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Thank you,
Ryan Allis
On November 15, 2003, the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) in Google were dramatically altered. Although Google has been known to go through a reshuffling (appropriately named a Google Dance) every 2 months or so, this 'Dance' seems to be more like a drunken Mexican salsa that its usual conservative fox-trot.
Most likely, you will already know if your web site has been affected. You may have seen a significant drop-off in traffic around Nov. 15. Three of my sites have been hit. While one could understand dropping down a few positions, since November 15, the sites that previously held these rankings are nowhere to be found in the top 10,000 rankings. Such radical repositionings have left many mom-and-pop and small businesses devastated and out of luck for the holiday season. With Google controlling approximately 85% of Internet searches, many businesses are finding a need to lay off workers or rapidly cancel inventory orders. This situation deserves a closer look.
What the Early Research is Showing
From what early research shows, it seems that Google has put into place what has been quickly termed in the industry as an 'Over Optimization Penalty' (OOP) that takes into account the incoming link text and the on-site keyword frequency. If too many sites that link to your site use link text containing a word that is repeated more than a certain number of times on your home page, that page will be assessed the penalty and either demoted to oblivion or removed entirely from the rankings. In a sense Google is penalizing sites for being optimized for the search engines--without any forewarning of a change in policy.
Here is what else we know:
- The OOP is keyword specific, not site specific. Google has selected only certain keywords to apply the OOP for.
- Certain highly competitive keywords have lost many of the listings.
How to Know if Your Site Has Been Penalized
There are a few ways to know if your site has been penalized. The first, mentioned earlier, is if you noticed a significant drop in traffic around the 15th of November you've likely been hit. Here are ways to be sure:
1. Go to google.com. Type in any search term you recall being well-ranked for. See you site logs to see which terms you received search engine traffic from. If your site is nowhere to be found it's likely been penalized.
2. Type in the search term you suspect being penalized for, followed by "-dkjsahfdsaf" (or any other similar gibberish, without the quotes). This will remove the OOP and you should see what your results should be.
3. Or, simply go to www.**** to have this automated for you. Just type in the search term and see quickly what the search engine results would be if the OOP was not in effect. This site, put up less than a week ago, has quickly gained in popularity, becoming one of the 5000 most visited web sites on the Internet in a matter of days.
The Basics of SEO Redefined. Should One De-Optimize?
Search engine optimization consultants such as myself have known for years that the basics of SEO are:
- put your target keyword or keyphrase in your title, meta-tags, and alt-tags
- put your target keyword or keyphrase in an H1 tag near the top of your page
- repeat your keyword or keyphrase 5-10 times throughout the page
- create quality content on your site and update it regularly
- use a site map (linked to from every page) that links to all of your pages
- build lots of relevant links to your site
- ensure that your target keyword or keyphrase is in the link text of your incoming links
Now, however, the best practices for keyword frequency and link text will likely trigger the Google OOP. There is surely no denying that there are many low quality sites have used link farms and spammed blog comments in order to increase their PageRank (Google's measure of site quality) and link popularity. However, a differentiation must be made from these sites and quality sites with dozens or hundreds of pages of informational well-written content that have taken the time to properly build links.
So if you have been affected, what can you do? Should one de-optimize their site, or wait it out? Should one create one site for Google and one for the 'normal engines?' Is this a case of a filter been turned on too tight that Google will fix in a matter of days or something much more?
These are all serious questions that no one seems to have answers to. At this point we recommend making the following changes to your site if, and only if, your rankings seem to have been affected:
1. Contact a few of your link partners via email. Ask them to change the link text so that the keyword you have been penalized for is not in the link text or the keyphrase is in a different order than the order you are penalized for.
2. Open up the page that has been penalized (usually your home page) and reduce the number of times that you have the keyword on your site. Keep the number under 5 times for every 100 words you have on your page.
3. If you are targeting a keyphrase (a multiple-word keyword) reduce the number of times that your page has the target keyphrase in the exact order you are targeting. Mix up the order. For example, if you are targeting "Florida web designer" change this text on your site to "web site designer in florida" and "florida-based web site design services."
It is important to note that these 'de-optimization' steps should only be taken if you know that you have been affected by the Google OOP.
Why did Google do this? There are two possible answers. First, it is possible that Google has simply made an honest (yet very poor) attempt at removing many of the low-quality web sites in their results that had little quality content and received their positions from link farms and spamdexing. The evidence and the search engine results point to another potential answer.
A second theory, which has gained credence in the past days within the industry, is that in preparation for its Initial Public Offering (possibly this Spring), Google has developed a way to increase its revenue. How? By removing many of the sites that are optimized for the search engines on major commerical search terms, thereby increasing the use of its AdWords paid search results (cost-per-click) system. Is this the case? Maybe, maybe not.
Perhaps both of these reasons came into play. Perhaps Google execs thought they could
1) improve the quality of their rankings,
2) remove many of the 'spammy' low-quality sites
3) because of #2, increase AdWords revenues and
4) because of better results and more revenue have a better chance at a successful IPO.
Sadly, for Google, this plan had a detrimental flaw.
What Google Should Do
While there are positives that have come from this OOP filter, the filter needs to be adjusted. Here is what Google should do:
1. Post a communiqué on its web site explaining in as much detail as they are able what they have done and what they are doing to fix it;
2. Reduce the weight of OOP;
3. If the OOP is indeed a static penalty that can only be removed by a human, change it to a dynamic penalty that is analyzed and assessed with each major update; and
4. Establish an appeal process through which site owners which feel they are following all rules and have quality content can have a human (or enlightened spider) review their site and remove the OOP if appropriate.
When this recent update broke on November 15, webmasters clamored in the thousands to the industry forums such as webmasterworld.com. The mis-update was quickly titled "Florida Update 2003" and the initial common wisdom was that Google had made a serious mistake that would be fixed within 3-4 days and everyone should just stay put and wait for Google to 'fix itself.' While the rankings are still dancing, this fix has yet to come. High quality sites with lots of good content that have done everything right are being severely penalized.
If Google does not act quickly, it will soon lose market share and its reputation as the provider of the best search results. With Yahoo's recent acquisition of Inktomi, Alltheweb/FAST, and Altavista, it most likely will soon renege on its deal to serve Google results and may, in the process, create the future "best search engine on the 'net." Google, for now, has gone bananas in its recent meringue, and it may soon be spoiled rotten.
filtered and unfiltered within the same (large) site
Gut feeling, but I'd go with RC on this. It would be the page popping up in the before-filtered SERPs that would trigger the filter.
>Good site + any term = apply normal algoScratch that one. I have filtered and unfiltered within the same (large) site.
Inadvertently I've used the word site here. I agree with others here that page is correct. I may have used it elsewhere in my little essay but was not trying to make a distinction between pages and sites or suggest that this method would apply to sites rather than pages. If I am anywhere near right in this it would make sense that the BadRank flag would be stored by page. It would not fit the "democratic" theory of Google if it were transferred to the whole site because some pages within that site were flagged. Also it would take another basically unnecessary computation to work out which pages constituted a site and which level of BadRank to apply to the other pages. They would pick up some BadRank anyway by simple transference in a similar way to how PageRank is picked up.
I would say that it would be probable that some pages within a site would not pick up enough BadRank to be flagged even if some were flagged. This would encourage Google engineers by suggesting that the system was applied in a fair way.
If I change the suggestion of how the flag works to this
Bad page + filtered term searched for = apply null algo
Bad page + non-filtered term = apply normal algo
Good page + any term = apply normal algo
Now the assumptions are not broken and the hypothesis is not disproved by "I have filtered and unfiltered within the same (large) site."
Sid
Bek.
n fact, they are no where in the SERPS for their keyword terms. AND they have PR6 and 500+ backlinks!
Gbot has crawled pages that I don’t have links to but I do have adsense ads on, so either the G toolbar, that I am getting ready to uninstall, has called home with the URL, or MediaPartners bots has put the URL into the G database.
If it is the latter, then we have one bot using robots.txt like it should and one bot using it backwards. That’s just an accident waiting to happen. I have never seen such bull stuff from an alleged professional company. Poor, poor design.
Like all databases, put garbage in, get garbage out.
Just stumbled across another story about Google November changes and IPO speculation:
[nypost.com...]
People with a subscription to the back room have discussed it and moved on.
:) Y
Superficial story... SEO dude quoted in the article was useless because he couldn't stop posturing long enough to say anything of substance about what was going on...
The BBC article from this morning (or yesterday?) has more substance and is better written.
Hey, deanril, it doesn't get more mainstream than a TV News piece on the BBC and a companion article online.
What's the old saying?
Gas, grass or _ss- nobody rides for free!
100,000 potential customers for $139.99 Hmmmmm.....
Very ironic!
To be honest, there are so many out there, that the lost sites wont be missed at all. What's so unique about the sites that sell similar products?
Interesting point and probably Google's attitude as well. It also justifies the authority/hub sites that have replaced them. Great cover to hide behind while selling Adwords to the lost.
My logs now contain a disproportionate number of referrals from continental Europe, and my actual sales outside the UK, for what was previously a high ranking UK site - but sadly no longer - have gone up 50 fold since the Florida update.
The initial hypothesis is that although commercial results are less relevant, they are now being dished up in their charming and random way, all over the place!
There is no way Google should be serving up the same page in #1 position time and time again, when there are potentially thousands of other online business equally relevant to the query.
Given the "power" that Google has over where people go on the net, I think it is a perfectly responsible move.
Sure, the person that used to be a rock solid #1 for "expensive blue widgets online" will likely be a bit miffed, but at least it will save Google from numerous class action law suits from the owners of sites #2 - #999.
Dave
Dave
AV was doing it back in '99, long before Google made it into Webster's.... :)
If that were the case then each data centre would show a different set of results for any give query. Each server will run its own instance of the query algorithm, and if that included a strong random number generator then each instance would almost certainly generate a different key with which to randomize the results.
The idea that Google is randomizing results is totally absurd!
I dont know about that, have you checked through your logs.
I have been checking referals , I follow back the phrase and path used to find me in Google, sometimes my page is there other times it isn't?
I'd say thats fairly random.
Karl :)
Randomised results, particularly for commercial searches have been predicted for months now.
Really? I don't see the results changing that much - they seem pretty stable, just odd!
superscript,
sorry - haven't answered your post (blush) but very interesting - one of our sites get's quite high foreign traffic for foreign searches, but I'll have a look and see if it's shifted and get back... the only shift I've noticed is down!
