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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.
We have ranked in the top for our category for years, and
we knew who our closest competition was also. Except for one competitor, we all got dropped.
we were dropped along with many of our best competitors. Removed kw1 from a search for kw1 kw2 region and we show up. kw1 appears to be the "bad" word causing us to drop.
What to do about it, when it describes what we do - I haven't decided. Hoping that Google will wake up.
LisaB
When you carry out a standard search in Google now, it shows the same results as their directory search. This is not a coincidence or a mistake.
if your site is bluewidgets.com, and you are optomized for blue widgets with many incoming 'blue widgets' anchortest links....YOU HAVE VANISHED,
BUT, if you have paid to place an ad page on a huge broad info page ith PR6-7-8 related to your niche (example: widgetworld.com which has thousands of pages about all different widget subjects), that page could do very well, quite possibly #1.
Example: Place a full page ad on widgetworld.com so the URL is: widgetworld.com/bluewidgets.html
As long as this ad page is not over optimized, then it should do very well in the current state of google. A key reason is: it's not an index page, and it should have very few backlinks...nobody pays for backlinks to their ad page. Your home page may have 200 backlinks, but your ad page would have maybe 1 or 2..and only an internal link from widgetworld.com.
There are about 6 of these ad pages in the top 10 for my niche, while the home pages for these same companies have vanished.
This would explain a lot of the Amazon listings as well.
CORRECTION: all 15 of the top 15 results for a 3 keyword search combo are NOT homepages!
CORRECTION 2: This seems to be true because all of the homepages for my niche are a maximum of PR5...so the pages on worldwigets.com (PR7 for this site) for those companies (wordlwidgets.com/bluewidgets.html) has a higher PR than the home pages of individual company sites...If you want to advertise, forget banners and links.... you need a fully dedicated page on a decent PR site.
Thanks in advance
SOD That's the best theory I've heard yet. G would maintain its quality search characteristics for non-commercial research on the web & also drive more adwords revenue.
Maybe the free ride is over...besides if your business model cannot withstand having to spend a percentage of revenues on advertising, then maybe its not a viable business model to begin with.
If this is what is happening, it's not such a bad thing.
(Don't throw eggs at me now ok?)
-c
i dont think my sites are being filtered - its just that my index pages are gone from the index.
whats going on? is it a bug or what?
Do you see now, that you can write "editorial" content to your hearts content and Google will still drop you into obscurity in a heartbeat?
Well, they dropped three of my pages out of 3,500+ into obscurity in a heartbeat. :-)
Sure, having tons of pages and sites is, and will always be the best insurance for google, but it would be easier if they just returned the proper results.
I certainly wouldn't argue with that. But finding the recipe that delivers optimum search results can't be easy, and collateral damage tends not to be permanent.
I would suggest that Google crank back the setting that gives #1 search rankings to Amazon.com catalog pages. (I'm guessing those pages are ranking high because they're "fresh." If freshness is the main criterion for a #1 ranking, that's a major weakness in the algorithm because it creates an opening for "freshness spam.")
We have found, if we call up any short phrase from the index page it comes up #1 or #2, (except if it is included in the title) but the only KW from the title that works is the company name.
and they are busy implementing a different algo for each keyphrase - just to keep us guessing
GG is laughing so much his hands can't hit the keyboard
and yes, I've been nuked too - very selectively, for non spammy pages but for keyphrases of obvious interest
Could somebody please explain what the -fufufu -xyzxyz or -dfdf dfdfd means? Is there special signifigance to each letter? I know what they are doing because I can see the different results when they are used. I just don't know what they are.
These are nonsense "exclusion" terms. They can be any combination of characters immediately preceded by a hyphen (i.e., a minus sign). If you enter one or more of these in the search box, Google interprets this as meaning that you want all pages that fulfill your search request except pages that contain these terms. If the characters are nonsense, then it means that you are asking Google to exclude something which would not exist on any page to begin with.
There are two thresholds for this "filter" penalty. One is the dictionary lookup for "bad" words or word pairs. Once you hit in the dictionary, there is a second threshold for whether a page in the SERPs is over-optimized on that dictionary hit. Leading suspects for this second threshold are titles, headlines, anchor text, URLs on the page (domain, path, filename), and URL/anchor text in external links to that page. If both thresholds are met, that page tends to drop like a rock in the SERPs for that particular searcher's request.
There is substantial evidence that the dictionary is mostly "money" words or terms. Noncommercial sites have not been affected. There is even speculation that the dictionary is nothing more than Google's list of Adword terms. This would be very controversial, if it is true.
It appears that adding nonsense exclusion terms to a search confuses the dictionary lookup, so that in many cases the lookup fails. If this first threshold (the lookup) fails, the second threshold (the over-optimization) has no keywords to use, so the page is not penalized. In some cases, more than one exclusion term makes a difference. This could mean that depending on how the search box terms are parsed, a douple pass at the dictionary might be done for some searches. Or, just a greater number of terms in the search box tends to exempt you from the dictionary lookup in the first place.
What many have been noticing is that when the penalty is applied, it's like a sniper attack rather than a shotgun blast. Very specific sites drop completely, while others are unaffected. This argues against those who think that there are some new broad matching rules in place rather than the process I just described.
Bek
[edited by: James_Dale at 7:21 pm (utc) on Nov. 23, 2003]
