Google SEO longterm?

[layer8]

I had a site, SEO was done, was in top rankings for about 2 months then overnight for no reason site was positioned way down the rankings. All practices were ethical and it seemed no point or logic to this what happend to me.

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....

[highman]

It would appear many here have been offered some good advise, yet most STILL insist on helping WW grow and complain to deaf ears rather than spending the energy on their own sites.

Hey we all need a break now and then eh?

[Brenda_J]

It would appear many here have been offered some good advise, yet most STILL insist on helping WW grow and complain to deaf ears rather than spending the energy on their own sites.

You seem to be listening with interest Dave;) I guess not all ears are deaf;)

I know other Google people/employees read this thread too, maybe they laugh and disagree with the criticisms, but our feedback is being made known to Google and if they laugh at it then so be it. Oh well, that's our problem to deal with.

If your pages truly were not hurt during the florida update then that's great and I wish you congratulations, but it also means that you probably did not rank well for any POPULAR money terms in the first place either.

It's hard to understand the situation we are talking about if you were not in our category of search terms to begin with. Lots of people who never ranked well for POPULAR money words survived the florida-update without a scratch, since those people had little to lose anyway.

I mean, if you rank #1 for the KW phrase: "orange and blue polka dotted jumpsuits in miami" and you survived the florida update then great, but that's not real surprising to me.

[Chris_D]

I understood that quoting specific searches/ urls was against the TOS?

Anyway - I think that the 'winnipeg real estate' search quoted and discussed several times above is a good example of what many people here are actually complaining about.

Do the searches - with and without the -wastheywereusedtobe
filter - and the new number one for 'winnipeg real estate' is now a lame javascript redirection to a flash site.

Personally - I think that if Google makes ONE change to improve the serps on update Godiva - the 'next' update - PLEASE make it by filtering all javascript redirections.

Potentially - there will be so much less collateral damage - yet so many more spammers/ crap lazy no-added-value-affiliates all flushed in one easy filter.

That would be a much better outcome for searchers - filtering out 'lazy seo' javascript redirections...

[Nicola]

There's loads of spammers still out there. Google is incapable of dealing with spam in a timely manner. There isn't, nor will be an algo capable of dealing with SPAM.

Abuse needs manual input. Blacklist the spammers instead of fiddling with an algo which blanket bombs innocent webmasters.

Like I said in my other post today :-

The term "SEO" in future will stand for "Sadly Everything's Over".

[Marval]

Brenda_J - some of us (actually a very high percentage that do not post much during updates) have very high rankings on the most competitive money words out there - and haven't been affected by this update other than to have more pages added with more money words and phrases - because we spent our time during the past updates creating validated quality content and adding good quality outgoing and incoming links for our surfers.
The longterm approach for "SEO" on sites is the same as it always has been - know what Googles guidelines for WMs means(reading between the lines helps) and keep building

[tobstar]

i agree with all points rasied by GG and Brett but they ingore a simple factor that this time is clear to see (even to the infamous users)that results aren't as relevant as they used to be.

Lets over simplify for a second......

Users use google to find information. They started using Google as it was the best way to find information on the Net.

Now its not (Or at least the definition of what is relevant has changed)

Users will go to the search engine that is supplying the most relevant resaults.

I have made a "floridaquality" spam/quality report, but as someone eluded to earlier I don't know I'm doing the work for Google?

I don't get GoogleGuy sending me a "Site Report" on the things I need to change on my site!

[jim_w]

>>have made a "floridaquality" spam/quality report<<

G is trying to inspect quality into the results. It cannot be done. It MUST be designed in. A quote from a Ph.D.

[groups.google.com ]

Can't tell you how many times I have seen code get really FUBAR'ed, (fouled up beyond all repair) G is really looking like a bunch of amateurs to me.

[Nicola]

Amateurs is a strong word to use. I think the decline of their engine is on the horizon.

Without reliable results Google will soon join the ranks of Infoseek.

I am positive Google are of the view that a few moaning webmasters after an update is something normal. Don't be so sure boys. There's always somebody more than willing to take your place.

History is a great teacher, and Google should start to look at the engines which are no longer with us, and WHY they are no longer with us.

[incywincy]

this is the first post i've made on this update because the update threads are usually very whiney and don't really contribute much to understanding google. i feel i have to comment this time though.

firstly my target keywords generally generate about 6 million results so fairly competitive. prior to florida my site ranked 1st or 2nd for my 2 term search phrase, following florida it still does well, so why am i posting?

i'm posting because the serps look really poor now, as mentioned i ranked 2nd for 'blue widgets' with other competing uk sites on the first page. now i rank 10th with the other uk sites outside of the top 100! since my 'blue widgets' are only relevant to uk residents i should be over the moon since uk searchers won't find the competition but somehow i'm sad that google has made the serps american dominated and all of the other uk sites have disappeared.

even for the search 'blue widgets uk' the opposition has vanished, mainly replaced by business directories.

in the short term i am winning but as an advocate of google i'm worried that poor quality results will drive searchers away from them.

[lgn1]

Could the google results now be now random chosen from a set of closely scored sites.

I have been looking at this for days, and I can see no pattern. It almost appears that google is scoring sites and placing sites with near identical scores into a bin

For example google will choose sites that score 95-100 based on their algorithm, and choose a mixture of commercial and informational sites and dump them into a bin. There may be a hundred sites in that bin, but google may only choose 5 of them. The same process is then repeated for 90-95 scores and so on.

Im just using this as an example, but using any method that intoduces controlled pseudo-randomness in combinations with bining will blow SEO out of the water.

[highman]

incywincy what you say IS the core of the problem, its not your site, my site, whoevers site, ITS the QUALITY, and if Google think that we will tell them every query that sucks... they better think again, I for one am too busy lifting all my eggs out of the Google basket

If HHTP_REFERER = Google then
have-you tried-this-engine-pop-up.asp
End IF

[aspdesigner]

Hey all - I had to take off for a few days trying to deal with yet another emergency - in the long tradition of laws that are named one thing but do the opposite, the US is poised to pass a law legalizing spam! (the E-MAIL variety). Damn, if it's not one thing, it's another!

Anyway, from what I've seen, Google may have been trying to target SEO'd pages that were optimized for relevant content, but is so doing, adversely effected rankings for all sorts of pages with very strong relevancy.

The result is a lot of SERPs have a variety of not-quite-it to completely-unrelevant sites included in the top listings, with a very noticable loss of overall search quality.

Sites with high relevancy and exact phrase matching are being replaced by sites with keywords sprinkled randomly in the body.

You do a search for pretty blue widgets, and you get a site for real estate in blue county.

Users are understandably confused and a bit miffed.

The idea that people need to be "trained" to change how they do their searches is total crap. Google exists to serve the surfers, not the other way around.

It used to be standard advise to put good content that was strongly relevant to your target audience. Now I see GG advising people to add random semi-unrelated pages to your sites?

I did take a look at some recent logs as suggested. I noticed a few things -

* we're getting a large # of hits from other SEs as well, especially MSN
* many of the searches people are finding us on via Google are not relevant to our site. (the random sprinkled keyword thing) It's nice to know we are top-10 for things we aren't even relevant for, but I'm sure it's got to be p*'ing-off some surfers!
* the hits we are getting from other SEs are much more relevant to our site (particularly from MSN and ASK)

Given what saw, and M$'s expressed desire to take-over the SE marketplace, maybe Google should refrain from telling people to look at their logs until the referrals make more sense?

I am particularly concerned that a select few of the senior folks here have taken a "rose colored glasses" approach to this whole situation. I am well aware that there is always some crying by the newbies whenever there is an update, but you also need to recognize when something is actually amiss. The very length of the update thread (including by senior and experienced SEOs) should be a clue.

Those who have been around a few years may remember another time Google had a "problem". They had just gotten some bad press about the whole "Googlebombing" thing, and somebody decided to turn the knob WAY the other way, resulting in an update where backlink pages were at the top of the SERPs! (i.e. - your heavily-linked page about "widgets" dropped out of site, replaced by top-ranked unrelated sites linking to you instead!)

People were screaming bloody murder. Google never admitted that anything was wrong. But on the next update, all the SERPs mysteriously changed back to normal. Another experiment gone horribly wrong.

I dearly love Google as an SE, and promoted it to others back when no one had hear of them. But if they want to continue their success, they need to wake up and smell the coffee on this one, or suddenly one day soon we'll all realize that 'ol Bill took over another market, and Google going the same way as Netscape and RealNetworks.

[Miop]

If I optimize my pages with lower kwd for Google, will that cause a drop on other SE's?
I haven't investigated but does anyone know roughly what G considers too high and what is considered optimum in general?

[aspdesigner]

LOL, highman.

You mean something like this? -

<% 
If InStr(UCase(Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_REFERER")),"GOOGLE") > 0 then  
 response.write("<SCRIPT>") 
 response.write("NewWin = window.open('GoogleSux.asp','_blank');") 
 response.write("</SCRIPT>") 
End If 
%> 
 

Haven't tested this, BTW

[edited by: aspdesigner at 2:02 pm (utc) on Nov. 25, 2003]

[lasko]

Away from the topic of being 1st or 100th in Google

Using the

Keyword keyword -mt-tb.cgi

query in the search box of Google actually cleans the results.

Now I am not going to go on about rankings and changes of the positions but what i will say is this

At the moment I get nothing put links to internal pages

like this

../dir/page.htm

.../dir/another_page.htm

After using the magic -mt-tb.cgi

the results appear nice and clean

www,mysite.com/

www,anothersite.com/

I would also point out that those using Sponsor Listings at the top and on the side don't always appear.

On one search I had to Sponsor listings at the top the same search a few seconds later and they were gone.

So I would not say that its just rankings and being 100th is the only thing wrong its generally across the whole system.

I still think this update is yet to be completed :)