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I'm not seeing that at all. For everything I've checked, results are at least as good as they were before the update, and they may be better. And I'm not just talking about categories where my pages rank #1. :-)
Totally agree with this poster, the results look just as good as normal. I took a bad hit when the dom update happened but you didnt hear me moaning. It all seems like sour grapes to me.
All the people who are saying silly things such as
The public are noticing as well. I was at a customers site today. They have a standard desktop with their homepage set to Google as they are a research company. I was asked by one of the directors to change the home page to another search engine as they were finding the results had deteriorated
just look a joke really. Are they hoping it will influenece GG or something?
I think it's great big merchants like Amazon have taken a hit.
essentially, i can't say any of the sites that are there now, or were there before, didn't deserve to be there. they all have their merits. what i am sure of is that there is a problem with index pages - the rest of my site ranks exactly where it did before, and all of my non-main phrases rank the same as well - even for the index page. so it doesn't look like a penalty - it looks like either an "oopsie" or not all the algos being factored in yet. i don't buy the penalty theories at all.
>>Is their anybody here who was running Adsense had their site dropped?
I have been running AdSense on my site that has disappeared from the top 100 SERPS in all but data center 8. I haven't looked deeper than the top 100 pages. I have been tracking my AdSense results. My page impressions and click throughs have been cut in half. This means Google is losing money on my site.
It's not a "Florida" problem though, it arrived with deepfreshbot.
/claus
Yah, like every single commercial area on the web.
>Is their anybody here who was running Adsense had their site dropped?
Yep. My AdSense spots are running, but my SERP position is in the toilet. And like the other fella that responded, my clickthroughs have dropped. Folks seem more inclined to click on through if they see not just your ad, but your site show up as a top result.
Hope this sorts itself out soon.
When we lost our DMOZ listing, we lost the Google Directory as well.
DMOZ is now restored, but not Google Directory.
BUT we had a link from directory.google.com/*/*/ today, How?
Title: Keyword1 Keyword2
H1 tag: Keyword1 Keyword2
directory: keyword/keyword.html
file name: keyword-keyword.html
And with links throughout the site going to those page, by keyword1-keyword2. Not just the index.html page was hit, but any of the other main pages with this type of internal naming and linking structure.
I thought this was the logical way to do a site. Apparently not. I'll wait for a few weeks to see what happens. But it seems rather ridiculous to me to have to go and make the site less relevant to the main keywords in order to not trip some Google filter.
I don't know of anything else to do. It's a clean site.
Totally agree with this poster, the results look just as good as normal. I took a bad hit when the dom update happened but you didnt hear me moaning. It all seems like sour grapes to me.
I say:
he really needs to search on a few more searches and see what's really going on. I used altavista for the first time in about a year today because I simply couldn't find what i wanted on google. I was looking for a demo of a piece of software to open a file a client sent me. #1 was a hack/crack site #2 was a university site with one passing reference to it, #3 a gaming site mentioning the keyword in a different context and so on and so on. It was nice to see how altavista has changed since I last used it actually, and i found what i wanted.
It's not sour grapes and it's not that I think anyone from google will take any notice, i'm just saying what i see and i'd hate to see google go down the pan because i use it about 50 times a day.
Overture numbers for the term are huge, but the site is simply a parked domain.
265 links in FAST, but only 25 total links showing in Google.
I see updated links on www
I don't.
I know that I'm looking for parked pages when I begin looking for stock trading. Looks like G did a thorough job this time.
The oddest thing about my sites is that all of my older sites (IE. Over 6 months ranking number 1 - 10 on G) are gone, but the site that I just put up roughly a month and a half ago is still ranking number 1 on a fairly competitive word.
Anyone else seeing this trend? I can't make any sense of it but it's a trend that I see.
I bet Google employees come here on occasion when they are stressed for a good laugh from reading all the conspiracy theories and comments from spastic webmasters.
How true this is. Every time Google updates we have tons of people complaining, and claiming lots of users / clients are complaining about the results. This never fails to make me laugh.
Will people stop making knee jerk reactions for christ sake. I have had plenty of bad and good updates on Google. But as long as your site uses good SEO techniques it will always bounce back.
mikeD said:
Totally agree with this poster, the results look just as good as normal. I took a bad hit when the dom update happened but you didnt hear me moaning. It all seems like sour grapes to me.I say:
he really needs to search on a few more searches and see what's really going on. I used altavista for the first time in about a year today because I simply couldn't find what i wanted on google. I was looking for a demo of a piece of software to open a file a client sent me. #1 was a hack/crack site #2 was a university site with one passing reference to it, #3 a gaming site mentioning the keyword in a different context and so on and so on. It was nice to see how altavista has changed since I last used it actually, and i found what i wanted.
It's not sour grapes and it's not that I think anyone from google will take any notice, i'm just saying what i see and i'd hate to see google go down the pan because i use it about 50 times a day.
I've heard this Google going down the pan comment for every update there has ever been
What has happened to Google?
My home page has just been dropped for some reason. Have they changed their algo yet again?
It is all well trying to fight the spammers, but when the complicated algos start to penalise the best sites then they have done something seriously wrong.
Google used to be the best search engine in the world...
But then so did Alta Vista once upon a time ...
Another one ,
Oh Mikey care to search my keywords? 1 thru 10 all message board spam.
thats for 4 fidfferent keywords.
Another one brings up a travel guide Hazardous household waste and cenus bureau.
Another brings up a guy that has 2 thru 6 of 4 different domains that are one page sites with maybe 4 or 5 sentences on them and 11 keywords at the bottom spammed and all linked to all of his domains back and forth.
"the results look just as good as normal"
Way off bro
- agreed
no..we never hear from you!
Miami Beach Real Estate
1 South Beach Magazine
2 Boyton Beach Real Estate?!?!?
etc. etc.
Many Many Many other similar results in key phrases across the board, some I agree arn't bad, but enough are that something needs to be changed
It just seems that there is always someone complaining about something every update.
Note that #4 and #9 don't look like the rest, except #5 and#10. Of course i should have done the test using one datacenter only, but it's not all that important to me at this stage.... still a lot can change.
It would be nice to see the same test for a page that do have the two keywords in the URL. Anyone?
/claus
[edited by: claus at 8:49 pm (utc) on Nov. 18, 2003]
site.com/keyword-keyword.html
or
site.com/keyword_keyword.com
It would be interesting to see that responce as Site Pro News, just released an article a few days before the Florida Update telling webmasters to use keyword-keyword.html.
If I missed this earlier - oops - this thread is pretty long.
The oddest thing about my sites is that all of my older sites (IE. Over 6 months ranking number 1 - 10 on G) are gone, but the site that I just put up roughly a month and a half ago is still ranking number 1 on a fairly competitive word.Anyone else seeing this trend? I can't make any sense of it but it's a trend that I see.
Perhaps the inconsistancy with behaviour could be due to penalties being applied by programs that work their way through the sites in the Google database. There are a lot of them so it may be an incomplete process.
>Overture numbers for the term are huge, but the site is simply a parked domain.
I know we the mods don't like to discuss specific examples, and if they feel so in this case edit the search term. This is a legit result. Check archive.org. This site used to have relevant content, and on Alltheweb has tons of the right backlinks. This is a perfect example of how lots of backlinks with the right anchor text can raise a site to #1. Looks to me like someone bought the domain, and has put up a holding page. However, off page content dominates for Google rankings. I could get a site about Ecuadorian slugs to rank #1 for "porn" with enough backlinks with "porn" as the anchor text.
Is it because of over-optimization? Our index and all important keywords got wiped just one day after we launched a new site we worked on for a year. It is quite a pain to see so much work lost. The site is good, large, with a few strong backward links, an original with no duplicate content.
It seems that our penalty was over-optimization - did we repeat our keywords too often? Is it proper to be deleted just for this reason? It is a paranoia, where to see the limits of what google likes and what not.
Well, I checked all my keyword/keyphrases and the results have been very boring. Almost no changes in positions - for my site and for others'. Since these are non-commercial categories, I attribute this to lack of spam.
I have two new sites competing in a brand name category (8 million results). Still have (almost) no links therefore am placed very lowly (150-200). There too the positions are virtually unchanged. Checked other sites and the conclusions are same.
To me this means that probably the algorithms has remained same and only the new spam filters are being applied affecting mostly the spammy commercial categories.
I also have a site that is would definatly be considered "over optimized" with urls like:
www.KW1-KW2/Kw3-Kw4.html and it hasn't moved an inch.
So that doesn't really apply to my sites at least. Also the idea that google could penalize you for using a descriptive H1 tag and descriptive Title tag is obsurd - thats just good practice. It just makes sense that you would describe your page with the keywords that relate to the topic.
What has happened to Google?
My home page has just been dropped for some reason. Have they changed their algo yet again?
It is all well trying to fight the spammers, but when the complicated algos start to penalise the best sites then they have done something seriously wrong.
Google used to be the best search engine in the world...
But then so did Alta Vista once upon a time ...
I think its time this thread should be blocked.
Too much speculation, serious dicussion finished along time ago.
Can we put an end to this please.
Good time to unveil a search engine that has relevant search results.
Backlinks are updated on the main server. It is fluxing though. Results only stayed about 10 minutes before it reverted back.
Ted
Remember the "weapons of mass destruction" thing? Well on all the datacenters that webpage is still there. They have "weapons of mass destruction" In their Title, H1 tags and a density of over 4% for the keywords "weapons of mass destruction"
This is clearly a webpage that has spammed google to get the top results for that search term and they're still there! If google was really trying to filter over-optimization and anchor text then why wouldnt they get rid of this result? It's a pretty famous webpage known for cheating google. Why isn't it gone from the search results? Why would they remove other websites like mine and yours for over-optimization and not this one?
Any ideas?
Good to here all is well for you. However, as you may have surmised from your reading here, all is not well for everyone.
In fact many people took a hit that will take some time to recover from, and have no idea what they did to get pummeled so hard.
So, with your permission, people will continue to ask questions, point out issues, try to figure out what's going on and generally vent their frustration.
Oh yeah... something positive to say about the update... Adwords profits should go up heading into Christmas, as this update happened with impeccable timing...
Make that "hear" not "here".... brain frying....
Hope you are right, since (as many have said), as long as the keywords are not overused in the URL string then the format is logical and should not hurt you.
I haven't ruled out the issue however, because *if* it exists, I don't think it exists in a vacuum. It would probably exist in conjunction with other keyword-related factors. So if yours is a generally clean site, as I'm sure it is, then perhaps there are simply not any other factors that, combined with your URL string, set off the filter.
If on the other hand, where overuse of keywords in file names is found to co-exist with other heavy-handed keyword practices, that just *might* send one's page into the depths.
Not saying it's so, just that I see some evidence of it and can't rule it out yet. My hope is that it's non-issue, and that this will all set itself right soon. There are enough credible examples in here that one would expect G to be looking at this closely, as they always do in the midst of big changes.
BTW, congratulations on running a site that's pretty clean, or clean enough, anyway...
;-)
ps...seems we're still in the "GG goes quiet" stage...
Loads of peeps loved that funny WMD page. And they linked to it, probably using the phrase.
And in an annoying way, it's right that it should still be there because, it's probably the funny page that most people now searching on that phrase are hoping to find.
Stupid and useless stuff can be popular! That's the beauty of democracy folks.
a trivial point I know. Good luck to all who are worrying
Utter rubbish. Why is a humorous page put up by what I presume was someone who thought the US president lied to wage war about "weapons of mass destruction" not relevant to a search for that term? What would be cheating is if a porn site with no relevant content to the search phrase scammed their way to the top. This site didn't cheat. People linked to it because they agreed with it (or, at least found it funny.) That page is PR7, and has an ODP listing to boot in Society > Issues > Warfare and Conflict > Specific Conflicts > Iraq > Humor. I'd accuse Google of political censorship if they removed that page.
Get your nose out of your own site and you won't end up wasting your time thinking about nonsense. Well-organized site.com/directory/keyword.html sites are doing fine all over the place. The tunnelvision people have around here can be staggering sometimes.
All those little bells and whistles that are mildly user-friendly and have zero negatives, like naming directories /word/ instead of /x124/, are still valued and doing just fine all over the place. The same with targeted anchor text, H1 tags and anything else you can name.
When dom happened my index page disappeared for months with no apparent reason, but eventually it reclaimed it's position. Hopefully this is what will occur this time.
I agree. This is superstitious thinking. "My site dropped, so it must be the site.com/directory/keyword.html URL that is responsible." NO, it could be something else.
I havent see this happening earlier.
**** that page which was way behind mine has been appended with me?
I have quite a bid of observational eveidence that suggets "over-optimization" could be very real... unless of course something changes...
I would be interested in hearing your opinion....
Technically, you are both just pages on the geocities.com site. This is correct.
The creative/productive fun of information exchange is becoming a frustrating waste of time and effort to just keep up with the rules. This is true throughout society, not just with this Google update.
It seems that "search engine optimization" has come to mean trickery and manipulation instead of good design to facilitate information exchange which is what the internet was created for.
It is to every search engine's benefit to give the searcher what they are searching for - that is THE PURPOSE.
Google has done an admirable job of that and I'm sure wants to continue to do that. I'm sure they go back and check search results to see if they themselves can find what they are searching for - I'm sure they don't want to get a bad rap right before the busiest time of year. I'm sure it will get fixed. I'm also sure their timing was lousy and agree 100% that it should have been tested privately.
Sorry for the sermon.
Hmm, 500 new postings in this thread in the last 20 hours since i last visited. I'll post this now without reading any of them, as it will take three hours to get back to here, by which time at least another 70 will have been added.
.
Site online in March, added to ODP in May, shows Google Category link in Google SERPs in August (but category not actually in Google Directory yet) .
Site added to Google Directory in November (on the 2nd), and today, for the very first time (in -zu and -va only) the site shows the ODP backlink at last.
Site has shown backlinks as 2 internal pages and only one external page for the last 6 months. Now it shows as 4 backlinks. However, using a URL fragment as the search term reveals that there are really about 25 backlinks!
Although -zu and -va now show updated backlinks for this site, I note that for another site (online for several years) the reported backlinks have gone down from 20 to 17 (no change of position yet though).
Google uk is now more important the google.ca though .ca has more links
Could Googleguy just confirm when the update is done so I can start panicking?
Amen. I am seeing many unprofessional sites with little or no content above me.
At least let us know! :(
i think uk sites are doing better with this update
Definately. I see that as well. Also, lots of sites with "?" from Japan, etc that are not in English and not translated.
KW1 KW2 KW3 used to be #1 now #280 out of 75,500
New relatively unrelated keyword:
KW1 KW2 #1 on UK & COM out of 1,930,000
Did massive amounts of index pages completely drop out of the picture like we're experiencing now with Update Florida? Or, did pages become restored with some reasonable semblence of order relatively quickly?
[edited by: optimist at 10:26 pm (utc) on Nov. 18, 2003]
My take: The update is not finished.
SERP results for some domains I watch closely are rock solid.
Serps for others, completely skewed. These are serps and domains using the exact same site architecture methods.
- Jason
And there are millions that continue to show good results. Why doesn't that make you stop and think for a second?
"Over-optimization" is such a broad word that it isn't very helpful. Basically every active thing a webmaster does is optimizing. Google appreciates and justifiably rewards good/sensible/natural/truthful optimization, like making site maps, titling pages well, etc.
What Google has done here for sure is one thing: devalued the importance of anchor text. That isn't a penalty of any sort, and it is very plainly a sensible thing, since anchor text is only a very trivial thing when it comes to actual usefulness of a page. No longer are the SERPs near exact duplicates of the allinanchor: search. But anchor text is still tremendously important, probably still the #1 thing.
Google makes mistakes. People would do well to look back at the Dominic and Esmerelda mess. Many folks denied the obvious for awhile. Many nellies were running off changing headers and imagining phantoms. Google had a problem with its data. Google Guy even solicited feedback here. They very slowly recovered. Obviously different things may be effecting different people, but a lot folks should be thinking that mistakes will be fixed rather than hare-brained poppycock that runs completely counter to the high rankings for thousands and millions of websites.
There is only one difference 1 week before the update we lost our DMOZ listing due to an editors error, this was restored on the day of the florida update, though it still doesn't show in Googles directory.
Views on this one anyone?
