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SERPS for these terms
a) have the two word phrase highlighted all throughout the titles and snippets
b) are the same whether or not -fdsafdsa is used (or very, very close)
It seems to be a major softening of the filter. Some KWs I'm looking at still have some results missing, but not nearly as many.
The rollback seems to be gradual. city1 KW1 may not be affected, but city2 KW1 is.
If they were tweaking a dictionary I would have thought it would be all or nothing for a given search term.
They are still rewarding spammer scammers over technical competency.
The noun "galen" has 1 sense.
1. Galen -- (Greek anatomist whose theories formed the basis of European medicine until the Renaissance (circa 130-200))
I wonder how many results are missing due to a filter :)
[edited by: vrtlw at 6:48 am (utc) on Dec. 3, 2003]
It's Galen Hall, former UF football (oblong) coach
I'm sorry to hear he is oblong - was he involved in some sort of accident?
1. Galen -- (Greek anatomist whose theories formed the basis of European medicine until the Renaissance (circa 130-200))I wonder how many results are missing due to a filter :)
Agreed - but I haven't seen many 'Galens' on sale recently :)
edit: I'm tempted to put up an Adword for 'Cheap Galens' and see whether this info is still available in a couple of weeks time!
[edited by: superscript at 6:54 am (utc) on Dec. 3, 2003]
Agreed - but I haven't seen many 'Galens' on sale recently
Except for in the travel industry! S-Croogle shows quite a few up
[biz.yahoo.com...]
"This particular change affected more people, but our testing shows there was a significant quality improvement for our users," said Rosing.
I'm sorry to hear he is oblong - was he involved in some sort of accident?I was referring to the ball, but now that I think of it, he was a bit oblong as well.;)
Ok, I think its named after the healer.
Thats a good point, and I wasnt paying close enough attention to notice if it was all or nothing. I can't imagine google implementing a dictionary it just doesn't sit with their whole "approach everything with an algo" philosophy.
I'm starting to see some new and interesting referals come through now, and none of them have been off topic. There's just this one particular keyword that the results won't budge from what's there. 90/100 sites were filtered out with this update, and in the top 20 or so I still havn't seen any of the ones I recognise make a return.
The top 10 currently sits at:
#1 irrelevant but I dont mind it being there (searchers would use a more exact phrase to find this site I would imagine)
#2 "fake" information site set up by business. I could live with this one being there too, only because I've thought of doing the same ;) Only a bit more content that this guy.
#3 road-kill - literally - yuk
#4 A "review" by a single person (blogish) on his experience buying widgets in his country through the internet. He is scathing to all but 1 shop. 5 stars to 1 shop, 1 or 2 stars to every other shop. No, mine is not on there, but I feel sorry for the shops that are there. I actually find this result more offensive that the road-kill one. And the road-kill one has always bugged me (it's moved up since the update due to sites dropping)
#6 legit shop, not to bad, can live with it being there (image navigation noted for someone who asked)
#7 another legit shop, but only 1 page which has very little text, and points to their new domain
#8 yahoo shop
#9 rather obscure but still kind of on topic. You'd expect people to be searching for this site with a slightly more exact phrase though.
#10 a good page of content. once again a searcher would probably use a more exact phrase to find this site though.
When this top 10 changes, I will know there has been a major shift because it has been steady post florida. There was one small movement, a couple swapped places.
I hope this isn't disallowed, I spent a lot of time editing it down but then ended up typing more.
I think your post was sufficiently vague unless #3 is literally road-kill.com ;)
Are you sure this isn't true? Remember, WebmasterWorld doesn't exactly have a random cross-section of searchers.
As for Galen being in force, there is no update. There may be filter tweaking, though.
It seems to be a major softening of the filter. Some KWs I'm looking at still have some results missing, but not nearly as many.
Hi,
I'm comming to the conclusion that the "Engineers" at Google are doing a large scale experiment with Bayesian probabilistic spam filtering. Bayesian filtering works like this. If it looks like spam it probably is spam.
If your email client or ISP is offering spam filtering it/they are probably using Bayesian filtering. For emails this form of spam filtering is about 99.7% accurate, from the figures I've read, and from personal experience. Whenever I go to clear out my spam in box I usually find a couple of messages which are not spam. So far this has done no real harm as important messages, not responded to, seem to cause an alternative form of communication. I get between 30 and 100 emails a day so would expect one or two false positives each week.
99.7% simply is not good enough for a search engine though for a number of reasons.
1. The number of sites filtered is so massive that the 0.3% false positives is a really big deal.
2. Worse, much worse, than this is the fact that the false positives are almost certainly going to be skewed heavily towards the first few hundred results (pre filter). In my niche 86 of the top 100 have been filtered out and I know from bitter experiance that not all of those are what any normal person would categorise as spam sites.
3. It is VERY EASY to fall into the trap of looking like spam even if your site does not use any spam techniques.
In our case I think that we have been listed in a number of directories, not at our instigation, with a link including the dreaded filtered words. This is exaserbated by the fact that Espotting affiliate sites appear to be presenting our Espotting ads in what appear to be static pages, resulting in multiple links back to our site including those filtered words and because there are multiple sites carrying the same ad I suspect this is making us look like a spamming site. Couple this with pages and an internal site structure which is well optimized and you could have something which, while it does not breach any of Googles guidelines, still, none the less, looks like it may be a spam site.
If we do not reappear after the next major update my strategy is going to based on a simple premis. If my site doesn't look like its a spam site the filter will not think it is one. What that actually means in terms of what I have on my pages and what I do to remove our site from directories etc is a bit more challenging ;-)
Best wishes
Sid
Add to this my own site, with a homepage PR of 7 but PR 0 for all internal pages for the last month, ever since we moved to the new server, so traffic remains in the doldrums.
Hoping for a change in fortunes soon. When you've tried to present good quality content with a user-friendly interlinking structure and clear, simple, spiderable HTML, you should expect 'improvements' in the search algorithm to benefit your site's rankings, not harm them. I remain confused as to Google's logic in this case.
A sign of too much TV in my youth but to me, Galen was a chimp in the film/series Planet of the Apes. Who chose the name?
Senior members may remember a thread I started many moons ago on hidden text.
Sorry - feeling frivolous.
Kaled.
I think whoever named the next Google "update" after a healer is being a little hopeful.
<snip>
[edited by: engine at 3:44 pm (utc) on Dec. 3, 2003]
[edit reason] No e-mails, see TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]
Theother one is still screwed up. You can call me biased all you want, but if the search "buy widget" brings up ONE widget wholeseller, 1 site with a personal story about buying cars and then taking a leak and seeing a widget out the window, and 8 sites selling "guaranteed widget-free gudgets" which are certainly NOT what a searcher usign "buy widget" as their search is looking for.
Anyways, one out of two... at least my earnings are back to around 80%! I can live with that...
SN
As rfdxm1 says, perhaps some fliter tweaking going on.
TJ
SN
