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Those 80 sites were a good representation of "white hat" and "black hat" sites and everything in between.
I had 3 "white hat" sites among the 80. 2 of the 3 were Top 20.
Google's current results are useless for someone looking to buy a property in the short-term.
The results are useless for a US citizen looking to relocate soon. All regional franchise sites such as Century 21, RE/MAX, Coldwell Banker completely removed under the term "mycountry real estate."
Google, put those cheap Linux servers to work properly!
I just searched for > myregional area map < and guess what? Google returns "Your search - myregional area map - did not match any documents."!
If I enter > map of my regional area < they return 16,100 results. Can this be filtering to an extreme where the words > myregional area map < are featured everywhere on the page for all 16,100 of us that they have deleted us all.
This is just too unbelievable.
:(
Alan...could u please sticky me the URL? Thanks
[inman.com...]
Evidently they are considered the "authority" in the world of real estate.
The algo secret is a combination of Word Stemming which in some case mixes together the results of singular and plural keyword matches etc., but more importantly a shift in the weighting of keyword proximity which now ranks a spread of individual keywords higher than an exact phrase matches. Repeated exact phrase matches are especially penalised (except for exact phrase searches, of course!). Put these two changes together and the results are churned around so much that many previous top ranking pages are now outside the magic 1000 results (wiped out).
No doubt there are other changes too, especially to do with the weighting of anchor text which helps directory pages.
The link with Adwords terms is an effect, not the cause. Most "Commercial" Search Terms have many, many pages with the exact phrase repeated several times on the page (just normal optimisation, of course). These are the worst hit pages. Of course, that may or may not have been Google's intention, but they didn't need to use the Adwords database to do it - it's just a big algorithm change!
There may be other things happening, but this is the main explanation for the "Commercial Filter".
And massive PageRank still helps Amazon, etc.
Just Guessing (after many hours of detailed analysis!)
[edited by: Just_Guessing at 10:55 pm (utc) on Dec. 1, 2003]
I can't believe nobody has any real answers to figuring out this stupid Google algo. And I'm really ticked at those that know the algo secret and aren't sharing!
I see that Planet Ocean Search Engine News are claiming to have the answer:
"Google's Over-Optimization Penalty Bites sites! ...here's what you should do immediately to avoid permanent penalties!"
$97 buys you the secret WebmasterWorld and numerous other forums are still trying to determine. Hmm... ;-)
mods, sorry for off-topic, just couldn't resist :)
welcome to middleman capitalism ;)
Seeing it all from WW, it's mostly in the abstract for me... it's cool seeing it "out there", rather than in the posts. Is that source for the article, (I won't mention the name), one of the WW members by any chance?
The results are useless for a US citizen looking to relocate soon. All regional franchise sites such as Century 21, RE/MAX, Coldwell Banker were completely removed under the term "mycountry real estate."
Google, put those cheap servers to work properly!
I also checked the real estate site mentioned on paragraph 10 of the article. The lower part of that page includes links that seem fraudulent to me.
I don't use that kind of "black hat" techniques on my sites.
just forget this, whick url is the ilegal one?
I don't think most sites were removed because of penalties.
A glitch on Google's algorithm seems more likely.
I'm starting to agree. But I don't think Google would admit it.
-squared
It's an algo change alright, but not like others are indicating I don't think. It's more than likely a "glitch" IN their "algo change" which would make everyone right.
[washingtonpost.com...]
The article is from October 12.
<edit>oops, didn't realize that it was in quotes</edit> DOH!
my bad,
squared
"Because of a bug in Google's software, Finkelstein said, Google's search engine essentially crashes when it hits certain combinations of words."
By time/date thing I mean that your listing is affected based on when it acheived the placement for the keyword(s) that it is (or is not) missing for now. If you got your top 20 spot more than a year ago then chances are it has held through all of this. If you got your spot within the year then you've been bumped to who knows where.
So you've been bumped not because you have been filtered out. You've been bumped because you haven't been filtered in. Stop the panic.
This is a different glitch.
I agree that the May update had something to do with a time/date issue.
But last month's update removed a bunch of sites. 80 plus out of 100 from the term I follow.
I'm relaxed because my sites target a bunch of different search terms. Traffic is only down 15 to 20%.
now, all of the top 20 are gone and replaced with newspaper, ezine, of portal site with a link containing suburb real estate somewhere on an inner page
i don't think website age is the issue, though I have also seen my two youngest sites tumble. Old site have gone as well. Perhpas it is the more recently done sites that are overkeyworded.
