RichTC - 4:36 pm on Jan 19, 2007 (gmt 0)

Andy

I dont think google can be taking into account title tags in some cases, in fact it prefers not to see the keywords in the title on a lot of search requests. So in the example you gave we are seeing more and more of this issue in the serps because the filters are taking out the quality and leaving junk in.

I think Steve B is bang on the money here ref stemming. In the majority of cases i think googles infastructure is poor and it relates far too many words under its stemming control and then hits sites that are deep in the subject matter due to duplicate content or perhaps to much mention of the keyword?.

The chickens will come home in the end because a lot of those sites kicked out that are buying adwords will shortly either go out of business or just wont be able to subsidize the adwords cost as they no longer get free traffic so it will be interesting to see the longer term effects of this - also the serps are less relevent so again users may start looking away from google which was once the authority on search.

To prove the point ive now seen loads of cases where the stemming has caused issues. For example:- You have a widget section with detailed informaion off say 12 pages and you carry an index on each page to the content so users can move to the next page or skip a page or so :-

1. Widgets Item Page
2. How i found a blue Widgetier item
3. The widget item that came by
4. The night of six widgetors items
5. Johns experience with widget items
6. Uk research into widget items online
etc etc you get the drift

In the above example google reads every page, assumes they are all about "widget items" and treats the lot as duplicate content yet the text and content is different on each page. Previously i always thought google would deliver in a search string the page it thought the most relevent to the string - now it doesnt imo - it delivers the weakest page of the site - often you are not now landing on the specific page you want in a lot of cases

In the above example the surfer wants detailed information on "Widget items" yet the serps deliver loads of single page junk, ebay pages, amazon pages about buying widgets and the site thats an authority with a detailed section dedicated to the subject matter is no longer showing.

Thats my take on it - this problem does relate to the rolling out of stemming in some shape or form and it doesnt work, you get some results miles off target