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Not very good. I'll use this simple example again:
If someone is searching for
red widgetsthe serps are now dominated by high backlink count sites that have a title something like this
red apples and green widgets
This may not be true at all.. Take a look at my post on this page [webmasterworld.com ] and the thread.. It's interesting what kind of site (now No. 1 in SERP) has outranked far better PR, far better linked, far more keyword heavy sites for over a month..
:-:
I don't think changing your title will get you back in. I was just pointing out how backlink count is much more important than having a two word phrase right next to each other in you page and title.
Check the back link counts of the top 10 sites for your two word phrase. You'll likely need to beat those counts with links from relevant sites that have good anchor text.
My philosophy is KISFBTCATOTBD (Keep It Simple For Bots That Could Always Turn Out To Be Dumb). Another way to say it is that the more help you give spiders, the less chance there is that a spider/bot will mess it up.
I took a long look at the "layout" of the site I abandoned many years ago which has out-ranked in SERP, for a month now, a tremendous amount of comparable sites w/ far better PR, far better keyword weight:content, far more relevant pages et al.
It's a site that's text-rich compared to images, etc. and the text is primarily centered/blockquote, there are no <H> attributes used, and most interesting to me there are no alt. tags used anywhere.
As far as being "crawler friendly", the site is I'm sure very crawlable due to it's simplicity. When GG says '...Keep It Simple For Bots' I think there's a lot to this.
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I will have to beg the differ.
I can give you a two word phrase and there is a site ranked 10th with 17 backlinks, no content ( 8 words) with about 20 banners on there home page and that is it.
Brew
Is it a very popular two word phrase? If so, can you sticky me the search phrase and url?
This has been true for eight months.
You need backlinks, you need the two words, and the sites with the two words next to each other in the title do the best.
What is being suggested here is a complete fallacy.
Red furniture
Blue hair
Green Apples
etc. into infinity
The sites at the top of searches tend to be ones with the two words next to each other in a title. Suggesting otherwise is to suggest black is white.
If you have a two word phrase, put the words together in the title. This doesn't guarantee anything, but it is more helpful than splitting the words up or not having them at all.
Pages with 500+ back links are getting a huge amount of traffic for two word phrases even if the two words are spread out in the title. Most of this traffic is not relevant to the two word phrase.
Google is giving way too many scoring points to pages with high back link counts, and it is leading to much less relevant serp's.
It does seem that trying to rank high for a 3-word city plus a 2-word profession is now FAR more difficult than it previously had been, though. It seems like a lot of search keyphrases that had previously been dominatable 5-word phrases are now being (probably more accurately) treated more like 2-word phrases, and for a single business site to break into the top 10 sites for such phrases is probably an unreasonable expectation. Before Florida, no one really went around expecting to be the #1 result for a search for "books," right?
That's pure speculation on my part, though, nothing more. (-:
I posted these figures somewhere else and as they are directly relevant to the current discussion I thought, I'd throw them in.
It could be that this is an irelevant co-incidence and that something else is causing these sites to rise to the top by exclusion. What I mean is this. Someone suggested to me that if you remove the anchor text ellement of the algorithm just for certain search terms then you get the results that we see here.
Best wishes
Sid
Results for the term that has caused me the most problem.
#1 PR7 9,000 backlinks General big player site not a specialist VERY limited but relevant content on page linked to from the page listed in SERPs. Not in top 10 on any other SE.
#2 PR7 680,000 backlinks Directory, content is my Espotting Ad this page is #3 on Inktomi
#4 PR6 125,000 backlinks Directory, content is an affiliates Ad and what looks like a link farm. Not in top 10 on any other SE.
#6 PR7 70,200 backlinks Large motoring organisation site, relevant(ish) but very limited content on this topic. Not in top 10 on any other SE.
#8	 PR5 890 backlinks Members Association, product only offered to members, relevant content but this is only a brief summary of a service offered by a small specialist (like ourselves) this small specialists site has been completely dropped from SERPs. Not in top 10 on any other SE.
#10 PR6 13,360 backlinks Large Australian company offering service only in Australia. Brief on topic, own content.
If we sold milk we'd be doing the natural history of the bloody cow (I think they're ungulates - who cares if you want to buy milk?).
We could even go for 'interactive cow-milking', or even interactive 'touch up the milkmaid' as a really deep theme.
What a load of b*llocks - exponential and careless.
Nevertheless, over here we're typing away 24 hours a day writing more and more puff and b*llocks to please a search engine that has f*cked up relevant search results.
You don't have to please them. You can always get your traffic from somewhere else.
You don't have to please them. You can always get your traffic from somewhere else
Utter rubbish - that only makes sense in the long or medium-term.
It will take months for computer illiterates to realise that Google is serving up poor SERPs; or for their ISP (who has hijacked their browser) to switch to a better engine.
Cash-flow for businesses is short-term. Some of us have to pay our taxes this month.
So enough of the b*llocks - let's have some realism.
Check the back link counts of the top 10 sites for your two word phrase. You'll likely need to beat those counts with links from relevant sites that have good anchor text.
ahem...the first 6 sites are mine for one of my favourite keyphrases.
I didn't just rewrite my titles. I rewrote the whole page.
Since keyword proximity became important it hase become necessary to put rediculous grammar on your page to hit your keyword density and proximity targets. It was a joy to rewrite my page in plain English without attention to keyword proximity. For once it looks like it was written by a native speaker of English!
If Google is attacking sites that deliberately modify their prose to put certain keywords together, I applaud that!
GoogleGuy - you can put my site back now. Hey....? Anyone..... listening? I guess not...
It doesn't sound like the keyphrase is very competitive.
But you are missing the point. Perhaps your site is a good match for your search phrase. In my area, the results are not. High back link count sites are appearing in the serps for two and three word phrases that they should not appear for. That's bad for the people searching, and that's bad for webmasters who do have relevant content that is buried behind these 500+ back link count sites.
LOL. Had some similar experience.
LOL. What is the foundation of your business then :-)
> Cash-flow for businesses is short-term. Some of us have to pay our taxes this month.
As I remember correctly you normally pay taxes for money you *earned* :)
If that's affecting your cash flow your business is flawed.
High back link count sites are appearing in the serps for two and three word phrases that they should not appear for.
Yankee.. When you say "appearing in serps .. that they should not appear for" do you mean their keyword incidence or just plain content in general don't support their ranking, but their high backlink count (I presume w/ corresponding anchor text) is what's driving them to their present 'unjustified' ranking?
I ask because I've had an old, abandoned site which is as "unoptimized" as is possible, with only 2 backlinks showing in Google (but 106 in AllTheWeb) and using very old framests suddenly appear-&-rise to No. 1... under a 3-word search term, and it's outranking sites with far better PR, far more optimized, et al..
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au contraire :)
Remember I have the top 6 positions for backlinks. Not for SERPs unfortunately.
The sites that are appearing are quality sites with high backlink counts. But they are appearing for two and three word phrases when the sites have nothing to do with the two and three word phrase. The phrase is not in the back links, and the phrase is not in the page.
The words are scattered in the title and document, but not together, thus causing bad serps. Google should require a page have the phrase together, then factor in the number of backlinks, PR, etc., for ranking.
