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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.
Actually -GV and -LM are same... but seeing movement in my group of words
[edited by: deanril at 3:38 am (utc) on Nov. 24, 2003]
Is it possible that Google wants to change what is required to rank well on their site to nearly polar opposites from every other site so that if you are optimized for Google you are not optimized for any other SE. Since Google gets most of the traffic at this point in time most people would optimize for Google. Therefore in a few months all other SE's will return results pretty much just like what Google has now, making Googles ground as #1 more solid.
If removing keyword density from title, h's, etc. is required to rank well in Google that is what seems like will happen to me. I am ranked on the first page for my targeted terms on all other SE's and used to be on Google a week ago.
As of right now the other guys might have better results, but they just aren't able to keep them as up to date. Google has pages I added last week, the others might have pages from last month.
I think Kackle's point more precisely is non-commercial search phrases as opposed to non-commercial sites. So the question is - are your index pages missing for search phrases that have commercial connotations?
I wouldn't call those keywords "commercial"--they're the names of specific places with no accompanying words. Since we aren't supposed to use real-life examples here, let's just say they're "Cityname," "Countryname1," and "Countryname2."
[edited by: europeforvisitors at 3:38 am (utc) on Nov. 24, 2003]
no idea what rfgdxm1 is looking at but i think most are in agreement that google is screwed, including me.
That is most likley because only those that are unhappy with the changes are posting. The silent, perhaps majority, are too busy adding more content and out there getting links.
It's kind of like what politicians do, preach to the converted :o)
Dave
I see very few top ranked commercial sites using either an H1 or H2 tag. And when they do, they don't contain any of the search terms.
GuinessGuy,
I do see that many sites which do not use H1 tags are ranking highly after the florida massacre, you are correct about that, and many sites which use H1 tags have been nuked during the Florida update.
But I wonder if this following theory might be correct...
I have confirmed that many sites (which I am monitoring right now) are ranking very high using the "money phrase" inside their H1 tags exactly, even after the Florida update.
Yet, as you mentioned many sites using H1 tags were nuked by the Florida update...
Therefore, I would draw the conclusion that it's not the presence of H1 tags which forced the other sites to get nuked (and it wasn't the absence of H1 tags which caused the "non H1 tag pages" to rise up and occupy the top ten spots after the Florida update was over)...
I would draw the conclusion that the H1 pages which dropped (nuked pages which used H1 tags) had other SEO traits which got them flagged as spam and penalized.
I would draw the conclusion that if a page uses their money word inside the H1 tags then that page is more likely than not to also use keyword stuffing (or use a slight over-density of keywords at the very least), therefore leaving those pages penalized by google for the other SEO traits (but not penalized because of the H1 tags specifically).
If H1 tags were being penalized directly then there would be no way for these other pages to rank #1 (for popular "money phrases") while using that same money phrase inside their H1 tags.
Google is nuking pages with "SEO penalties" and sending them to the dark side of the huge black hole which sits in the center of the milky way galaxy, therefore if the H1 tag was a part of the penalty then I would think that all pages with that tag would be nuked and obliterated. I just don't think the H1 tag is a direct target, but I do agree that many pages using the H1 tag were penalized (I just think they were penalized for other SEO factors).
I am not saying my theory is right, maybe it's not, it's just a theory.
[edited by: Brenda_J at 3:55 am (utc) on Nov. 24, 2003]
The silent, perhaps majority, are too busy adding more content and out there getting links.
I should be more silent, but it's hard not to get drawn into these threads.... :-)
I got 8 new pages online in the last few days, field notes, muchos content, and 5 were picked up by googlebot yesterday.
Sorry that some of the commercial people are having problems, but Google still works for information purposes the same as it did two weeks ago... not bad.
I'll quote myself from about 1000 posts earlier in these update threads, "If you're selling the same stuff as a million other people, you might have problems". If the competition is that fierce, you're selling the wrong stuff.
Yep. One thing to be considered is the sample of people who post at WebmasterWorld tends to be *very* different than the average punter using Google.
One thing to be considered is the sample of people who post at WebmasterWorld tends to be *very* different than the average punter using Google.
So very true which is why the SERPs are most likley still fine (or better) for 95%+ of the world.
Dave
Now say what you want, but this is not an improvement in results over the previous ones and I will bet that if it is happening in my niche it is also happening in many others.
Google needs to address some sort of issue here, because there clearly is a problem or we wouldn't be approaching part 5 of this wonderful thread.
BTW. The toolbar search tool, froogle and all the other meaningless toys are really cute but Google needs to realize that they don't mean squat when you plan on providing results such as Google has been in the past week!
Non-commercial info webmasters just don't spam using cloaking much. And most commercial SERPs aren't that competitive that anyone would do such a thing.
i hope you don't think that this is a cloaking issue. i can assure you, i don't cloak anything, but this issue has affected me.
I was only referring to the specific case Robski mentioned.
My impression is that this is a bug, not a filter, and that google will eventually fix the problem.
