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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.
I think the suggestion that Google is temporarily messed up makes more sense than some of the wackier theories in this thread. There may also be less emphasis on allintext: and more on anchor text.
should hire 100 guys going through spam reports....
that would keep the results a lot clearer.....
Their are some things that humans can do better then computers :)
However....
Google does respond to Spam reports and sites have been deleted due to human intervention. Google is trying to build a fool proof system without the requirements of a human being.
With billions of web pages indexed already and the expected growth of web pages in the coming years it will make it very difficult for humans to manage. Google has already managed to indexed all those web pages, display the correct results and update on a daily basis.
When you start to employ many humans to do the job you will run the risk of sites being banned for no particular reason(a few dollars in pocket would do the trick).
Although I have suffered in this update so far I have more trust in computers then humans, computers don't make mistakes thay just need to be re-configured.
Google is going through this reconfiguration period and it's going to be a very bumpy ride but at the end of the day they will have the best freely indexed search engine producing the most relevent and update results on the internet.
This is no short term tactic by Google.
:)
If this is the case I would say Google has lost its direction and forgot what got them so far in the first place.
The results are no good. People don't have time to sort through search results that are no good.
JMO
It made sense a few days ago when Google delivered poor results to Yahoo! It was a good idea to make Yahoo! perform low bandwidth until the switch occurs.
During the last 72 hours, Google has been displaying the same poor results as Yahoo! In addition, Google's directory results look really bad.
If a Yahoo! user obtains poor search results, he or she has the option to access Yahoo!'s directory results which look better than results in Google's directory.
There is something wrong with Google.
On the worlds largest search engine, if my existing customer base or future customers type in "widgets.com", no page exists.
Is that even legal? At this point, I don't care about google referrals, but I would like the ability for customers to type in my domain name and get my site.
Cut as a break Google!
jd
[edited by: johnnydequino at 1:20 pm (utc) on Nov. 23, 2003]
Our site is a two word (no hyphen) .com named after an Island off the coast of SA. It has an English way of saying it, and two Spanish ways of saying it, one with "de" between the words which returns different results than the two word search without it. Our tile and description has been the same way with minor adjustments since it was created in 1995. It gets us wonderful placement in ALL search engines and is filled with content.
My fear is that if the update is over and I have to change the home page title and description as well as the text because the name is repeated many times to provide the 3 ways of saying it, what impact will this have on the other search engines?
Are we back to doing doorway pages which will just be filtered at some future update?
Google has to return to a REASONABLE level of optimization to reflect the real world problems that we face in creating proper web sites. Because we have this problem of multiple names with one recurring word is our web site to be penalized?
I would guess that there are thousands of web sites dealing with two word locations that have this same problem.
I might say that as soon as we append the country name we show up just fine. Unfortunately most searchers just enter the two word version.
paniced me too, but try "+widgets.com" instead
It's been this way for weeks! There are several threads that talk about it.
Directory search is just showing the same results as the regular search, and has been for some time. It has nothing to do with this thread.
The last UPDATE this happened to the major keywords but the minor results seemed to stay good -- but now the minor results have become irrelevant (less quality).
When you search for key phrases such as "dry hair" and all you get are message board listings and guestbook pages then things are not good.
Great - now only if I could tell all my prospective customers that!
I think I am in the last stage of the google update - whining.
Then why oh why have I just searched my keywords and for this example I will use "Great Widgets" got a site with 32 uses of the phrase great widgets and then 47 uses of just widgets.
This is a very big money keyword and this spammer has 2nd place in Google is he lucky?
Well a little detective work and this site is a member of googlesyndication.com which means onward transition of visitors (because this site doesn’t actually offer anything they are just a portal) benefits the site by money from Google. Is this a new way for people to get good listings in Google I always thought they were above commercialism!
If when Google Guy wants to respond he can tell me how to join this club and get my site back onto the first page I for one will be very pleased.
It appears that a few things are happening:
1) Im getting more 3 keyword plus traffic, as customers are figuring out that single and two keyword combos returns crap.
2) The adsense traffic has increased, as customers are finding that the ads of the right is much more relevant that the results on the left.
I don't know why Google likes to spend so much time tweeking its algorithm. All the bad guys are eventually going to poke and prod the system until they find out what is causing the penalty, and the level of spam will slowly increase again, and the cycle will repeat itself.
Meanwhile all the good guys are doing the same thing, because we feel that we have unjustily been dropped. It basically forces companies that don't do SEO, into SEO.
On our top search phrase their used to be around 8 million
results, now over 16 million! We were no.3, now nowhere -
although we have still keep most of our rankings for less
competitive keywords.
If a filter is in place, it has let in a lot more sites!
TM
.
Google Directory results have changed again though. Some datacentres are still showing old data, and some have new data. One datacentre with new data reverted to old data yesterday. One datacentre that wasn't responding last week, now has the new version in it.
Responses: -fi timeout; -in old; -va new; -ab old; -dc new; -cw new; -ex new; -zu NO; -sj NO; -mc NO; -kr NO; -gv NO.
(... where "new" is meaning "includes a cat added to dmoz.org in May, that then showed in Google SERPs in July, but only appeared in the Google Directory for the first time on November 2nd")
[edited by: g1smd at 3:46 pm (utc) on Nov. 23, 2003]
