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The panic is settling down, the whine of worry is receding to a steady hum in the back of my head, and several recovery plans are forming...
I lost my index page entirely, due to lazy keyword stuffing. My fault! Unfortunately, mine is a very small business: no listing = no food (let alone xmas).
I was planning on overhauling the website anyway, and I've given myself until 1/1/04 before I accept an opening with another business and abandon my own. The question now is: overhaul the index page and resubmit to Google immediately, overhaul the entire website and resubmit the whole thing in a few weeks, overhaul the website (starting with the index page of course) and wait for Googlebot. Time is most definitely a factor.
...are any of these plans likely to restore my index page to the directory before I have to throw in the towel in January?
There are also longer range options of starting over with a new website and closing the old.
Mahalo Nui Loa! (Thank you very much!)
[edited by: LateNight at 10:32 am (utc) on Nov. 20, 2003]
Which is the point. This is not anything new. Making separate domains, or making subdomains, and having the serps be all basically one site has been a major problem caused by Google's anchor text fetish -- coupled in this case with its improved indexing of complex-string URLs.
The New York Times story merely highlighted the more straightforward spam of multiple same-content domains. The asf search is the same principal, except this guy knew how to save $35 instead of buying new domains.
Even if the results appear to be settling, they will set off on another, faster, more frenzied dance within a couple of days.
Enough is enough.
Stay tuned...
Yes, index page back on -gv in position 3. Is not showing a freshtag, but I have nothing to compare this against (as the site is missing completely from all other DCs)
How long had your site held that position?
can someone confirm that the Google web matches are identical to the Google directory matches?
My site matches the google directory, but the top 10 do not. I only held a top 5 position for a month before this update, but had been climbing very steadily. All I can hope is that it comes back.
[edited by: vbjaeger at 12:14 pm (utc) on Nov. 20, 2003]
While I agree with 90% of what you say in all you posts, 1 out of 10 is NOT good, although the sample size is extremely small based on the total number of pages indexed. See results below based on industry standard calculation using Excel. Formula available on request. One would use number of results as a sample size and unrelated pages returned as an error.
DPO - 0.1
DPMO/PPM – 100000
Sigma – 2.8
Yield - 0.90
An industry standard of 3 sigma for acceptable results was established in the 30’s by Juran. Since then most, if not all Fortune 500 companies have adopted 6 sigma as a standard. Since I have not checked as many results as you, it could be very well that G is 10 times better in results than any other search engine. Of course broad matches will skew the results tremendously. Google must have a defined number of keywords they use as a standard to measure their results with. I would guess-a-mate that you would need to look at no less than 150 results to actually be able to establish, with any convenience, how accurate the results really are. And even then, 150 is a very small sample based on the number of pages indexed.
Same guy has 8 of 10 first page.
>[keyword 2]
Same guy has 7 of 10 first page.
Similar results across the board for all popular drugs sold on the internet all pointing to affiliate template sites.
This guy made out like a bandit.
He must be praying to the Google gods night and day.
[edited by: tedster at 6:13 pm (utc) on Nov. 20, 2003]
[edit reason] no specifics, please [/edit]
This morning, for a popular term, a site with tens of thousands of anchor text identical backlinks came back from the dead (not even in the top 1000) to reclaim position number ONE for it's main 'anchor text' set of keywords.
I'm the same industry, I'm still seeing other sites appearing to be penalized for doing the same (only much less 'black hat').
Go figure....
This, along with your 'drug results' discussed in the last few posts, makes it obvious that the bad guys are winning this thing - big time.
Are most of you experiencing the same?
WF
Which datacenter?
is Google categorising searches according to which Google directory category most closely matches the search string?
If so, not in a way that one would expect. Logically, a broad query would match to a higher level cat. I have seen examples where this is NOT the case.
Search directory for 'widgets' and the cat returned is not the expected Business -> Industries ->...->Widgets, but rather the lower level, i.e. Business -> Industries ->...->Widgets->Widget Producers
Likewise, a search for 'widget' returns Business -> Industries ->...->Widgets->Widget Associations
A directory search for 'widget information' gives the cat Regional > South America > ... > Travel Information (The widget in question has nothing to do with travel!)
It is these type of anomalies that are so intriguing with the current 'update'.
WBF
But I've noticed that, particularly on google.co.uk that searching for phrases "word1 word2 word3", including the quotes .. should retrieve pages with that text on the page .. yes?
However, the top results have only got the phrase in the page title - not the page text, results further down have it on the page. It's not every search query, but certainly more than a few.
This implies google isn't working perfectly yet. Anyone else noticed it?
J.
And my thoughts on the directory, maybe Google is trying to lighten the load on it's bots by using the directory as a basis for their search results. That would be a ton of sites that would not have to be crawled as often.
Went looking for a hotel we recommend to guests as they enter our country and have to spend a night before catching a flight to us the next morning.
Typed in PrincipalCity airport hotels and got at least 2 pages of redirects to pages that have no information on this term. The urls are all www.blahblah.com/PricipalCity-airport-hotels.htm.
When you click on the links you are redirected to travel sites with no info. I checked at least 10 on the fiirst 20 results and only one site came up with some info.
Could this be part of what's creaming commercial sites on heavily optimized topics? I mean, if you were previously listed on the first page for "golden widget" but now you're suddenly competing against all the sites previously optimized for "gold widget" and "gold widgets" and "golden widgets" and "golden synonym-for-widget," I could see how that could make you drop a lot.
Anyway, I hope it's true and I'm not just seeing things; though it might cause some short-term heartburn, SEO techniques would quickly adapt I'm sure, and it would ultimately be really great for searchers.
on g.co.uk
I sure hope that's what's going on. It would prevent me from having to work one page for plural, one for singular, one for nouns, etc.
Did you look for those synonyms in an allinanchor search on the site?
