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"-" is making the diff these days..or we never bothered to search it earlier like this?
[edited by: wanna_learn at 8:19 pm (utc) on Nov. 17, 2003]
If you ranked for a 2-word keyword, try searching it as "keyword-keyword" rather than "keyword keyword".Results look much like they did before the update....
Same here. I wish we had that back. :(
I'm thinking it might be helpful for those relating info about their lost homepages if they note whether their index page is *gone* or *lower* in the SERP's.
I for one am more worried about index pages that are still there, but lower. The ones that are gone will likely reappear as has been true with previous upheavals...
Worked for me as well
my index page is there - just went from #1 to well below 1000 for my main keyword phrase. i think most of the problems are not that index pages are no longer in the google index, but that they are SIGNIFICANTLY lower in the serps for certain keyword phrases.
I have a site about widgets, organized by type of widget.
I was #1 on many widget searches.
I used to be #1 on xyz widgets. Now I'm not on the first page at all. However, on the second page, my page about abc widgets and my page about 123 widgets are both listed.
The site is database driven and so generally all the pages of the site follow the same format so the chance of one being penalized and another not is remote.
This is on all datacenters except IN.
It appears to me that results with - in between keywords are updated results.. I have a new page that was ranked about 150 before all this and if you enter - now between the key words i am on the second page.
How many of you guys that are doing the keyword-keyword have a - in the title.?
None in the results I am looking at.
I can't really tell from a lot of the posts... but it's important, I think. During Dom/Es, that distinction made a world of difference. Lost pages were eventually found; devalued pages/sites needed work...or in somecases abandonement.
Regarding the hyphens, I'd say it suggests only that the specific combinations of keywords have been devalued relative to the target page's place in the SERP's, whereas when the hyphen is included, you're simply telling the SE to search for that exact string of characters, and are therefore likely to get far more literal (and less interpretive) results.
Keyword-keyword Every single keyword I search as I have 50 different ones doing the keyword-keyword they pull up.
I noticed in every single one of them I have phone numbers on the page with at least 2 - in between them or a - in the title.
I'm trying to find one with out a - on the entire page.
Could it be the - used on a site more then once caused something screwy?
Dan
This thread is a big waste of time at this point.
There is so much misinformation. People are trying to read into things a little too much
I concur.
But I find that I keep coming back :-(
Of interest, in doing a "view source" for the new top 10 sites for my primary keyword phrase (1.9 million results), of the ones that allow a source view, NOT ONE had a description metatag and only one had a keyword metatag with only three words. All had a title but not necessarily the key words in the title.
The #2 site shows "done but with errors on the page"
The #6 site moved in 2002 and their "new" link returns a page not found.
The #7 site doesn't even have the keywords in the title or anywhere on the home page.
The #10 site comes up with a very large affilitate ad for an unrelated product before the keyword content.
I can't believe Google wants this kind of irrelevant search results.
<Addition>
One more interesting thing I'm seeing:
A site in the top ten for "keyword-keyword" has a title of: "Keyword Keyword - KeywordKeyword.com"
Ok you say.. but both "Keyword Keyword" AND "KeywordKeyword" are bolded in the SERP title.
That's saying that Keyword-Keyword = "Keyword Keyword" AND "KeywordKeyword".
</Addition>
[edited by: synergy at 8:43 pm (utc) on Nov. 17, 2003]
i think keyword -keyword2 (notice the space after the first keyword) would return results without keyword2. but keyword-keyword2 is what we were discussing. i think caveman is probably correct though in that this is just returning fewer results looking for the exact string. probably just wishful thinking that there was something to this. it is nice to see my site be number 1 again, even if it is just a fluke.
Results 201 - 227 of about 763,000I cannot go past result number 227 unless i click 'repeat the search with the omitted results included.' - dazzlindonna
Google's always done that - it never actually returns as many results as it says it's found.
Forget the searching-with-dashes-thing. It will only get you pages with the string "searching-with-dashes-thing"...
;-)
Google's always done that - it never actually returns as many results as it says it's found.
As far as I can remember the number of results is just an estimate and not the real number. I think it would be impossible to calculate these numbers in real-time across several servers in a cluster with more than 3 billion pages.
I'm not sure if I read it somewhere here or the speaker from Google said that at SES.
But my guess:
The bigger the gap between guess and reality, the more dancing to be done.
In most search engines you can combine the pluses and the minuses with quotation marks, as explained above. However, you cannot use brackets or the OR-operator.
+"pan pizza" -olives pepperoni
This means that the pages the search engine shows you must include the phrase pan pizza, they must not include the word olives, and they should preferably include the word pepperoni.
If there is no sign in front of a word, most search engines will nevertheless read a + sign. The engine reckons that the word should be present . In other words: it will default to AND if it finds no "mathematical signs". Some search engines will nevertheless give priority to keywords that you give an explicit + sign. The main exception is AltaVista, which will interpret the lack of a sign as an OR operator. This will not be the case, however, if AltaVista recognizes your query as a common phrase.
The use of the minus sign may have some unforeseen consequences.
Here's my 2 cents...
All the datacenters (and www) give crappy results for about 25-50% of the searches.
For some reason, the seaches on www-gv are not so bad, and I think that, when everything settles, which includes GoogleGuy's minor update and then some, the results will (or at least should) look something like that.
