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I am from India.
This is because the keywords you are tracking have seen almost no changes at all. I know since I'm from India too, and in fact I too have a site that is thematically similar to yours (so easy to make out which site you belong to from your user name). But for other keywords and phrases (that you are not monitoring) serps have changed like hell. Or why would you see such a long thread and such chaos?
Someone in this thread said that geeks made Google no 1.
Geeks may be too loyal to their favourite websites, and that loyality may be misplaced.
Webmasters need to be business minded first and geeks second.
We need to start spreading the risk of bad SERPs by supporting search engines and directories other than Google.
I don't have a problem with Google. I've lost and gained so far in this update. But I do feel that it is time that webmasters and WW made a concerted effort to protect the investments they have made in their internet businesses to ensure that those businesses are still around in 1 or 2 years time.
If the energy devoted in this thread was channelled into identifying and supporting alternative sources of traffic, we need not find ourselves in such a serious SERPs limbo in the future.
vbjaeger: whats your competition like thats ranking above you in the *new* SERP's?
3 or 4 of the sites in the top 10 should be there. Many of them fall into the right category, but have not seen updates or had any new content in several years. I am not entirely convinced that all of them are even in business anymore. Only one or two of the sites have more backlinks than our site. As a matter of fact, we have the exact same amount as the *new* #1.
The *new* #1 was the top site about 3 months ago. We had only been in the top 5 for about 40 days. There is a completely non relative site listed in the top 10 as well because it mentions keyword 2, keyword 1, and keyword 3 in the text of the page.
I am holding out hope...new and higher PR and more backlinks. We are still on page 6 as of this morning so I am keeping my fingers crossed that this is not it yet.
The whole entire page is spammed by message boards. Thats right 1 thru 10 is ALL MESSAGE BOARD SPAM.
And the least humorous thing is the main offender thats been doing it for over a year is the only site on the page along with the spam.
He doesnt have even one backlink.
He gets all his power from message boards.
Mean while all the people who work hard are kicked off.
I have sent the findings about one page to GG and I am awaiting to see what happens.
This isn't the only page either. There all over the place.
To those of you that wrote me I will get to you in about 5 minutes with the search terms that are producing these results.
Anyone else wants the search terms sticky me and I will be glad to send them to you.
Anyone that says the update worked and removed spam is dead wrong I have the proof.
Not only that but it was here before Florida and it was bad and it took me a year to get above some of it in some of my states. I finally get there above the spam which was a tremndous victory and this comes out and bam Im gone spam is up 2x.
It would be so easy to stop this with a warning in google guidelines saying we will ban or penalize sites with message boards that are allowing people to do this. And or penalize or ban the people in the spam. Only have to do this a few times and the word would get out.
But I have written to google spam so many times over the year with these results and not once has it been addressed.
I have talked to adwords on the phone their reply is Oh thats not right .."We will forward this to the right department" Umm the door with the Mens sign on it is the wrong department guys.
GG told me the same thing. I am waiting for some results and hoping he comes through for me.
I'm not even griping about where my site is I just want the spam gone and the cheaters taken care of.
It's so blatant that its getting stupid.
GG any progress or updates?
I have more search terms for you but I didn't want to start sending you all this stuff as I am sure you are quite busy.
Throw me a bone will ya? I am losing faith here.
Dan
Dan
Best part? The results are packed with sites that include the ANCHOR (keyword) text to these sites that have disappeared! No penalty on any of the sites from what I can see, PR is strong nothing at all spammy..
C'mon Google.... I'd hate to start using MSN!
What is showing up in line ahead of my squeaky clean and utterly relevant site that Google has loved for so long? .gov and .edu sites that have the keywords somewhere in their page text, but other than that have nothing to do with the subject. Anyone wanting to find "blue widgets" will learn that the state of Nevada will consider blue applications and accept widgets on alternate Tuesdays.
This is relevancy? Madness.
now backlinks increased.
confirmed. on -va I see increase in Backlinks for our site! I think quite recent links are added to this list...
Surely if im looking for blue widgets, id prefer a page with the phrase "blue widgets" actually on it , rather thatn a page that has blue wodgets and green widgets?
The hyphen searches are giving me much more sensible results becuase of this.
Dave.
Let that be a lesson to us all (myself included)
Does that means that anchor text and (or) *newly adopted* anchor text filters have not been factored in for the new version?
Otherwise looks like anchor text has been severely devalued or maybe even penalized?!
What a room for knocking down competitors! Just got to all FFAs you can find and put your competitor's title in the anchor text! Easy - peasy :(((
Are those black hat or white hat tactics, Omnipotent Google Gods?
[edited by: WebmasterFisherman at 1:25 pm (utc) on Nov. 18, 2003]
About industry specific links:
In the real world you do not get a lot of industry specific links linking to your site because your competition just will not do this. Likewise you will not link to another person selling widgets. So a legitimate link would more than likely be from a person in different industry. Changes to favour the industry specific links hurts the merchants. I wonder if this is being done to encourage ad word sales?
[edited by: DocElder at 1:41 pm (utc) on Nov. 18, 2003]
Dave.
Besides a pure eyes-of-God algorithm, the very best algorithm would look highly on quality sites in one niche that look favorably on quality sites in that same niche. When Ted Williams said Tony Gwynn had the best baseball hitting technique he had ever seen, that meant more than a dozen sports talk radio philosophers saying the same thing.
It will always be likely that widget sellers will not very often link much to other widget sellers, but then, those that have the confidence to do it, and those that get the links will very likely be high quality sites.
It would be a good thing for an algorithm to appreciate that.
1) Message board spam
2) 10 keywords spammed at bottom of page all interlinked to 1 page sites.(different domains) Theres like not even a paragraph of content on any f the sites.
3)Same Guy different domain
4)Same Guy diffrent domain
5)Same Guy different Domain
6) Same Guy different domain
7) Message board spam
8) Good Site
9) Good Site
10)Same Guy different domain
Sticky me if you want the search term
Dan
1) This algorithm is a change to improve business for Google.
2) Google revenues comes from advertising sales.
3) Any changes that encourage more advertising are good for Google.
Industry specific links will also help sites that are not merchants like the .gov or .edu sites.
Let's be real and get out of the fairy tale:
If you sold Blue widgets you would not link to any site that sold more Blue widgets than you for less money. This is a fact.
Googles search directory is just an advertising business. I think we forget this sometimes.
[edited by: DocElder at 2:02 pm (utc) on Nov. 18, 2003]
What you describe is what has been a winning combination for several months, and some of that is still in the serps, but algorithm changes to value quality/peer linking and downgrading reams of anchor text links from bogus family "sites" is a seriously positive thing. I'm not saying at this point that is what occurred, but certainly this could possibly be something that was at least attempted.
Hopefully soon the adult and commercial sites will sort themselves out equally well and you can all have a big sigh of relief. (-:
This does not make good long term business sense to me. The only reason Google has the traffic that it has is because of the quality results(until Sat) that it produced. If this change sicks, then I think over a period of time people will use less and less of Google to find what they are looking for. Adwords are the dessert to the main course meal. If the meal sucks then the dessert will not follow.
Just my opionion
Anchor Text:
It appears *at this point in time* that Google used to give more credit than I thought to internal backlinks and anchor text pointing back to the homepage. Now it appears that they give almost none. Reasons-to-believe this include: index pages with high rankings in allinanchor, allinurl but with no corresponding showings in the SERP's. In their effort to curb spam, they turned the dial waaaaaay too far...
Early guess: he/she in here who supposed that leaving the "-" thing untouched was a programming ommission (or decision?) at the Plex hit the nail on the head. Problem is, paired words with and w/o dashes often have different meanings or connotations (e.g., "go-go girl" vs. "go, go girl").
If G applies the same filter to the keyphrases connected by dashes that it applied to the keyphrases not connected by dashes, there will be new collateral damage in a smaller set of very innocent pages...taking the situation from bad to worse. How about just turning the dial back? :-)
I have been #1 for nearly a year (except in may) for a very competitive search term and managed to get #1, #2, #3 positions only 2 months ago.
Now I am looking down on page 2 or page 3. It's totally bizarre to me, the guys above me seem to have gotten there by sheer luck.
Having said all this I am not yet worried! The whole serps look a complete mess, my site seems to be on page 2 and page 3 for the same search term and even when I type in the domain name of my site without the 'www' or '.com'
the site will appear, but it will appear lastly after all my inner pages. Anyone else seeing this?
My only hope is that www-mc seems to be showing results which are more in my favour although I cannot help think that this is old data from at least two weeks ago.
What is the significance of the google labs viewer? The results on there are always different and look quite tastey from where i'm looking.
Finally, that kw1-kw2 thing does nothing for me, if anything it puts me even further down the serps.
I think we just need to wait this one out.
This algorithm is a change to improve business for Google. Their money comes from advertising. Any changes that encourage more advertising are good for them.
Has no one considered the possibility that Google may be trying to improve the quality of its search results?
For what it's worth, I haven't noticed any significant changes for the keywords/keyphrases or the competitors and comparable sites that I monitor. (Note that I'm not just talking about my own site.)
The main difference I've seen is that more directory pages from the ODP and Yahoo are showing up in the top 20 or 30 search results. I'm not sure that's a good thing, but it's no worse (and probably better) than finding boilerplate affiliate pages in those same positions.
I suspect that a lot of the people who are complaining about the latest update are those who have relied too heavily on easily detected SEO techniques. Techniques that aren't inherently suspicious or even "spammy" in themselves, such as optimizing heavily for anchor text, may cause problems when used in combination. For example, it wouldn't be that hard for Google to detect a combination of keyword-optimized anchor text AND a keyword-optimized title AND hyphenated domains with the anchor-text keywords AND high keyword density in the body text--and to give less weight to each of those factors if they exceeded a certain threshold on the same page. This wouldn't be a penalty per se; it would merely be a correction or weighting shift to compensate for what Google regarded as artificial (and excessive) SEO.
