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The same programme also commented on the irrelevance of results returned by just typing in keywords. Pointing out most sites returned for their search of "shelving" were comparison shopping sites, plus an educational site.
They also encouraged viewers to use the advanced search facility or to put search terms in quotes, which I have noticed also obviates the new filter.
The item was accompanied by sob stories from small co's and an expert from a UK Internet magazine stating the purpose was to reduce the amount of spam in searches.
IMHO, I think that, while Google's efforts are valiant, the results are a miserable failure - at least in the areas I monitor. In trying to kick out the spam, which wasn't such a problem anyway, they just got rid of all the most relevant matches! And the pages from certain top price comparison sites are still there - even when they only say "your search for widgets didn't return any matches.... are you interested in oozamewotsits instead?"!
Regards,
Suggy
You ask questions you know I am not allowed to answer, as it's against the charter. Regardless though, there are so many... just face it.
You know full well you can sticky me. Your evasion of doing so pretty much answers the question.
Come on. Every thread I look in you are there, trying to tell everyone Google is fine.
Selective reading on your part. I give up spelling it out to you. You obviously are not going to spoil your story with ant facts.
Tell me one good reason why I should draw a target on my head for Google to aim at.
..and there you have it! Only the guilty have something to hide. Now, tell me why Google would target you?
Oh, and you appear to have missed this question;
Here we go again, Google is on "route to failure". Then why is anyone bothering to try and get back to good ranking in a SE that is on a "route to failure"?
Dave
[edited by: Dave_Hawley at 10:40 am (utc) on Dec. 5, 2003]
It is also true that any business that relies on "free" positions is running a risk.....I think most business already knew this, even if they are now calling a foul.
For several weeks into the future I expect more press articles on the subject with a negative bias. That can not be good for Google's future.
Google became popular because of word-of-mouth. That was spread by everything from the major news organizations, TV entertainment shows (e.g. it has been mentioned 4 times on The West Wing), down to individual webmasters and friends just telling each other.
On the flip-side this type of bad press will reverse Google's popularity. Don't read into this that Google will be dead in 3 months...it will not. But as soon as "rot" starts to set in it is very difficult to reverse the process.
The press generally love to kill those that stand on a podium above all others as soon as an opportunity arrives. Look at what they do to celebrities and sports personalities.
Google has given the press an opportunity to take shots at its previously "holier than God" type approach to business. If Google's actions have really been done for commercial reasons (e.g. Adwords/Adsence revenue increases) I have to conclude it has been a huge mistake, and one for which they will pay a price in the future.
Personally I like Florida, the SERP's are generally reasonable and I certainly haven't been hit in the pocket. Yes it is biased to some types of sites, but who is really to say these are less relevant than others. To say directories are worthless results is to say Dmoz.org, the Y! directory and numerous others should be scrapped. Obviously most would consider this total nonsense as they have value, so therefore they must have value when found in the SERPs.
[edited by: percentages at 10:45 am (utc) on Dec. 5, 2003]
Personally I like Florida, the SERP's are generally reasonable
How dare you say such a thing, are you mad ;)
Dave
No-one is hiding anything, but only an idiot would take undue risks. Deny your position with respect to defending Google all you wish, but your actions speak rather louder than your hollow words.
By all means respond (again!) by telling me how much I have to hide, how much you are not defending Google, etal. Frankly, it's a little tiresome now, so I won't bother reading it.
BTW, i tried to answer your question in an earlier post...just flip the page.
[edited by: wanna_learn at 11:03 am (utc) on Dec. 5, 2003]
I hope you aren't suggesting that because some duplicate content exists that... well I guess I don't see the point of the comment even. A common denominator of many problem sites is duplicate content. That doesn't mean that all duplicate content ALWAYS causes problems!
but only an idiot would take undue risks
So you want your site ranking well in Google for world to see, yet do not want to have it your profile because you have something to hide. Good grief, what possible "risks" could there be having your site in your profile?
You have a lot to hide Napolean and perhaps do not deserve to rank well in Google.
BTW, I'm still waiting for the sticky of the large content site(s) that have been "zapped" by Google.
Dave
i mentioned waffle not working but waffle.cgi working, and blow me it was censored..wow!
by golly it is!
How's about: "SEO's no longer exchange information about how to cheat the engines to get better ranking, in stead they discuss search quality?" - do you think any amount of AdWord campaigns can buy that?
/claus
<*running for cover*>
[edited by: claus at 11:51 am (utc) on Dec. 5, 2003]
Alexa are reporting in their traffic rank "movers and shakers" a 2,800% increase in traffic to a Google alternative.
LOL...that is a nice find. I don't think it will have Google "shaking" in their shoes....but it is an interesting observation on Webmaster reaction, fear and recovery.
I thought I has already explained this to you? I'm am NOT defending (or attacking) anyone or anything. My ONLY statement has always been that "I still find Google the best SE". That's it period. Surely that is not so hard to understand?
My understanding of your statement is that you find
the Google serps satisfactory. Others are taking
the opposing view. Without regard to underlying
reasons, that would make you a defender of the
engine as in the best SE. *IF* the serps
are broken, how could the engine be the best?
The *if* comes into play depending on *which*
serps are being examined.
I know of one search term describing a certain
big software company's product which contains
300+ results as the first results which are all
sales pages for a *single* book title about the
product offered by affiliates of a certain large
book retailer. All duplicate content taken from
the publisher's blurb.
In other words, if I want to read about the product,
I would have to buy the book if I didn't know how to
narrow down the three word search and didn't know how
to navigate to the software vendor site. This is
surely counter productive if I haven't bought the
product yet.
I am an Adwords user and I reported 400% decrease in no. of impressions for the KWS I track.
and this is gradually widening.
Google has become too important for this not to become a major mainstream news story.
The saying that "No publicity is bad publicity" is a dangerous myth. I was in Public Relations long before Google existed.
Google should stick to their own brand of PR.
Chosing not to publish personal information for others is an entirely reasonable option. I never give away personal information to people I don't trust. If people consider their website addresses to be personal information, they are entitled to keep that information private without fear of criticism and innuendo from others.
For the record, when GoogleGuy asked me to sticky my url so he could check something I did so - so obviously I was not scared of him looking closely for dodgy SEO. My site is clean enough to eat sushi off the floor (if it had a floor).
Without wanting to malign members of WW I'll say this. Knowledge is power. The more information people have about you the more easily they can hurt you (if they want to). I'm not going to suggest a method, but most imaginative webmasters could hurt a small site if they new its url without trying too hard. If anyone is struggling to work out how, I would keep it to yourself, because to do otherwise would be to advertise your lack of intellect/knowledge/imagination.
Kaled.
PS Don't sticky me for suggestions on how to hurt a site - I'll bin it.
In addition some of us actually still put valid telephone numbers in our domain name registrations.
To everyone else, I have seen more recent news articles related to this Florida update than any other update before. In general, these articles portray a slightly negative tone against Google. Although you might say that no publicity is bad publicity, I do believe that Google has taken a PR hit with this update (how bad a hit is up to personal opinion).
Which leads me to the question: Why doesn't Google play out the Dance backstage on www2 and www3 before propagating to the public datacenters, just like the old days? This way, if there's yet another flawed update (which would lead to mass disgruntlement and perhaps more bad publicity) this gives a small window of time for Google to listen to webmasters' input and fix the update/dance on www2 and www3 before making the new SERPS public. Or has Google become so confident in its algorithms that they are willing to run the update live every time?
I have put out this question several times before, but I never seemed to get any response :(
Indeed, since all my sites have invariably done marginally above average at each update, I've been a major advocate of GoogleGuy's recommendations for lots of content, and clean HTML/CSS.
So I chuckled again.
And then I noticed that two particular 4 keyword phrases that I expected to do well at were not coming up in the first 1000 results - ones I'd not tried before, admittedly, but I reckoned I should be in the first ten.
And so I tried the -waffle.
Top of the pile. For both.
My search? nothing to do with commerce, adult content, politics or anything else even remotely contentious, and I do fine with any three keywords out of the four. Which is more illuminating.
My site? doing remarkably well with everything else I throw at it in terms of keywords.
Anyway, having till today supported GoogleGuy's recommendations to the hilt, and being of an honourable British stock, I thought I should stand here and ewd dsfcds cdfscfdscfdsc mmmph
(That's the sound of me eating my hat)
I too am joining those on this forum who look at their search results with a slight tilt of the head and a furrowed brow.
Perhaps "GoogleBrow" will become a recognised medical condition amongst bemused SEOs...
DerekH
Brett, I even doubt 1/5th-ish. I would assume along the lines of 1/10th on google alone.
And trust me, the information searches rock. Way too cool. you can blindly put in the search and hit 'i am lucky' and you would have got a ton of info on that one
1. Commericial versus information. No difference, Google is returning a lot of directories or irrelevant sites in both cases. I can't find the information I need for my other line of work right now. Never used to be the case.
2. I don't consider myself an SEO'er. My site has bags of great content using well structured HTML and no naughty stuff. How can I help it if people link to me using the keywords. Surely that is logical. The Tahoe example says it all.
3. Search results in my area are now riddled with a certain bookstore claiming to be able sell me a book on whatever I search for (spam), another major company offering to get whatever I'm searching for at a better price (spam), and a whole load of directories offering to point me towards sites that can help (funny, I thought that was the job of the Search Engine?)
Where's the quality in that?
I now find a certain, alledgedly evil corporate empire's search engine is returning far more relevant results.
Suggy
The GOOD news for Google is that it's a very small minority of searches--I did the same search substituting six different city names for the bad one and got good results, and successfully searched for three other commercial things in the city with the bad result. None of the searches I've done naturally since the update have been bad, and many have been noticeably better. And, perhaps most tellingly, of four supposedly 'bad' serps I've been stickied, only one was actually bad. All the others had plenty of good, relevant sites on the first page so that I could have found what I wanted immediately. Overall, the results are looking good, with some room for improvement.
The BAD news for everyone is that because of the volume of complaints about serps which are clearly NOT bad--in fact, the volume of insistence that the disappearance of site X or page Y must *mean* the serps are bad--I'm afraid the reports on the genuinely messed-up searches are going to fall through the cracks completely and that improvement may not come. So many people are crying wolf and making such a tremendous amount of noise about one of their pages ranking low (sometimes for perfectly good reasons at that) and about perfectly valuable informational sites and directories 'cluttering' up 'their' searchterms that I'm not optimistic Google's going to take the genuine reports of irrelevant searches seriously anymore.
The GOOD news for everyone is that the chance of this actually negatively affecting the overall economy is zero. I successfully bought every thing I looked for last week. I may not have bought merchandise from the same store I would have two months ago, but I certainly bought it all from someone. Someone's pockets are lined, someone's business is booming. Capitalism continues on its merry way. (-:
Google went for a period of several months with no major changes, and some webmasters got complacent about their search rankings to the point where they felt deserving of them.
We used to look at just links and keywords, but now we're incorporating a lot of other stuff... looking for more and more signals and types of information on a page that attempts to determine or read a 'real meaning' or what a page is trying to provide...
See the concise RSS at:
ht*p://www.optimizer.co.uk (bottom right of page)
The source of this article:
ht*p://www.traffick.com/blog/archive/2003_11_30_archive.asp#107041902731754297
[edited by: James_Dale at 4:26 pm (utc) on Dec. 5, 2003]
I think you underestimate the numbers of ma & pa sites that have been displaced in this latest update.
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that tens of thousands of households will feel the effect of diminished profits, and therefore hundreds or even thousands of businesses will feel the effect as well. It's an economic chain...
You may be right... perhaps a HUGE economic impact will not felt by EVERYONE. However, there will be an economic impact. Perhaps a political impact as well...
Only time will tell....
Mac
