Forum Moderators: open
The only place these 2 2-word key phrases are mentioned are in the sites description, and in DMOZ's desription. The words he ranks for cant be found on the site.
I asked over at the resource zone if I could change my description. God only knows what I put in at 2:00 am almost 2 months ago. So I get into a big fiasco over there. They are saying that the description means nothing, I say it does, and show them this site, and show them 2 week old results (www-sj.google.com) where the guy was ranking, and current google results where he is ranking now(with his new DMOZ description).
Im a Messege board guy, I typically love to debate on Computer Hardware technology. These guys said it didnt matter, I proved it did, then they said, they wouldnt alter a description to help a site rank better(admitting that it did indeed help, after saying at first it didnt help).
Any way they are so mad they probably altered my submital, and ill never get listed now...
So my question is: Does the DMOZ desription, in your oppinion help, if there are keywords in there?
Also what is up with the DMOZ it been so slow for months now, server problems ect, you cant even submit a site... You cant even go to resouce.com its dead, and all errored out..
[edited by: Laisha at 1:48 am (utc) on May 7, 2003]
[edit reason] Per the charter. [/edit]
They tell you a listing with DMOZ will influence your PR with Google - but how the hell do you get into DMOZ?
Become an editor? - nah! perish the thought!
So my question is: Does the DMOZ desription, in your oppinion help, if there are keywords in there?
In my opinion, the description you submit is generally of little consequence either way.
While many -- some? -- editors will take your submitted description and craft it to meet guidelines, I think most discard the descriptions and write their own reviews based on their own viewing of the site.
I think of you folow the guidelines TO THE LETTER and don't give them reason to edit your description i.e. keep it
realistic, relevant and to the point - they are less likely to edit it.
But you can never be sure - which editor will be objective or subjective. I am not casting doubt on the editors here - but if you submit a site that competes directly with a site that an editor owns - will he be objective and add your description?
When a key word is typed in google will highlight it, the DMOZ description with the keyword in it is also highlighted. Tells me google is giving it weight.
Since there was no update in the last 2 weeks for the site I am talking about in my first post above, and it did get its DMOZ listing, and the site has not changed at all, in the 2 weeks. I feel without a doubt that DMOZ desription, plus listing have a huge amount of weight.(going from #156 to #31 in a very competetive listing, also #12 to #1, and not having any of the 2keyword phrases on the site)
I also think because of this, it flat out , for a lack of a better word, Sucks. That you have to wait 4 months for some un-godly reason, for a category that only has 70 sites listed, and with out a doubt, only gets 100 at the very most submitals a month. It just sucks. I mean what do they do, 1 a month? 4 months...... Why cant we just pay, like with Yahoo, maybe DMOZ can get some better internet connections in the deal, half the time its down, the other its erroring out...... Take the $300 look at my site, make the decission and give me my listing, so I can carry on with my life. :)
So now you can apologize to the folks on resource-zone who told you the right thing and admit your poppycock "proof" was not true.
(For example, this site has the text "discussion forums on search engine and directory promotion, professional issues" in its description, but searching for that doesn't bring up webmasterworld.com as a result.)
Keywords in the TITLE of a listing do affect Google's relevancy measure, because at the ODP (and most licensees), the title serves as the text of a hyperlink to the page, and Google is well-known to index that (hence the "Google-bombing" game).
This is 100% true. I asked this question over here: [webmasterworld.com...]
I said , basicly, if you carry parts and accessories for a product does it make you an athority, because all of the top dogs on my main key word phrase, have this " We sell widgets, parts and accessories" As their tittles.
And of course over at DMOZ, they are under parts and accessories, I never put the 2 and 2 together, until earlier today, looking at the dmoz listing for my site(rather where it should be) and saw parts and accessories.
Now I know why they do that!
Send me $300 and I will look at your site - for as long as you like!
In the meantime, try this mantra:
"DMOZ is shining and the grass is green!"
Chris.
Description has no impact. This is very easy to see. Simply search for some obscure description text. The site will not show on Google (if the text isn't on the site).
So now you can apologize to the folks on resource-zone who told you the right thing and admit your poppycock "proof" was not true.(For example, this site has the text "discussion forums on search engine and directory promotion, professional issues" in its description, but searching for that doesn't bring up webmasterworld.com as a result.)
You guys know alot more then me, can you explain maybe how this site went where it did, in 2 weeeks with out a update, and no changes to the site, except a dmoz listing, with the exact 2 2-word keyword phrases in the desription?
Im here to learn. Maybe I can learn, eat my words, and benefit from it all at once :)
deanril,
Send me $300 and I will look at your site - for as long as you like!In the meantime, try this mantra:
"DMOZ is shining and the grass is green!"Chris.
LOL!
Thank you for your advice, Ill take it. And try not to be poppycocky, any more :)
I bet it does not have much competiton...
Its actually a tough listing, the guys with the DMOZ listing are doing the best though........ j/k : )
poppycock - It’s a fine-sounding expletive, but hardly heard on anybody’s lips these days, and with a dated feel. It seems eminently English: think of elderly ex-Indian-Army colonels in retirement in Tunbridge Wells exploding in wrath over some supposed mismanagement of the country’s affairs and writing disgusted letters to The Times about it. And most of the citations for it in the big Oxford English Dictionary are from British sources. But, as the OED reminds us, the word is actually American in origin, first turning up there about 1865. The OED is silent on its origin, but most modern dictionaries know well where it comes from: the Dutch word pappekak for soft faeces. The word was presumably taken to the USA by Dutch settlers; the scatological associations were lost when the word moved into the English-language community. The first half of the word is closely related to our pap for infants’ soft food; the second half is essentially the same as the old English cack for excrement; the verb form of this word is older than the noun, and has been recorded as far back as the fifteenth century. So there’s no link with the vulgar meaning of cock. Nor is it linked to the sense of cock for rubbish (as in phrases like that’s a load of old cock), as that’s a shortened form of cock and bull story, which comes from a fable concerning a bull and a cockerel.
The #1 ranker for poppycock has a 4 letter word in his discription. Now I really think this 4 letter word is somehow helping his ranking. Its a long shot, but Im sticking that 4 letter word in my title and description and Im going to just let it ride.........
[edited by: deanril at 3:10 am (utc) on May 7, 2003]
Keep in mind that not a lot of editors are likely to find the world of auto part sales as fascinating as you do. It's tough wading through dozens (or hundreds) of similar-looking sites on a subject you have zero interest in, on your own voluntary time, through tons of spam and crap, just to find the few gems that can be listed. And from the point of view of editalls and metas (who are frequently the ones going in to clear up the waiting sites in a category), your site is essentially one of some x hundred thousand looking for some attention in a directory with almost 4 million listed sites. And most of those x hundred thousand waiting sites are jumping up and down yelling "Me first, me first".
Lol... for the most part in its niche its one of the best, all around, being shopping, we are hundreds less in price across the board compared to our competitors. We actually have information to help customers. Plenty of eye pleasing eye candy. Large pics with low file size because our product is a looks product I have worked hard to make it 56k user friendly.
I checked every site first then built mine, with the mind set to blow them all away, on all these basic values.
But who cares, sit wait. Doesnt matter, it will get picked up sooner or later. The whole waiting thing just kills me.
You must wait for everything with a website, wait for google, wait for an update, wait to stop everfluxing, wait for the dmoz, wait to get deep crawled, wait for your links to get picked up, wait wait wait...
I like Yahoo, pay dont wait, roll the dice if you get a listing. If DMOZ would accept money it would be great get new servers, and better net connections, ect.... right now if you click submit, 1 out otf a 100 times it may go to the next window. Your messege board is contantly messed up, and most of the time, seems to be down..
If you're talking about Resource Zone, it isn't an official part of the ODP and thus any problems it experiences are unrelated to the hardware problems at dmoz.org.
Here's a relevant example: check out "Hymns of the Eastern Church," an e-text I created and published at CCEL. The description I added to the ODP includes the words "historical notes," which do not appear on the first page of that e-text.
So Google for "Hymns of the Eastern Church" "historical notes". You will find that the E-text at CCEL doesn't appear AT ALL in the search results -- all you'll see is copies of the ODP page (which, if clicked on, show the links to that site as well as all other sites about its author, the eccentric scholar and philanthropist Mr. Neale.)
So words in the ODP description don't even get indexed for the URL in that ODP listing....and if they don't get indexed, they can't possibly be fed into the RELEVANCE calculations.
Now, once a page has been found and ranked, Google's DISPLAY engine looks up various stuff including ODP category, ODP listing, and cached page text. It gathers all that together, highlights the search terms, and spits out a nice report. But this is the DISPLAY algorithm, and logically comes AFTER the SEARCH PLACEMENT calculations, and should not be expected to be in a position to affect search placement.
No, I'm not mad still (or even yet). I go through several other phases first: including a spurt of deliberate linguistic obscurity, then a gnomic phase. I haven't even started spitting out epigrams yet.
On this subject I have a kind of unfair advantage: I've built a number of categories on very obscure topics like this -- no commercial interest or website promotion or cloaking or doorway pages or artificial manipulation involved. Then I've come back months later to Google for new pages....and had to scroll through many dozens of results that were just copies of my own prior work.:( The effect of an ODP description on Google results is not something I can forget, much as I'd like to.
Talk about poppycock. Of course the description matters! Just because you can't search for it, doesn't mean that Google algo doesn't account for the keywords that are used in or near inbound anchor text and rank accordingly. Also, description has all sorts of nice tangible impact in that it describes the site's purpose, often the best descriptions would happen to include the most potent keywords for search engines. Editors who won't change a site's description to make it more accurate are pedantic twits. This is something highly dislikable about editor culture. If you phrase the question one way (i.e. better more accurate descriptions) you get a favorable response, but a functionally equivalent question like "please add these keywords to my description" is a call to arms for the Google Gestapo that haunt the ODP.
Sorry, I should perhaps have mentioned that at Google, the ranking is derived from the search, not from post-search analysis of the linking pages, because they, um, don't do post-search analysis of the linking pages. I thought that was generally understood.
You mean that the relevancy of the anchor text for a link that's inbound does not matter at all for Google's sake?
If all the links to my site had the anchor text of <notwidgets> it would be just as effective as the anchor text <widgets> for SERPs on the keyword <widgets>?
I tend to think that is not the case and a quick search of these forums backs me up. Of course, I wasn't responding to your post at all, yet you responded to mine correcting my assumptions, so possibly there is some confusion here?
>You mean that the relevancy of the anchor text for a link that's inbound does not matter at all for Google's sake?
I do not.
The ANCHOR TEXT on links TO a page are indexed "for" that page (with some relevancy factor known only to Google, and probably tweaked periodically anyway).
Text AROUND the anchor text on links TO a page are NOT indexed "for" that page.
The importance of that distinction is that for the ODP and most of its licencees including Google, the website TITLE is in the anchor text, and the website description is NOT.
A search of the Google INDEX (which is the words on pages, not the pages themselves), it returns PAGES (URLs).
Then Google has to display those URLs. The DISPLAY algorithm is evolving, as Google adds more tidbits. But it includes such information as the link, the page title, the page description from the ODP (if that PAGE is in the ODP), the ODP category, and a snippet of text from the Google page cache containing one or more of the search terms. For the sake of speed, whatever information Google displays comes from its own database -- it's not going to read, say, 1000 pages off the internet (or even off its own cache servers) to find relevancy factors or even cool snippets. You should never expect to see ANY snippet in the search results display that would have taken more than one or two Google-database accesses to produce. (Those of you with a programming or database-design mindset will generally be able to get a fairly good idea of Google's basic database design logic, by seeing what snippets they produce.)
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]
I find your explication of the Google method a reasonable one, although I think if the assumptions in the above threads were true Google would deliver more relevant SERPs. Thanks for clarifying.
