Forum Moderators: open
Anyone else with losses please post like to get an idea of simliarities
My site name produces a similar situation to yours. I rank as #1 (for UK index) for the first word of my site title - it is a ridiculously common English word - but on its own is not that relevent to my site.....relevent yes, #1 no!
I can see the aims and benefits of broad matching.....a little fine tuning is required.
Thank for your help
Now we must NOT have the one series of words in our Title, Text, etc. that is exactly what the searchers are looking for. What genius at Google figured that one out? What do they think most of the world out there who are putting together websites are doing?
Every time I go to check our two main 2 word keyword phrases and see the junk that is listed my heart goes into my stomach. The fact that since 1995 our site which is named for the regional area has placed well because of content and is now MIA causes great pain. It reminds me of the great AV fiasco which contributed to Google's growth.
I've read in other threads that Google has acknowledged that they are working on some corrections - hopefully this is true. It badly needs to be fixed and quickly.
I've gone off the Broad Matching theory - Word Stemming yes, but Broad Matching no.
It does look like a "commercial" filter which catches your multiple keywords, but not your first keyword on its own. Also, I think exact matches on keyphrases is a big part of the filter.
Has anyone else done any serious research into exactly what type of "commercial" keywords are targetted? See thread [webmasterworld.com ]
I'm curious if google will allow people to easily control their spam filter at some point like Outlook's junk mail filter.
[edited by: rrl at 4:48 pm (utc) on Nov. 28, 2003]
I just did a test on what you described below:
"let's use water skiing as the example, although that is not my search term (not even close, but the phrase works well for what i am talking about). my site used to place #1 for water skiing, and now places well below 1000. yet, it places #8 for the word water. now my site really doesn't have much at all to do with water, other than you ski on it. there are many more relevant sites that discuss water than mine. yet mine is extremely relevant to the phrase water skiing."
My main keyword phrase is two words too and my index page is nowhere to be found; used to be number 6. When I did a search on the first part of that keyword phrase which has nothing to do with my topic my index page came out as number 21. This is really crazy!
I just thought of something. If the keyword phrase of mine that has totally disappeared was due to that phrase being mentioned too often on my index page then how is it possible that the first half of that keyword phrase that is mentioned as often or even more often comes up as number 21 in the search engine. What does everyone think? It looks like I was not being penalized for "keyword stuffing". Now I really wonder what the problem is?
Like a lot of people since Florida my index page is lost in space, our sub-pages are still doing quite well. After doing some reading and research here and at other boards decided to make some changes and tone down the SEO of our index page as an experiment.
On Tuesday I modified our title, deleted out h1 and cut KW density in half, took KW's out of our back-links, redid some text on the page and updated. We were updated by Google on Wed./26 and our changes were reflected. After the changes our index made it back to page 4 for some of our terms but still lost on others. I was hopeful.
Today the changes we made are gone. Our old index page is back, it's as if Google realized that a "penalized" page had made changes so it deleted those changes and reinserted the "penalized" index page. Am I being paranoid or is this just another glitch in the midst of a monster glitch.
Has anyone else had this experience, if so can they or anybody else with more insight and knowledge offer an opinion on this.
I assume that Google staff read this message board now and then, and I would say to them, in all honesty Google is by no means the engine it was. Alot of hardworking people have posted their case. I have spoken to a few people on the phone today and two of them (without prompting) have brought up the subject of Google and how it's "gone mad".
This is some seriously bad publicity ahead of your IPO guys.
The first half of your keyword phrase is not in Google's "database" of commercial keyword phrases and doesn't trigger any special filter, therefore you rank highly for that.
All pure guesswork, of course.
Now we must NOT have the one series of words in our Title, Text, etc. that is exactly what the searchers are looking for.
I'm really skeptical about the idea that Google is punishing Webmasters for following Google's own guidelines. It may not be giving Webmasters as many "bonus points" for on-the-nose titles, anchor text, etc. as it did in the past, but it just wouldn't make sense for Google to decide that a page about "Jelly Doughnuts" shouldn't have "Jelly Doughnuts" in the title, anchor text, headline, etc.
(On the other hand, I can see why Google might penalize you for body text that read "Jelly doughnuts are great if you like jelly doughnuts, and we can sell you jelly doughnuts that have a great jelly doughnuts taste and a wonderful jelly doughnuts appearance as part of our complete jelly doughnuts line for jelly doughnuts fanciers and jelly doughnuts collectors.")
For what it's worth, three of my four index.html pages got zapped, including one that has ranked #1 for its most important keyphrase over a period of many, many months. The pages are information pages, they don't use any tricky SEO techniques, and one of them (the former #1 page) actually jumped from PR6 to PR7 in the Google toolbar a few days ago. All use descriptive keyphrases in the titles, and have essentially the same navigation bar across the top with descriptive anchor text for the links. Yet only three of the four index pages got zapped. Why? I think it's because the crosslinks to the ones that disappeared were to what are sometimes called "vanity domains." In other words:
widgets.com (the main, surviving index page) had links to:
bluewidgets.com
greenwidgets.com
redwidgets.com
And those redirected to:
widgets.com/blue/index.html
widgets.com/green/index.html
widgets.com/red/index.html
I probably would have been okay if my navigation links had pointed to the internal index.html URLs instead of using the "bluewidgets.com," "greenwidgets.com," and "redwidgets.com" URLs with redirects at DirectNIC, my domain registrar. I say that because my main widgets.com index.html page still ranks exactly where it usually does (#1 for one important keyphrase and #4 for another), while only the "vanity domain" index pages went away.
To me, this suggests that Google applied a very aggressive crosslinking filter (or maybe a very aggressive redirect filter) that threw the baby out with the bathwater.
I have a page on a topic which takes four keywords to describe. It's a very specific topic (keyword4 defines the specificity) and it's the only web page that exists that covers the topic. (No, really).
1) keyword1 keyword2 keyword4 brings up the page at #1.
2) keyword1 keyword3 keyword4 brings up the page at #1.
3) keyword2 keyword3 keyword4 beings up the page at #1.
4) keyword1 keyword2 keyword3 keyword4 leaves the page somewhere in orbit (around Charon).
The thing is, variants 1), 2) and 3) don't make sense semantically - no native English speaking searcher would use them. The only reason I even tried this experiment is because a few of my referrer logs are showing me that searchers are using variant 1) increasingly (they never did before) and I assume that they're doing this, because they can't find the page any other way.
On the other hand, variant 4 is a highly relevant search string... and since it doesn't bring the page up, I assume newer searchers reach the conclusion that the specific info that they're looking for doesn't exist.
Try the same search using
keyword1 keyword(make one up even if it isn't on your page) keyword2,keyword3 keyword4
Let us know if it comes up that way.
The filter seems to take out sites that have keywords in the same exact order as the search.
I - like many others here - have had my site blown out of the listings for my main 2 keyword phrase (every single page of my site in fact). However I tried reversing the order of the keywords, and in my particular case I'm still nowhere to be found post-florida despite having featured highly with keywords reversed pre-florida.
Try this and see what happens.
three word search
keyword1 (keyword - any word from your meta tag except keyword 1 or keyword 2) then your keyword 2
Please let us know the results
Try this and see what happens.three word search
keyword1 (keyword - any word from your meta tag except keyword 1 or keyword 2) then your keyword 2
Just tried this, and a few variations. Results:
keyword1 keyword-from-title keyword2:
Back in rankings near top for all keywords tried
keyword1 keyword-from-page-body-text keyword2:
Back in rankings near top for all keywords tried
keyword1 keyword-from-meta-keywords-tag-only keyword2:
Nowhere to be found
I suppose the 3rd result was to be expected given that google ignores meta keyword tags, and that particular keyword was only mentioned in the meta tag.
Been checking the sites that are before me, and nearly ALL is an normal page, not an index page, so therefore some companys has several pages indexed before me, though I donīt have pages with nearly the same content as the index page.
Seems like google index higher pages that arenīt index pages............... just crazy.
Itīs even so bad that looking for my domainame without the .com and a site with a link to me comes before my site...........
Because of spammers, google needs to make these changes. Looks like for the XMas season, I lose. I am making the required changes necessary for next month. After studying the results, it's painfully obvious that techniques that worked before will no longer work today.
That being said, my advice is to change the following tags to be more wordly:
<title>
<h1>
<h2>
<alt>
Keyword density did not change. Text in these instances that worked before no longer does. Time to make the changes and move on -
jd
DirectoryIndex index.html index.htm index.shtml index.shtm index.phtml index.php3 index.php
for both index.html and index.htm return custom 404 error page, index.shtml is the file you get when asking for www.domain.com/
domain1.com:
www.domain1.com/index.shtml no matches found
www.domain1.com/ indexed but dropped for the most important search phrases
link:www.domain1.com/ returns our backlinks
link:www.domain1.com/index.shtml no matches found
internal pages link to the home page as [domain1.com...]
toolbar:
www.domain1.com/ - pr5
www.domain1.com/index.shtml - white bar
think it should mean index.shtml is indexed and treated as a page different than www.domain2.com/? then why no matches found when I search for www.domain1.com/index.shtml?
domain2.com:
both search for www.domain2.com & for www.domain2.com/index.shtm return our web-site's home page
link:www.domain2.com/ returns our backlinks
link:www.domain2.com/index.shtml returns the same number of backlinks as for the previos search
toolbar:
www.domain2.com/ - pr5
www.domain2.com/index.shtml - pr 5
so in this case it looks like google treats www.domain2.com and www.domain2.com/index.shtml as the same page
and yes, in this case inner pages link to the home-page as www.domain2.com/index.shtml, and external inbound links mostly use www.domain2.com in anchor tag
in opposite for domain1 we could not find a single link pointing to it as www.domain1.com/index.shtml, there are www,domain1.com/ links only
would appreciate if someone could comment on this, is there anything behind that? should I change the inner linking structure or any settings? add redirects? or just stop thinking about this all :)
sorry if speculating about it is a meaningless exercise, just cannot figure out any other reason why both domain1 and domain2 have dropped from #1-5 to #300 - #580 :) I have reasons to think anchor text filter and seo-filter is not the reason, at least in my case
I tried your suggestion, but no luck.
Something that's been bothering me is why Google haven't put out a press release. Usually when a company messes up it's customary to put out a press release to say exactly what happened and how soon it will be fixed in order to reassure customers and investors.
A colleague of mine suggested that by issuing a press release Google have far more to lose than to gain since if the majority of the searching public - including future investors - haven't yet noticed any significant changes in the SERPS, Google would not benefit by drawing attention to them.
Either that, or everything is going entirely to Google's plan... in which case there would be no need for a press release...
Either way, as soon as Google has some real search engine competition and the market is more diversified, the happier I'll be.
Go nutch...
Either that, or everything is going entirely to Google's plan... in which case there would be no need for a press release...
That's exactly my thought. It is a well planned move.
I am doing some experiments that seem to be bearing fruit.
It's too early to draw solid conclusions but the keys areas involved are title, meta and on page.
A definitive find so far is:
keyword1 keyword2 exact phrase match in either title or meta will get you killed for that phrase.
On page dosen't seem to hurt that much.
What I did is examine the "layout" of both the title and meta using different search terms in conjunction with the two keywords.
I will post more when I believe it will be of more help, right now, i need to get my latest pages indexed to tell if I am going in a clear direction, and not just seeing fluke results.
> keyword1 keyword2 exact phrase match in either title or meta will get you killed for that phrase.
Not true - The filter only applies to certain phrases, and even when it does apply, there are some pages surviving with keyword1 keyword2 exact phrase match in title.
I see examples of sites on page one of current SERP's for their important keyword pair, where "kw1 kw2" are the first two words of the Title, the META description, the META keywords list, visible text on page...and this pair of words is definitely the money phrase, hard hit in Florida. Some sites still there.
Just an FYI,
caveman
Yes that is very true.
I guess I should have been more definitave about the keywords being "money keywords"
Site at top with phrase in title, meta, and on page>
Yes, I have seen those also, but I believe they are there either because of off page factors (ie link text) or the page has not been updated in recent times.
I probably should have stated: for pages with no outside optimization.
A site I had that was gluded to # 1 throughout this entire debacal is now gone. I had not updated the site for over three months.
Made a change five days ago, and now it's gone.
Only change made was changing the date 2003 to 2004 in my copyright line at the bottom of the page.
Nothing else.
The third place page for this search DOES have the phrase in the title and description, and IS an index page. But it doesn't carry the keyword phrase anywhere else on the page. It's also PR6.
In all three cases, the high ranking index pages use kw1 and kw2, and variations (stem, singular/plural) of kw1 & kw2 on their pages, but more often not adjacent to each other.
Looks like PageRank gained increased importance, while the advantage previously given to stuffing keyword phrases in title and page text has been removed. And some sort of penalty applied that kills index pages that cross a density threshold for two-word phrases in title and page text.
