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Kackle - can you explain the "dictionary" for me? And how I might benefit from it - Im reading your posts hard but dont see where youre coming from.
Sure. But you have to act quickly. Google will fix this one just like they fixed the hyphen.
1. Google is depreciating pages/sites that are over-optimized for certain keywords or keyword combinations. It does this by looking up search terms in a dictionary of target keywords or keyword pairs that it has compiled. This dictionary is Top Secret, because if you knew what was in the dictionary, you could avoid these words in your optimization efforts.
2. If the search term or terms hit on a dictionary entry, the search results for that user's search are flagged. This means that before the results are delivered, the order of the links, or even the inclusion of links, are adjusted so as to penalize pages that have overoptimizated for those terms. Most likely the title, headlines, links and anchor text are examined. It's possible that external anchor text pointing to that page has also been pre-collected and is available for scanning, but this is much less likely. (Besides, external links are not something within your immediate control, so don't worry about it right now.)
3. You want to find out which keywords that are relevant to your site are in Google's dictionary. Compile as many relevant keywords you can think of that searchers might use to find your site. Now take these words singly and in pairs, according to how users might search. Run two searches for each combination and compare the results.
4. If the results are strikingly different for the pre-filter and the post-filter search on a particular term or combination of terms, it means that some variation of those terms has been flagged because something was found in Google's dictionary.
5. Do lots of searches and you can come up with a list of "sensitive" words that you'll want to avoid when you re-optimize your pages.
It's a nice weekend project.
At the end of the day - I need to rank for keywordx. See where my problem is with what the "dictionary" gives me?
No, at the end of the day you need to rank for words that people might use to find your site. You don't necessarily need to rank for the keywords you were using before.
If you think hard and come up with synonyms, there are probably at least 10 words that a searcher might use and happily end up on your site. If you then add all the unique pairs for these 10 words, that gives you 45 unique pairs. So far we have 55 tests you can do. If you discover 20 words or pairs out of these 55 tests that look like they are hitting something in the dictionary, that still leaves you with enough words to re-optimize your site.
If you were number 2 and now you are 800, I would think that you'd want to avoid bad words like the plague.
I concur that it may be too early to start re-optimizing. All I'm suggesting is that there's a small window of opportunity to run some tests and figure out what's in that dictionary. Maybe you won't need to use this information after all. But if it turns out that you need it and it is no longer possible to collect it because Google fixed the glitch, then you'll be out of luck.
One one of them (highly competitive, almost 10 million results!), in the Top-10, 5 of them were educational, 4 of them were news media, and 1 of them was a blog. None of them were what someone typing in this search was probably looking for.
On another one of them (again, highly competitive, almost 8 million results), several of the Top-10 only had one of the keywords in the title (one did not have any!), and many of the sites were not exact matches to what I was searching for. What was an exact match (unlike the SERPs), were the 8 "sponsored" listings that also appeared on that page!
Hmmm...
(I'm not in the sex site business, by the way :)
[edited by: aspdesigner at 7:27 am (utc) on Nov. 22, 2003]
There is more to it than just the words...For example with some adult terms what we see is that the regular paysites are gone, but sites that sell DVD's are on top. These sites have all the same words often repeated many times but they are still ranking.
Just by observation you can arrive at a way to improve your rankings, and if you suss out the dictionary and the optimization threshold you can be on top.
Sure give us the results in a few days!
Indeed I will. There are unintentional de-optimization techniques evident in the remaining commercial site in the top ten. Back up of the original page at hand and ready to upload though!
<added>that commercial site is ranking the highest they've ever managed and are now throwing a mv "Fatal Error"</added>
[edited by: Edouard_H at 7:49 am (utc) on Nov. 22, 2003]
Just tried a search for - location car dealers
The first few results appeared to be related sites with near-duplicate content (been seeing a lot of this in Florida as well, anyone else?)
However, what was more interesting was that in the listed titles in the SERPs, the words -
Car Dealership
were highlighted. As you know, highlighted words in the title are those that match the search terms. But I did NOT include "dealership" in my search!
Is G doing word stemming on titles now?
Then buy an Adword.
Interesting research...What I don't understand is that when I type in my keywrd1 keywrd2 keywrd3 -dafdlk I am in the #7 spot. Weird thing is that I've never been in that #7 spot pre-update. I am now #12 for just keywrd1 keywrd2 keywrd3 At least I'm on the 2nd page for my main keyphrase and not completely obliterated! But oh how I'd love to have that #7 spot ;)
>On another one of them (again, highly competitive, almost 8 million results), several of the Top-10 only had one of the keywords in the title (one did not have any!), and many of the sites were not exact matches to what I was searching for. What was an exact match (unlike the SERPs), were the 8 "sponsored" listings that also appeared on that page!Then buy an Adword.
rfgdxm1, I have no need to do so, as I indicated, I am not in the sex site business, just testing-out Kackle's theory on what I figure would be a highly competitive commercial search.
However, if what you are implying is true, then Google would be in apparent violation of the FTC guidelines and federal consumer protection law!
Thank you Kackle...your post has been incredibly revealing.
Based on a number of tests, there seems to be filtering of 'dictionary word' on the following:
Title, body text, and external inbound link anchor text (I guess you call them backlink anchortext).
Title: when searching for keyword1 keyword2, pages without the keyword in combo in the title showed up first.
when searching with keyword1 keyword2 -fufufuf, some pages with the keyword combo in the title appear in the top 10 that were missing before
Body Text: Same thing for body text
External Inbound Links Anchortext: This is the scary one for me, because I have over 100 external links to my site with my main keyword combo as the anchor text.
How I could tell that anchor text is being filtered is this:
There is a website 'BlueWidgetsPro.com' that sells blue widgets. Another website 'All-About-Blue-Things.com' has placed a duplicate copy of 'BlueWigetsPro.com's' home page on their website under the URL:
All-About-Blue-Widgets.com/BlueWidgetsPro.html
The actual home page of 'BlueWidgetsPro' has the exact same HTML code as the copy of the page on All-About-Blue-Widgets.com/BlueWidgetsPro.html
But when you search for blue widgets, the
All-About-Blue-Widgets.com/BlueWidgetsPro.html
comes up #1! Even though they both have the exact same HTML!
When I search for blue widgets -fufufu, the home page of BlueWidgetsPro.com comes up #1, and the other site's All-About-Blue-Widgets.com/BlueWidgetsPro.html is buried at about #50!.....
So what is the difference between the 2 pages? (They both have the same page rank by the way)
When you do LINK:BlueWidgetsPro.com, you find about 60 external links, and about half of them have 'Blue Widgets' as the anchor text. So it is getting penalized for having 'Blue Widgets' as the external anchor text.
Then you do:
LINK:All-About-Blue-Widgets.com/BlueWidgetsPro.html
There are only 5 links, and none of them use 'Blue Widgets' as the anchor text.
My conclusion is that either the backlinks anchor text is being filtered/penalized, or the new backlinks have just not been added yet to the mix, so the pages with the best backlinks aren't showing up yet... Hope that made sense.
I'm appending all of my searches with:
-thesearetherealgooglesearchresults
although the results using:
-better
are actually quite a bit better, but I don't care for the
-best
results at all. And searching for the:
-perfect
results? Just shows me that there is no such thing.
-Jason
Instead of using some algo to compile and create a 'dictionary', I think Google is just using the the keyword combos in AdWords. If you use Adwords, then you are selling things....People only Spam when they want to sell something , right? People only use AdWords when they want to sell something, right?
To get rid of spam, just filter for over optimization of AdWords keywords... makes sense to me. Anybody....
Yeah- interesting. keyword1 keyword2 -jgdjg returns good results- even if the site I manage wasn't #4 with that eliminator...they are all good solid results.
No, at the end of the day you need to rank for words that people might use to find your site. You don't necessarily need to rank for the keywords you were using before.
Sometimes, there is a very niche market wherein very few terms or phrases are used. About 80% of all sales come from keyword1 keyword2 and that phrase is in the dictionary.
The site is not in the first 1,000 results now. Using your technique the site is #4 like I mentioned.
Nearly *all* companies were wiped from the SERP. Even a search for "keyword1 keyword2 company" does not bring up quality companies! LOL. Just 1 company comes up.
One dmoz category link, One yahoo category link, a BUNCH of AOL, Homestead, and Earthlink pages dominate the phrase that _specifically_ searches for companies.
Site was voted for best in the industry last year and is up for best web forum in the industry this year.
It ranked Page 1 for 6 months and Top 20 for 2 years for the phrase.
The current results are of aol home pages taking #3 AND #4, with a dmoz directory link at #8. A few other generally poor sites stuck in. #1 and #2 are still good for that SERP though out of 3,540,000 results. ;)
WB
I hope this is the case.
So do I, Thomas. Again, I can't believe that Google would be that stupid.
But I am a bit worried by what I am seeing in the SERPs to test Kackel's theory.
Hopefully, this is just a glitch in the new update.
"keywords in general"
What the hell does that mean? LOL. Every search term is freaking keyword. Every combination of words is a keyword phrase.
Reality is Google has devalued anchor text, even if it is still right at the top of most important things. Google has dramatically increased the value of words on a page. Google has eliminated with this update huge amounts of trivial, low content sites.
Now Google needs to add to these very positive steps by eliminating the different kinds of spam that have appeared, as well as add at least a minimal amount of theming to the results so that more niche authority sites can compete (and defeat) general authority sites as well as gibberish text and list of links pages (that have good words on the page value but really aren't themselves about the topic).
The black helicopter theories are funny up to a point, but I'm finding it interesting that what seems pretty obvious (as a conspiracy theory) isn't even mentioned... that this is the information algo, and that widget sellers are all being herded over to Froogle, as news is herded into Google News, and as blogs will be herded over to an un-named blog engine.
Information is ruling now. They just need to weight the theme of the information better, and address the on-page low relevance types sites like link pages that have popped up.
And for the first time in a year, from a strictly seo point of view, the thing to do now is not get more and more links links links, the thing to do is to get more and more content on pages.
[edited by: steveb at 8:28 am (utc) on Nov. 22, 2003]
This is imo an english language update, the new features Goolge brought in lately (define,local search, broad match) are all english none of those are available in german language, therefore german search terms are rather unaffected.
