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Update Florida - Nov 2003 Google Update Part 4

         

Kackle

5:57 am on Nov 22, 2003 (gmt 0)



Continued from: [webmasterworld.com...]

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.

rfgdxm1

11:59 pm on Nov 22, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



>But this is clearly *not* the tail end of Florida - it is a new update.

My belief too. Update Florida is done. What you are seeing now is the "continuous update" mode Google has been in for a while.

Stefan

12:01 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



How about those of us who lost our posting privileges on WebmasterWorld over a year ago for being too critical of Google, and are now using a new name?

Is that true?

I posted some msg's back during Dom/Esm, with my non-American, anti_Gulf_War_2, Google_as_part of_the_American_Empire views associated with the posts and to my surprise was never banned... specific anti-Google msg's did it though? You sure it wasn't something else? Brett seems, all in all, to be pretty easy going for a Yank... :-)

Kackle

12:03 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)



LOL. Thanks for driving the stake through your own heart. I guess its not the new results bugging you then huh?

Google referrals have been excellent on my nonprofit sites for the last three months. This update didn't affect me at all; in fact, it looks like my traffic is still climbing. But I'm still a fascinated Google Watcher.

Maybe I'm just nervous that 92 percent of all my external referrals to my main site are from Google + Yahoogle. Unlike some people who are enjoying their current results, I can imagine what it's like to drop out of Google.

I take the long view when I look at Google. I'm neither bugged by Google results nor debugged by my site's traffic. I'm an objective observer of the big picture.

BradBristol

12:11 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)



Why would you even think to compare those two numbers. They have nothing to do with each other.

The result numbers are for the same kw searches just one uses allinanchor and the other uses -hfhdyro (or whatever)

You just made my point for me - they have nothing to do with each other.

I also find it offensive that some folks around here think if you are a "newbe" to WebmasterWorld you don't have any knowledge and only have "bizarro" ideas.

steveb

12:34 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



BradBristol, all in anchor is a reflection of words used in anchor text pointing to a page.

The -ssstsrse should list all pages where the word or word are used in any way on a page.

The fact that you don't even know that much should tell you that your jumping to bizarro conclusions is a bad idea and you should learn some of the basics here.

A secrch for left furniture liberation -afefeshs returns 34,000 results.

A search for allinanchor:left furniture liberation returns eleven results.

This isn't strange at all, or worthy of noting (aside from the fact eleven pages in the world have left furniture liberation ancjor text...)

The amount of pages for those two things have nothing to do with each other.

Just being a newbie doesn't mean you have bizarre ideas. But postulating an elaborate theory when you don't know the difference between allinanchor and normal occurences of a search term is bizarre.

Trawler

12:35 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Hi Everyone,

I am a new poster here but have been reading the posts for a few weeks. My websites also got axed in the latest update.

This may be something and maybe not, I am not really that up on SEO but did manage to get to the top many times in the past.

Regarding the searches: Keyword1 Keyword2 ---dfght

If you do this search for your keywords and find your established position and then click on advanced search after your results are returned you will notice that the dfght is appended to the area that says "none of these words"

This leads me to believe it has to be a double filter.

The second half could be almost anything, but the relationship revelancy has to come from the first two words

Hope this makes sense.

BradBristol

12:39 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)



The -ssstsrse should list all pages where the word or word are used in any way on a page.

Wrong again... -ssstsrse would EXCLUDE any pages that have ssstsrse on them.

steveb

12:45 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



"I don't see how these two searches could possibly be returning the same results."

Then to add what should be obvious, the searches return similar but not the exact same results because the previous algorithm relied very very very heavily on anchor text. So, if 670 or so sites have allinanchor results for a term with 2,500,000 occurences, the old Google's results would mostly just be a ranking of those 670 sites, plus a few others with very high additional algorithm factors like page title, pagerank, high density of keywords, etc.

Syaing "I don't see how these two searches could possibly be returning the same results" is simply saying "I don't know how the old Google could use an anchor text based algorithm". But it did. Results previously have conformed very closely to allinanchor -- where allinanchor text exists; when you get to three and four word combinations, anchor text starts occuring too infrequently and other factors became the algorithm.

The non-secret secret, seems to be merely the old algorithm sitting in reserve.

It should not suprise anyone that when moving to a new data set that the Google keeps the old data set handy.

steveb

12:47 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



"Wrong again... -ssstsrse would EXCLUDE any pages that have ssstsrse on them."

Okay now you are just trolling. As I said "The -ssstsrse should list all pages where the word or word are used in any way on a page". The point of searching for discount jewelry -ssstre is to find pages with discount jewlery but not -ssstre. The search term is there, but -ssstre is not.

This stuff is so basic.

[edited by: steveb at 12:48 am (utc) on Nov. 23, 2003]

BradBristol

12:48 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)



steveb obviously one of us does not know what he is talking about...

Marval

12:49 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



rfgdxm1 - as much as I want to - I dont think I agree that the original update is done - although the backlinks have come in the PR that was sitting there has not come in yet - at least on the 200 or sites I look at

DanThies

12:51 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Brad:

As I understand it, you're seeing a great similarity between the top results for an allinanchor: search and the regular keyword search in many cases.

In some cases, the top ten may even be identical. The results aren't usually identical, but for a lot of competitive searches, they're darned close.

I hate to get all speculative, but this just might mean that anchor text is an important factor in Google's algorithm.

If you look at the number of results returned for each of these two searches, you should see very different numbers. The allinanchor: search will generally yield far fewer results.

Stefan

12:53 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



steveb obviously one of us does not know what he is talking about...

He does. You should read his posts more thoroughly. Using, www.site.org -whatevercdsb, is well known to those who have been here for a while. I don't think you've grasped the basic concept yet.

Kackle

1:00 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)



The second half could be almost anything, but the relationship relevancy has to come from the first two words.

That's right, Trawler. Normally, a search that includes the term -qwqzw means, "Do not include any pages that have the word qwqzw in the page." But, since no sane page has qwqzw on the page, this means that normally, adding this has no effect on the search results, compared to a search that did not include this excluded term.

The point of all this interest in adding something that normally makes no difference, is that in one specific situation, it has been shown that it does indeed make a difference. That's the situation where the search terms are sent to what I've called the "dictionary lookup." This lookup is a big collection of bad words and/or bad word pairs. It's killing a lot of sites in this latest update.

Why would it make a difference for the dictionary lookup? It's a bug. There was another bug like this that was very similar, and that was discovered shortly after this update started a week ago. That bug was a hyphen between two keywords. Guess what happened two days ago? Google fixed that bug. Speculation has it that Google will fix this new bug too. That's why we're all hurrying to see what this interesting bug will tell us about what's in the dictionary.

The way we're doing this is to select one or two keywords, run a search with the excluded term, and another without the excluded term. If the keywords tickle something in the dictionary, what many posters have been seeing is that some sites that were normally near the top of the SERPs before this update suddenly vanish, or at least rank much, much lower. This means that the dictionary got tickled somehow. And that means that the reason these sites have taken a dive is because their "over-optimization" has used keywords that tickle the dictionary.

Now consider -- if there's a huge dictionary of bad words or word pairs, wouldn't it be useful to know what's in that dictionary? That way you know what words to avoid.

If you tickled the dictionary with your keywords, then there must be something in the dictionary that responded to one or more of those words. That's all we're doing -- seeing what tickles the dictionary.

BradBristol

1:02 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)



As I understand it, you're seeing a great similarity between the top results for an allinanchor: search and the regular keyword search in many cases.

Yes a similarity but they are not the same results as was stated by steveb. That was my point.

Actually the difference was between an allinanchor search and an exclusion search like this -kjkdgfkdf.

Now how about we get back on topic...

Dave_Hawley

1:07 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)



"New User" posters should be paying attention to the isolated posts from members here who have more than 500 posts to their credit, instead of latching onto whatever bizarro idea some newbie concocts.

That's right, then you could also post how the latest Google shuffle dropped you from all SERP's.

Dave

claus

1:09 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



...thanks for the reminder:

Welcome to WebmasterWorld all new posters :)

It's not a general attitude that new posters have no valuable points to make and i don't really think that it was steveb's intention to say that either. It's just that these threads naturally lend themselves to all kinds of theories and speculation, some of it might even turn out to be valuable information, but not all will.

I'd personally just say that it's easy to get carried on in the debate sometimes, especially as things like these is what a lot of members make their living from... please try to keep a good tone even when you disagree with someone - readership is always much larger than the number of posters ;)

/claus

LateNight

1:21 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



If it is a dictionary it must be rapidly growing. It was my index page - now it the words on subpages that have gone missing. Ouch...

steveb

1:24 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I didn't say anything to putdown new users, but new users would do well to search the archives here around the time of major updates. Several things occur each time.
- a bunch of "new users" appear wondering what is going on
- several people with something in common, usually but not always fixated on their own sites, come up with some poppycock theory which is plainly contradicted by most sites at the top of the serps, but which sends many new users on destructive wild goose chases where they do unsensible things, like changing their headers or title tags or anchor text.

There are pages and pages here on an idea that exploded into a million pieces when it was discovered the phenomenon held true for all individual words, but in the meantime some posters actually went out and made changes to their sites. Not good.

BradBristol

1:25 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)



Thanks for the Welcome :-)

Kackle explained it much better than I could or did in his/her last post.

I am open to hear anyone give a reasonable explanation of why adding the exclusion with nonsense letters in it brings up pages that have been dropped in the serp.

But the fact is that at the moment using the same keywords in a normal search and an exclusion search (with nonsense letters) does bring up different results for certain keywords. When as Kackle pointed out the results should be the same only minus the pages that have the nonsense text on them.

<eddited for spelling>

[edited by: BradBristol at 1:39 am (utc) on Nov. 23, 2003]

Newman

1:27 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Update is not done!
When I search for my phrase on -in data center Google shows results with two sponsored links on top, and that result is not yet live. My phrase never had sponsored links on Google results before.
Penalization for over-optimized sites?
Googleguy said no penalties on my site despite full optimization.
I have an important question!
What is with Google feedback reply? Does anybody receive mail with answers from webmaster [at] google.com (for missing index page)?

[edited by: Newman at 1:40 am (utc) on Nov. 23, 2003]

otnot

1:30 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



What I have noticed is that my 3 word anchor text is holding me at #1 in the natural results but for any combinations of 2 KW's my index page is gone except when I use KW KW -whatever.

KW KW
google.com #0 out of 1,300,000
allinanchor #5 out of 2,410
allintext #5 out of 1,280,000
allint title #3 out of 2,950
KW KW -whatever #4 out of 1,210,000

KW KW KW
googl.com #1 out of 138,000
allanchor #1 out of 170
allintext #1 out of 137,000
allintitle #1 out of 329
KW KW KW -what #1 out of 120,000

I hope this helps.

aspdesigner

1:41 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Google "theming" on drugs?


I have a contender for least relevant SERPS on the new index [users.htcomp.net...] (a real estate site selling ranches) is top ten for jewelry. Can anyone beat that?

Not only is that result completely non-relevant, but the word "jewelry" does not appear anywhere on the page!


I have a suspicion that the page used to have relevant content for "jewelry".

Nope. Check the cache. Then check the listed title & snippet for this page in the SERP. The Top-10 jewelry listing for this real estate page was based on it's current real estate content. The snippet is particularly interesting - note that there are no bold words, as there were no keywords matches anywhere in the content! Not exactly what I would expect from a Top-10 listing on a extremely competitive search that returns almost 23 million results!

But check-out the back-links, a number of them are from jewelry-related sites. That doesn't mean that this site is, though (obviously, not, in this case!)

Perhaps somebody smokin' somethin' at the 'plex suddenly decided that top listings should now be selected based on the "theme" of the backlink sites?

Kackle

1:47 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)



What I have noticed is that my 3 word anchor text is holding me at #1 in the natural results but for any combinations of 2 KW's my index page is gone except when I use KW KW -whatever.

Yes, all of these tests are helpful. So, either your third keyword was a "Get out of jail" card or the filter only goes two keywords deep. What was your third keyword? If you try it alone, is there any evidence that it's in the dictionary? Probably not. Then the next question is, can you come up with other "Get out of jail" keywords for the third term? What happens if you use KW KW KW without the -nonsense term?

Finally, what happens if you use KW3 as the first term in your search, and follow it with KW1, KW2. Any difference?

So many questions, so little time....

claus

1:47 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Anyone tried:

allintext: keyword keyword

...and compared to the -asdfsaf? I'd have thought it to be identical, but it seems it's just very similar.

As i see it, it has the same effect as doing a quoted search ("keyword1 keyword2"). The keyword-dash-keyword did the same thing, didn't it? It seems like an operator that means "all searchterms are equally important" or something like that...."exact phrase"?

/claus
edit:added last part


Added: If there is such a thing as an "exact phrase" search, that does not show the default serps, then the default serps are not searches for the exact phrase - they must be broad matches.
Added: Found it - had to go back to part post #138 of part two [webmasterworld.com] to find it:

keyword1-keyword2 on Google just does a phrase search along the lines of searching for "keyword1 keyword2". It limits results to pages that have that exact phrase on the page, or possibly in anchors.

[edited by: claus at 3:51 am (utc) on Nov. 23, 2003]

Dave_Hawley

1:49 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)



Not only is that result completely non-relevant, but the word "jewelry" does not appear anywhere on the page!

The results look fine to me. You will always end up with a couple of spammy sites in SERPs

Dave

[edited by: Dave_Hawley at 1:50 am (utc) on Nov. 23, 2003]

pele

1:50 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



To me it's like a game studying the google ratings. So when it started acting strange and not the normal moondance, I took notice, then it really went berzerk so I decided to check around to find answers instead of just guessing WHY. Because at first, I thought it was a bug or maybe the server got messed up but after watching the results from my sites and reading as much as possible it seems more like it's just overzealous filtering. It just needs to be tweaked and then maybe it will be better than before. Most people use specific searches that bring me to the top of the list. My one site is unaffected by it all while the other is bouncing around. Hopefully it gets sorted soon and the dust settled things will be fine.

rfgdxm1

1:56 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



>Perhaps somebody smokin' somethin' at the 'plex suddenly decided that top listings should now be selected based on the "theme" of the backlink sites?

Search for "Googlebombing". Anchor text of inbound links can make a site rate high even if it has no relevant content.

aspdesigner

1:57 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member




The results look fine to me. You will always end up with a couple of spammy sites in SERPs

It was not a spammy site. Please re-read my post to see what I was getting at.

markis00

2:04 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I am pretty sure the update isn't done. My site has been botted many times in the last few days; I made changes to my homepage, and those aren't even showing up. I made those changes yesterday and I've been crawled many times since, and none of those changes appeared for searches for my homepage (my site is still missing from SERPS, too).

Well, if the update was supposed to be done Wednesday, and it's not, when will it be done and things return to normal?

steveb

2:04 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



"reasonable explanation"

They are the old anchor-text based results. Perhaps Google is not running the new algorithm on search phrases with the -gsretsre exclusion. Perhaps they are deliberately keeping this data unchanged as a reserve of some sort. Perhaps somebody at the 'plex forgot to flip the "add nonsense word exclusion searches to the algo" button (I think it is the pink one).

Whatever the reason, the -systsrs exclusion is merely bringing up pre-florida style results. Another way of saying that is: heavily anchor text weighted results.

Why they left that data there (at least temporarily) is one question. Why something so mundane generates a conspiracy theory is another question.

otnot

2:09 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Kackle:

KW3 #163 out of 5,558,000 money word
KW3 KW2 KW1 #11 out of 126,000
KW3 KW1 KW2 #2 out of 131,000
KW2 KW3 KW1 #3 out of 131,000
KW2 KW1 KW3 #0 out of 131,000

I have five KW's in my Title that through combinations I make up my Adwords KW's. All the money combo's are gone. I have been advertising for a year now and was finally going to cut the umbilical cord and go it without adwords and now this.

Josecito

2:09 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



i get a lot of spam sites on top 10 SERP of my keywords, that sux

Josecito

2:10 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



what can i do with the damn spam sites?

JasonR

2:11 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Greetings, all:

Over the last seven days, I'm actually noticing a marked increase in traffic from Alta Vista.

I find this fascinating, in that I've held the #1 positions across the board for the key terms people use to find this site for quite some time to compare with.

Alta Vista usually comprises between .8 - 1.1% of referral traffic, with an average of 1.1% over a one year period ( #1 spots on all search engines but google-derived currently ).

This last seven day period, they've jumped a point to 1.9%. Considering I haven't seen them this high in years, I thought it was a neat anomoly.

Google has not lost any ground via a comparison... Traffic is UP by a good 2 points by comparing the last week to a yearly average; however, it is up via less relevant results. I'm getting alot of traffic on money words at a non-profit site that I shouldn't really be getting.

It's converting @ 8.7% on my adsense account though.

I didn't even see this sort of shift back in June.

This data comes from a site w/ 30k page views monthly.

Anyone out there with a serious wide-range traffic flow ( drawing traffic from a wide range of related searches ) seeing any shifts in search engine referrals?

- Jason

aspdesigner

2:12 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member




Search for "Googlebombing"...

I am quite familiar with the term already, thank you very much.

Many posters here have been observing that the inbound link text ranking parameter has been tuned down quite a bit (or even penalized) in the Florida update.

My observation was not about the link text, but rather, the actual theme of the back-link sites themselves (i.e. - that many backlink sites were jewelry-related).

rfgdxm1

2:13 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



>Why they left that data there (at least temporarily) is one question. Why something so mundane generates a conspiracy theory is another question.

This could just be a Google bug. Since it will only rarely effect real world punters out there doing searches, all kinds of low as a priority at the Googleplex.

tantalus

2:18 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Steveb as much as you want anchor text not to be a factor anymore, it is.

I checked the first five links for [users.htcomp.net...] and they all point using 'Custom Jewelry Webring'.

I know other sites for a competitive term that are merely a frame around another site which hold their place purely on incoming anchor text.

Sorry but Kackle has something and its not incoming anchor text.

Dave_Hawley

2:20 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)



It was not a spammy site. Please re-read my post to see what I was getting at.

Perhaps a bad choice of word, but I cannot see how you could know if the site got to be there via "spammy" techniques?

The bottom lines are;

The SERP's will never please all of the people all of the time.

There will always be an irrelevant page in any search result.

Dave

BradBristol

2:23 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)



steveb, I think you are choosing not to look at or consider all the evidence that has been shown here in post after post.

I don't understand why you keep wanting to believe that people that are trying to work out what has happened are creating some conspiracy theory. Maybe it has to do with todays anniversary of JFK’s assignation.

But hey, that’s your opinion and I respect that. But is rather silly that you just keep repeating it over and over.

flicker

2:25 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



If there were a secret Google dictionary of "money" keyphrases which were attracting penalties, and this was the explanation for the "-asdf -asdf" thing, you would then expect that searches for something obscure and financially useless, such as "Mongolian yurt," would look identical with "-asdf -asdf" and without it. Not the case; results 5-10 on that search are shuffled around a bit. So unless the "money dictionary" has "Mongolian yurt" in it, that can't be the explanation.

The anchor text theory continues to explain the discrepancies simply and adequately. Results for Mongolian yurts are only slightly affected, because no one in their right mind is optimizing for that. Results for hotly contested phrases are going crazy, because everyone with 500 anchor-text links was in the top two pages last month and now suddenly they're on a level playing ground with sites that only have 30 anchor-text links, and consequently some sites are gaining or losing 150 places while this sorts out. Meanwhile the sites which had great ranking from Google for reasons other than anchor text, such as a ton of inbound links or on-page stuff or high PR or whatever--or for non-anchor-text-related spam techniques for that matter--are holding or gaining ground.

I've had people lately putting spam links to themselves on my stupid guestbook... I mean, I have about 8 friends who read that thing, and there's only one link in to the guestbook, so it must be useless for hits or PR purposes. The spammers must have just wanted an 878th copy of their same adult keyphrases in anchor text to them. Maybe adjusting Google so that the value of repeated anchor text drops off after a certain point will make this spam technique less valuable. The downside is that other, different spam is becoming more visible, but I'm sure they're working on that. And, of course, good sites that relied heavily on anchor text for promotion are taking a beating. But it shouldn't take long for them to integrate some other promotional techniques.

In the meantime, non-commercial/non-competitive searches are looking great. My educational site's down a few positions, but I assume that's because it had previously been artificially inflated by extra anchor text (something it seems automatically happened to sites with the topic in the title, because that's how other sites link to you). All the sites ahead of mine are also good sites with real content. There used to be porn spam on the second and third pages of this search, and it's all gone now. Presumably anchor text had been keeping it afloat (it certainly had nothing to do with the topic). I'm glad to see it gone. (-:

aspdesigner

2:35 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



RE: the -dhsjsda thing

I do not believe, as some here have suggested, that this is returning "old" database results.

First, from a programming perspective, it makes no sense that the addition of a simple exclusion word to a search phrase would cause it to go to a completely separate database. In addition, the SERPs I am observing are not the same as pre-florida (and also include new sites).

My best guess is that it's a programming screw-up. Part of the new ranking code is either not activating properly for these searches, or the code can't "handle" exclusions yet, so it is disabling itself for searches that include them.

Either way, this discovery is QUITE valuable, as it gives us the opportunity to observe and compare SERPs with and without this new filter, and hopefully discern exactly "what" effect it is having on the rankings.

aspdesigner

2:37 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Miss Understood, I agree with you on the title thing.

BTW, has anyone noticed the difference in the titles on Top-10 results with and without a -dhsad?

johnnydequino

2:38 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Interesting - I have "super" fresh tags right now - changes reflected on my home page I just did yesterday afternoon are in cache, but no home page on search. Google, why must you torture me?

jd

Zak1955

2:40 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)



Even though it says I'm a new user, I'm not a new user at all. I'm a respected and successful designer and SEO that has relied on this forum for years for information on how to do my job.

I hold a great deal of respect for the knowledge that flows from this forum and very seldom find a need to comment, because the efforts of others usually bring forth the true answers to all our questions.

Throughout the last trying week, I've watched all the conspiracy theories and the flooding speculations of what could have been changed to undermine all our hard work to be No. #1 for our clients.

We have followed the rules to the tee, we rank the very highest in every search engine on the net. Now, when we see all our efforts completely ignored and thrown aside for ridiculous search engine results, we are quick to assume that it is something we have done wrong and need to make immediate changes...

It is in such times we all need to take a moment and look at the truths. We have done our jobs properly... We have several other successful search engines to clarify that. We have followed the rules of not only Google, but all search engines.

This is obviously an attempt on Google to better themselves, as can be expected from a winner. Whether or not is is successful or not, remains to be seen.

Yet, we all have to look at the reality that in its present state, this is not only devastating for us, but Google as well. The ridiculous search results are costing them audience, that may never come back. Ultimately, such drastic moves could result in the demise of what is the most powerful force on the Internet.

Myself, I'm confident that the folks at Google are scurrying to correct the "wrongs," and this will soon be corrected. For those of you who are speculating on how you can change your sites to make them work on the new Google algo, my suggestion is, "Don't worry about it!"

If the overall consensus of a decade of search engines analysis and research is suddenly wrong, then Google can let it be wrong. BUT, I'm putting my money and efforts on what has worked successfully for years!

In the end, I think we will all find that not changing a thing will be in our best interest. If Google continues on the track they are now, they will lose their lose their audience and we will still be the winners on the winning search engines.

So, with all that said, I'm going to sit back and enjoy my Saturday night after a very trying week, have a few cold ones.

Myself, I have great faith that Google will get all this straightened out very soon. They are winners and will continue to be! S... happens..

Crisco

2:55 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)



aspdesigner wrote "Many posters here have been observing that the inbound link text ranking parameter has been tuned down quite a bit (or even penalized) in the Florida update. "

They have observed incorrectly!

Firstly, it would be very easy for users to directly affect other's site's by putting up "targeted" anchor text links and directed them to a competitors site.

Secondly, if your sites name is red-widgets.com I DONT see how they could possibly penalize a site for having links pointing to them such as visit < red-widgets.com > .

I dont think this has anything to do with anchor text selection regarding inbound links.

superscript

2:57 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)



It's not Florida - it's a new update! - we're just going through the juggling phase - don't panic

(he said..., as he collapsed on the floor)

<edit: grammatical for dramatic effect>

otnot

3:02 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



This has probably been mentioned before. If you use 3KW's or more your index page will show up? I used 3 KW's from my title and any word from my text and guess what my sites are ranked well again.

Kackle

3:07 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)



steveb says:

Whatever the reason, the -systsrs exclusion is merely bringing up pre-florida style results. Another way of saying that is: heavily anchor text weighted results. Why they left that data there (at least temporarily) is one question. Why something so mundane generates a conspiracy theory is another question.

I don't think you appreciate the significance of this latest update.

In Google's history to date, ranking has been primarily determined by PageRank. This calculation was so intensive that it took several days to compute for the entire web. Consequently, it was done once per monthly crawl.

Other factors were used for ranking on-the-fly. Since every search result produced only the top 10 or top 100 or top 1000 results based on PageRank, this subset of results was small enough to put through a real-time analysis that included dozens of other factors. Most of these involved on-page factors -- title, headlines, domain, path + filename, etc. The external link analysis and anchor text was presumably done at the same time as the crawl, or when PageRank was calculated. In fact, some of the on-page considerations were probably pre-computed also, as there is room for coding it in the inverted index, as described in that famous early paper by Brin and Page.

With this update, we see a new kind of on-the-fly ranking that is throwing out pages that always ranked high under the old criteria. It's effectively a cancellation of previous criteria. It seems that this is done on the fly, otherwise we wouldn't be able to switch it on and off by exploiting a minor bug.

It appears that this new filter is based on keywords, plus what Google perceives as over-optimization. This is a departure from old methods. The mere fact that top sites are tanking based on their use of particular keywords is evidence enough that something new has happened.

It's not just another ranking phenomenon. If you were sitting pretty for years in Google, and suddenly you disappear for your carefully-chosen keywords, it's not just "Ho-hum, the algo was tuned again."

The imperative is to understand what has changed. The mere fact that WebmasterWorld traffic related to this update has skyrocketed should tell you that something is different. The posts from dozens of webmasters who are trying to understand what happened should tell you that something is different. Yet you sit at your keyboard and tell us that everything is normal.

The change in Google for top English-language e-commerce sites is so drastic that it suggests a reordering of priorities at the Googleplex. Alternately, it's possible that Google is increasingly incompetent with their algorithms. Or perhaps Google is competent when they want to be, but they are so focused on getting rich that they don't care about algorithms anymore. Any of these three possibilities is very interesting to many people -- even if you aren't one of those webmasters who is suddenly seeing a loss of traffic and income.

I don't understand how you can dismiss all this interest in this update, and claim that everything is normal. Clearly something has changed, and you have yet to tell us what Google is doing differently that explains all the changes that have been observed. Your complaint that newbies are misleading other newbies won't fly.

Sorry about that, but it is simply unconvincing. Something else is happening here.

steveb

3:11 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



"In Google's history to date, ranking has been primarily determined by PageRank"

Well, hopefully this will help people see that you obviously know nothing about this. You should stop confusing people.

For the past six months anchor text has been the primary determiner of the serps, as all allinanchor has closely paralleled the actual serps.
===

"Clearly something has changed"

The algorithm.

otnot

3:20 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I now think that Google is sooo smart. They have in effect made it very difficult to spam by making people search by using more than 3 KW's. By narrowing down their searches to exactly what they want. It now makes sense why they did away with common words in the searches and included a dictionary. They have been building to this for months. I have been watching my stats and the majority of the people who find my site are using phrases not 2kw's or even 3kws but whole sentences. I can use a combination of my 2kw's and any word in my text that is not even relevent to what the 2 kw's are about and it pulls up my site #1.

Maybe I've finally lost it and need a few brews to clear out the cobwebs. Hmmm Good Idea!

Dave_Hawley

3:22 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)



RE: For the past six months......

The past 6 months have been no different than any other as far as what we (not in the Google know) *know*. All guess work and supposition.

Dave

aspdesigner

3:24 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Some results of a little experiment -


Normal / with -

Search 1 (8 million, Top-10 results) -

All keywords in title...6 / 9
Exact phrase in title...0 / 8
Only 1 keyword in title.2 / 0
No keyword in title.....2 / 1

Search 2 (4 million, Top-10 results) -

All keywords in title....7 / 9
Exact phrase in title....5 / 8
Only 1 keyword in title..3 / 1
No keyword in title......0 / 0

See the changes on the top listings for titles?

Note - I've now noticed that some searches are now returning the same (bad) results with or without the -dsajkd. Are they "fixing" this little bug?

frup

3:37 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



otnot has a point, GoogleGuy once said that the future is multiple keyword searches.

dazzlindonna

3:42 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



hmmm...

keyword1 keywording (notice the ing at the end of second keyword) and my page is lost.

keyword1 keyword (no ing) and i am number one again.

this probably doesn't apply to most searches that are singular/plural, but for the ing type words, this might be significant.

my title and optimization is based on keyword1 keywording. i do have the non-ing word form a couple of times in the text, but not in the title.

Goanna1

3:46 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



>>multiple keyword searches.

Multiple keywords are more speicific. There is no doubt about that. However, the average searcher often uses just the main keyword(s). If you look at a list of the top few hundred searched keywords on the net, you will see most of the big one are single words.

For example, "jokes" is more common than "blonde jokes" or "dirty jokes".

drewls

3:47 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member




hmmm...
keyword1 keywording (notice the ing at the end of second keyword) and my page is lost.

keyword1 keyword (no ing) and i am number one again.

this probably doesn't apply to most searches that are singular/plural, but for the ing type words, this might be significant.

my title and optimization is based on keyword1 keywording. i do have the non-ing word form a couple of times in the text, but not in the title.

WOW...us too! Now that's an interesting find! :)

willybfriendly

3:49 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



A couple of hundred posts back I asked if anyone had ever done a -qwegt search before florida. Without that baseline, all is speculation.

That said, after a little bit of poking around, it seem to me that the new algo is having the most effect on searches that list lots of adwords ads on the right.

If there is screening based on advertising, well...

WBF (-qwdter)

aspdesigner

3:56 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Interesting!

wbf, what do those results look like? How many of the Top-10 include the exact search phase in the titles? How many of the Top-10 are "spot-on" relevant to the search (vs news sites, not quite what you were looking for, etc.)?

plasma

4:15 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



otnot has a point, GoogleGuy once said that the future is multiple keyword searches.

Wht ds tht mn?
Wll ppl chng thr srch bhvr?

markus007

4:17 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



How have people been effected with yahoo? I've just checked my stats to find out that yahoo google and MSN are now giving me exactly 27% of my SE traffic each. Normally google is way out front. But google supposidly feeds yahoo...

vbjaeger

4:24 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Im not an SEO pro and certainly do not pretend to be. I am just an average joe that is trying to place my site in a position where the end user searching for keyword1 keyword2 keyword3 can find my product.

I guess i am one of the n00bs that stevb keeps referring too, but I have to say that a week ago, if somebody typed in those keywords, they found sites that offered those products. Now when those keywords are typed in, they find 8 out of 10 directory sites. I suppose those sites are
relevent, but it definately makes the end user jump through more hoops. Are they really more relevent than the previous results?

rfgdxm1

4:26 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



>Wht ds tht mn?
Wll ppl chng thr srch bhvr?

Like on Jeopardy, would you like to buy a vowel?

dazzlindonna

4:28 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



That would be Wheel of Fortune (and i can see how google can be considered a wheel of fortune. spin the wheel and see if you win or lose)

rfgdxm1

4:30 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



>That would be Wheel of Fortune (and i can see how google can be considered a wheel of fortune. spin the wheel and see if you win or lose)

Sigh. Gotta get some shuteye. Hey, they are owned by the same people. ;)

[edited by: rfgdxm1 at 4:31 am (utc) on Nov. 23, 2003]

asomani

4:31 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Hi,

I was working on one of my client's website. The site is a couple of years old. We started working on it four months back. The optimized content has been created and uploaded. The link pop. building task has just started, only 10 inbound links. Google ranked it top10 rank for 3 keyword, and top 40 rank for the other three keywords. After one month the site is nowhere within 300 ranks. We have not used any spam tricks.

Please advise. Will it again come up? What is happening?

dazzlindonna

4:38 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Will it again come up?

To refer to another game show, that is the 64,000 Dollar Question.

Sorry, but it is all speculation at this point. Sit tight and hope it does. In the meantime, read a few posts and you'll get a large dose of the possible answers.

irishaff

4:49 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



im not sure what datacentre im seeing , but it seems that a " switch " has just been flicked . A lot of anchor text pages ( GB spam ) have just dropped out of the SERPS for my KW1 KW2 etc..

incidentally how do i tell what Dc my live google is using?
thanks

otnot

4:49 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



A few brews and it all looks much better. OK, take one word from a title and three words from the text and some how google brings up the correct site. Of course maybe this NZ beer is affecting my senses. LOL I'm serious though! I think google is putting most of the importance on the actual content of the site not the meta title,h1,h2 or text links or anchor text. Try it you might not like it.

mfishy

4:51 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



<<In Google's history to date, ranking has been primarily determined by PageRank. >>

I hope you don't seriously believe this.

aspdesigner

4:52 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Philisophical question, trying to look at the big picture here -

Are people loosing rankings because...

A) something that they did (and now shouldn't)
B) something that they didn't do (and now need to)
C) because the SERPS are now crap and their loss of ranking is just a mere side-effect of that?

otnot

4:54 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Well Mr.Fishy it's as plausable as anything else I've heard for the last week.

dazzlindonna

4:57 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



i still like the theory that the codejam finalists caused this. ;-)

Idaho

5:08 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



The anchor text theory continues to explain the discrepancies simply and adequately. Results for Mongolian yurts are only slightly affected, because no one in their right mind is optimizing for that. Results for hotly contested phrases are going crazy, because everyone with 500 anchor-text links was in the top two pages last month and now suddenly they're on a level playing ground with sites that only have 30 anchor-text links, and consequently some sites are gaining or losing 150 places while this sorts out.

I appreciate what Flicker is saying in post 977, but wouldn't the real estate site that is showing up for "jewelry" searches seem to argue against this? If the algo is now simply giving less wieght to off page factors, then how does this site score in top ten with just a page called "ring"?

aspdesigner

5:19 am on Nov 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member




im not sure what datacentre im seeing , but it seems that a " switch " has just been flicked . A lot of anchor text pages ( GB spam ) have just dropped out of the SERPS for my KW1 KW2 etc..

incidentally how do i tell what Dc my live google is using? thanks

irishaff, the dc you get will bounce around, it depends on which one Google pointed you to the last time your PC did a DNS inquiry to them.

However, there is a way to tell.

Right after you get an interesting search result (i.e. - before it changes), check what IP address your PC is using for Google.

One way to do this is to open a DOS or Command-Line window, and then type the command -

ping www.google.com

The first line that comes back will look something like this -

Pinging www.google.com [216.239.37.100] with 32 bytes...

That # (216.239.37.100) is the IP Address you are using for Google at the time.

That will also identify which DC you were using.

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