and so, the person spent 2 hours looking for it on Google over the weekend, and couldn't find anything. Well, it's on my site, the page it's been on has been online since 2001, and for 4 years it was #1. Now it's buried. And I don't know why. That page could have saved the guy a couple of hours, because the info he needed was readily available, and answered his question and solved his problem in under 5 minutes. But that isn't relevancy in Google's world...they'd rather show a bunch of junk to the guy instead, none of it answering his question, none of it solving his problem. Repeat several million times a day, and you get an idea of the user experience for many people.)