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I did see a major PR change - backlinks were updated, so I jumped a little bit. My guess is that your PR change is the result of either lost backlinks, or lost PR to the pages containing your links.
[edited by: nevetS at 3:13 am (utc) on Jan. 27, 2004]
Mods, bless you. :-)
It is as if the link to the site is now more important than the site itself. And yes, these new high-ranking pages are directory pages.
Anyone who got hurt with Austin but not much previously, go back and read the Florida threads. You'll find more useful info there.
"I manage a real estate site, it has 15 pages, has my town real estate in the title, image name, mentioned a few times in home page text and in one link on home. 150 incoming links. used to rank No.2 for "my town real estate". Now nowhere "
Who are the 150 links from? Other real estate business's or real estate directories? or are they from sites unrelated to yours?
[edited by: cbpayne at 4:24 am (utc) on Jan. 27, 2004]
It is as if the link to the site is now more important than the site itself. And yes, these new high-ranking pages are directory pages.
Not sure this is new at all. Was very much the case with Florida. Only now, more so (i.e., extended to more search terms/phrases).
Didn't mean to imply this effect was new. Yes, I noticed it in Florida as well. But with Austin, I am just even more concerned about this. I didn't bring it up before, but it is so overwhelming now, that I felt it deserved to be looked at a little more closely.
130 from other real estate sites and directories, no affilaition to my site. Different ip addresses, different countries even
9 of them appear in the top 100 for "my town real estate" regardless only relation to my town, is the link to my re site. All 9, have at least 200 pages. "my town real estate" does not apear in the page titles or keywords of the linking sites
I disagree on topic links make a difference anyway. Won't detail why here, other than google is just not that smart to apply a penalty for links that are of a different topic than the site linked from. WHo is to say what is valid for a site to link to? Whbo is to say what is related anyway?
If ever there gets to be "serious algo discussion", which I'm doubting at this point, there have been a lot of interesting tidbits in the dancing serps. The only thing really worthwhile now might be in observing differences between the various groups of results that have been coming out. They are all basically similar, but there have been some very interesting phenomena in the differences.
For instance, for my main keyword, keyword.com has dropped from #1 where it has been without fail for three years. This site clearly does NOT belong at #1 for lots of reasons that aren't too important. It has dropped to #3 in most search groups, but plummets to #10 in one. The other nine sites in the top ten are all established authority sites on the topic -- with wordstogether domain names. Gone down ten to twenty spots are all the link spam hyphenated-domain piffle. This could be explained several ways... Google now doing a much better job recognizing niche authority sites (the holy grail so far as I'm concerned); Google lowering the value of keyword in domain in the algo; OR Google doing a very good job of parsing wordstogether.com and thus not turning down the keyword in the domain knob but now more accurately recogizing keywords scrunched together. Those last two things are very, very different, but could accomplish the same result. I'm not sure what to make of that one result batch that sends keyword.com to #10, but it makes me lean toward Google being able to parse wordstogether now.
But then, absolutely none of this stuff I've been loking at is anything I've made my mind up about. These results are still shaking up a bit and drawing too many conclusions is premature. The only thing I'm sure of is anybody who uses the word "deoptimization" has no clue what "optimization" means.
If they are going to keep the results they have now they should just get out of the Search Engine Business.
Seriously.. I typed in a keyword expecting relevent results, instead I got 200 spam sites, 1000 mirror sites, and no relevent sites?
If you use the allinanchor: you should nearly the same results that would be in a normal SERP right?
Doesn't have to be exact.. but like in the near ballpark:
"allinanchor: widgets"
Well it's WILDLY diffrent than the output... GUYS... they really put away with the anchor text... like in a big way.. try it yourself..
I have 3 sites. All three of them got hammered in the Florida storm down to position 200+ to 400+ last November. All 3 were in the top 5 or so for many months, two of them for about 2 years.
In December, one of them came back and bounced around between poistion #7 and #12 in the SERPs. The other two were still down around 100 and 200.
Last night I get back from a weekend of skiing :) and I find you guys discussing an update. To my surporise all three of my sites are back in the top 10, and 2 of those 3 are in the top 5. When I look at DC [216.239.37.99...] all 3 sites are in the top 4.
In other words for me, these are pre-Florida results.
Some of the other sites in my SERPs are still junky. So I don't think this is a necessarily a Florida roll-back. I haven't tried analyzing why yet... just wanted to share this with everyone.
Oh, and I almost forgot. I didn't make any changes when all this Florida stuff happened (and I haven't done any link-begging in months either). I wasn't going to get around to that for another month or so.
Obviously not. This would only be true if you wanted a search engine to be full of the most vomitous spam.
For highly competive areas, right now you can see the difference. allinanchor serves up huge reams of crap. All it shows is who can make the most anchor text, which says close to zero about quality.
You might want to read the archives here to find out about allinanchor.
Google has not completely kicked its anchor text addiction, but they sure have made great strides, thank goodness.
In my case "word1 word2" form the anchor text in most of my inbound links and yesterday my PR went from 5 to 6, yet I still cannot find my site for the "word1 word2 word3" used above (without the allinanchor:).
Any ideas what anchor text I should use? Maybe my site name?
[edited by: idoc at 5:56 am (utc) on Jan. 27, 2004]
snipped
[edited by: DaveAtIFG at 6:36 am (utc) on Jan. 27, 2004]
[edit reason] No specifics please [/edit]
Normally my site get's between 800 1200 unique visitors a day.
I thought I would get hammered for the past few days because of the update.
I was sadly mistaken.. I had almost 2000 unique's.. it used to be like 80% from Google.. now it's roughly 45%
The rest came from Altavista, Excite, Hotbot, and Mooter (Believe it or not)
They did not only pick up the Google Slack.. they exceeded it's normal traffic.
Is this something you guys have been seeing as well?
Then everyone thinks they know what Google wants, Google reverts back to an old algo and all that have changed their sites are lost.
My guess is that the links page is part of this strategy. Hard to find links pages named links.* - all seem overnightly named something like i-luv-lucy.html with navigational anchor texts like "websites." Only the .edu, .gov and site owners who have never heard of SEO techniques are still using "Links" and links.html.
Google is watching.
Anyone got any clues?
It is impossible to garner any meaningful information through the noise of so many predicting the demise of Google. How can one adapt if they do not first seek to understand?
WBF
Last night I get back from a weekend of skiing and I find you guys discussing an update.Tahoe, Mammoth, or Big Bear? Anyway, Good on ya.
steveb-consider possibly that when someone says they are deoptimizing their site they may mean they are undoing previous optomization techniques, which i think is different (yet maybe the same) from(as) reoptomizing. Its just semantics.
I have several sites all using same clean seo (anchor text, backlinks, title, heading)
All commercial sites.
All my sites survived Florida without ranking changes.
Now one site still ranks #1, other sites have fallen down the serps (mostly 5-10 positions)
one site has gone completely.
How could there be a 'overoptimization' or 'seo' filter when some seoed sites survive and some not. Ok, you could say it is an other way of seo, but in my case I did exactly the same I did to all my other sites.
Also I recognized Google loosing backlinks. A site of mine was used to have about 150 backlínks, now 13! The links are definitly there but google hasn't found or does not display.
Anyone else lost backlinks?
With the current "motives" I assumed of Google's updates, there will be two classes of searches. I call them 1. Knowledge Oriented 2. Business Oriented.
Knoweldge Oriented search phrases will not have a "business" word in them. A search of this kind triggers Google to supply with sites from "informational, non-commercial" pool. A search for "blue widgets" may be Knowledge Oriented search or rather "Business" intention behind the search is not apparent, and hence informational, non-commercial sites are supplied, since the searcher may be searching for knowledge. If he isn't and searching with commercial interest, there are always adword listings.
If a Search phrase contains a business word like "Provider", "Company", "Services", then the search triggers Google to supply with sites from commercial sites pool, since "Business" motive behind the search is established and is apparent.
If this logic were correct, cribbing about a commercial site not being ranked for a "Knowledge Oriented" search or for searches where "business" motive is not clearly established, inspite of perfect "Optimization" and high PR, will NOT get the ranks, since Google wouldn't be using the "Business Oriented" sites pool. When a site is not even considered how will it get ranked?
The current chaos is perhaps because not a perfect application of this logic and somewhere near that. Once Google gets it right, one will see definite sets of sites depending on the search phrases.
Would like to get some criticisms :-)
Mc
No it isn't, and it goes to the heart of the matter for some folks.
They seem to have done things that were bad ideas. Anti-optimization. Duh.
The point is to do things that the search engine looks on favorably, like descriptive titles, site maps, etc. Spamming is not optimization. Using tactics the search engine does not look favorably on is NOT optimization.
Optimization remains fundamentally like it has in the past, but it is plain foolish to think optimization stays the same. Frankly you should be re-optimizing on essentially a daily basis. Things are constantly changing a little bit, even though the bedrock guidelines that Google lays out stay the same.
In my business this is called a "tell" -- if you talk about deoptimizing it reveals that you don't know what optimizing is, and you did not and do not know how to do it.
One lesson I see in various threads this month is that there is merit in linking to pages that link to, especially on large domains that might not get deeply/effectively/100% crawled each month. Do what you can to send the bot to any pages that are key to you.
Also remember that PR has a serial effect. if one major link to a niche goes awol, that could lower the PR of several sites in a niche that link to each other. Same with internal pages. One missed link might lead to a daisy chain of pages falling below PR3.
In the end all SEs need to serve searchers.
Their behavior (which changes with evolution of the web as well) is what SEs are trying to match.
Basically SEs need to do two things:
Avoid Abuse + Match Searcher Preferences
If you want to be successful with SEs you need to match THEM, meaning:
Avoid Abuse + Match Searcher Preferences
Thus you match the market drive and this is the only way to go or you fight against dynamics all the time that you do not control.
At the end of the day the three major players (SEs, WebDev, Searchers) follow the same paradigm:
Don't want Abuse - Need Relevancy
Only then everyone wins. If you want to belong to the ones that only want to win for themselves you fight and lose energy instead of creating value.
My 2cents...
Jens
Maybe the link: feature does not work correctly at the moment?
Anyone have any clues what is happening here?
