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If you speak to all the best Internet Marketing Pros they tell you SEO is a waste of time longterm, everyone in the industry has lost their position at somepoint from what I gather - or am I wrong?
I want to hear from anyone who has had long term success with SEO say for 6 months or longer....
If you add -mt-tb.cgi to the end of any keyword affected the results look like they are back to normal with some changes in ranking.
the extension -mt-tb.cgi seems to generated by Weblog sotware Movabletype.org when it creates a trackback. I need some of you experts help, but if you do a search for this on Google by itself without the (-) in front it generates blank pages created by trackbacks. If you follow the second result for this search and then go to the homepage listed on this page you will see that the blog is powered by movabletype.org by a very small link on the right hand side of the page.
So here's my question... what's does this have to do with me setting up reciprocal links with other companies that want to help me do business and why should Google penalize me..... I didn't even know what a blog was until Sunday and this is the second post 9now third) I've made. What am I to do?
Google is a monopoly and it shouldn't be that way. There should be a level playing field.
[edited by: buckworks at 1:33 am (utc) on Nov. 25, 2003]
it would be nice to hear one of the authorities on the subject explain why adding -getyeroldresultsback after the dropped phrase shows our sites back where they used to be.
It just occured to me what that is. It is a 3 word phrase or it is one more word than it was before. Trying doing a search with one word and 10 "-" Google will only let you do 9 because 10 words is the max for a searh. Google looks at the "-" as a word. The -asdfadsf means nothing so it returns the right results for a 3 word pharse not a 2 word phrase.
Google is now presenting lots of ideas to the user, in an effort to match the context of the results with the idea(s) within the users head. Googles results are now showing abstractions of the ideas within the search phrase which is why they look irrelevant when viewed with your particular focus.
When you look at the Top 10 results for searches now you see that Google is offering variety - its not really an ordered list. Perhaps this has always been the case with pure informational areas, but in the money areas we are used to seeing exact matches with the search phrase - webmasters had learned to feed the algorithm what it wanted to climb up the ladder. In part, Google were responsible for this - Page Rank and its Toolbar representation actually encouraged the 2D view. By learning the elements of the algorithm, coupling it with PR, commercial webmasters had managed to impose implicit commercial ideas on most search terms so more and more search results began to have an implicit commercial aspect.
Google have just changed all that. Your website can no longer rise to the top on specific keyword relevancy alone. There is going to have to be a context within which the search terms exist on your site. Google can't know the exact context of the users search (especially for short 2-3 word phrases) - your webpages are going to have to help it offer different contexts to the user. Not only will Google use on page factors to determine the conetxt of your webpage its going to use inbound links and anchor text - BUT here is the real difference - the keywords being in the anchor text isn't going to help - its the idea within the anchor text, which probably includes ideas of where the link originates as well.
If your webpage is useful in lots of different ways, then you will stand a good chance of being visible. This is going to make it much harder to gain an advantage using reciprocal links - how do you know what text to put in the links? That's why your're going to have to build content that will be naturally linked to for a whole lot of reasons - some you wouldn't even have considered.
All considerations about is H1, H2, keyword density, URL, etc, are now trivial - they just aren't going to help get *just another set of words* elevated up the rankings.
The impact of this on commercial websites, particularly affiliates and widget resellers is going to be devastating. I imagine that the rankings will now change frequently - unless you are a mega-brand or niche authority expect lots of constant turbulence. If you're hawking what 100,000 other websites are hawking then find something new to hawk. If your promoting products that 100,000 other websites are promoting then you'd better have something interesting to say about them.
If you can't find anything new to hawk and you don't have anything interesting to say then enjoy your hobby website.
Google is now in a different league to any of the other SEs. AV is simply where Google was last month - it will take them years to catch up.
The index pages aren't coming back. Think about it.
EOD.
[edited by: claus at 1:50 am (utc) on Nov. 25, 2003]
Google is now in a different league to any of the other SEs. AV is simply where Google was last month - it will take them years to catch up.
Nah, it's just a crude filter. Some of us have done too much homework over the last week to believe otherwise.
Or, it's an incredible, four-dimensional, sophisticated artificial intelligence algorithm that behaves exactly like a crude filter for all intents and purposes. Darn! Twenty years of AI research is shown to be fraudulent!
Take your pick.
It's a question about what is the right thing to do long term
Long term?
Google years are now like dog-years, but kicked up a few notches.
Therefore, "long term" in "google-years" means next week;)
The only question for me is how to rack up more traffic by TOMORROW;) (or possibly Saturday at the latest).
"Next week" is as long term as I am willing to contemplate;)
And guess what. Im back in my regular spot for the keywords that matter to me, but not all former keywords.
And I have a freshbot date of Nov 23.
I not sure if www-in is the start of the new update to be spawned across the other datacenters, or just a test database. Anyways the results are post-florida.
[edited by: LateNight at 3:50 am (utc) on Nov. 25, 2003]
I had succombed to the idea that Google was filtering some sorts of searches - I no longer believe that. Its just that webmasters have gotten used to the 2D view, the view from their one particular focus, especially when that focus is commercial.
I only partially agree with your assessment of the new landscape, but I also believe kackle's long term analysis is true and dead-on accurate, and a part of this new landscape.
Those who think no KW filter is being applied are misleading themselves I think, because I have done tests for similar keywords (which are all used in the same context).
Here are the results of those tests:
Of the several KW's tested, they all rank "top 10" except for the one KW which originally had a slightly higher density than the others. The higher density KW is no longer ranked at all (nowhere to be seen within the top 500) but the similar KW's (which are used in the same context and have many of the same words) are now ranked top 10.
This kind of throws a wrench into the theory that google is using only "context" based searches and no KW filtering whatsoever.
I do know that google is also using "context" filters and some form of "word stemming" as you have stated (that is correct), but they are ALSO using KW filters as Kackle has said. It's a broad new landscape, it includes all of these things.
By the way, this information is important for LONG TERM seo on google, because how can you plan for long term seo without discussing what we know about the current algo?
Forget PR, just exchange links with on topics sites that will help YOUR visitors. Forget the whistles and bells and stick with nothing more that boring old HTML. the oooh arrh days have long gone. People don't have time, they want the stuff downloaded ASAP.
Bottom line is, build your site for humans and NOT Google, being humans ouseleves we know pretty much what they want. Googles ultimate aim is to give humans what they want. Regardless of what we read, make your Titles and Meta tags readable for humans with some keywords inculded. Don't even bother with keyword density, just write text on your pages for your HUMAN visitors. Once you do this humams will find you via Google.
Stop wasting time and engery (that should be channeled on your site)checking all Googles data centers for various keywords/phrases 10 times a day then posting your findings back here. It's a TOTAL waste of time and only complicates what is really very simple. Same goes for Allintitle etc Remember your visitors don't search this way. 99% simply type in some keywords.
Although common sense is not always that common, in this case it is.
Dave
And why for the love of google is another of my sites which has a distinctive whiff of the spam about it, and has keywords stuffed not only in H1s, titles and internal links, but stuffed up it's jumper and down it's pants, doing really well after this update in comparison to my whitehat site that is trying really hard to be a good little googleoid?
I hereby give up. I'm off to spend more on overture.
"Those who think no KW filter is being applied are misleading themselves I think, because I have done tests for similar keywords (which are all used in the same context)"
And there is the flaw in your argument. You have decided that the words are all in the same context within your own mind. To 10,000 or 100,000 other people those words could represent very different ideas within their own mind. This is the leap that Google are making - they are preventing webmasters from imposing their own ideas on what keywords mean and assessing the web in general to see all the different ideas that exist around the keyphrase the user has entered.
This is web cartography Google style. And to many website owners its going to be unreadable.
