Forum Moderators: open
steveb, I believe the 64.x.x.x data center has the change, but I'm not positive. We use different terminology inside Google. :)
Powdork, I'm not sure if you'd call it an update exactly (different algorithms play more of a role than different data). But I'm guessing the change will probably roll out over the course of the weekend.
Some sites up, some sites down.
Slight relaxation on the OOP perhaps.
Googlebot had a good crawl a couple of days back so hopefully this data will be added soon(ish).
P.S. Powdork, not positive if I remember your site correctly, but if I do then you should be happier. We really do listen to the feedback that people give us, I promise. :)
Ah, that's right. I'm waiting for this here program compile to finish.
<GoogleGuy pokes his compiler some.>
That's the kind of feedback I like to hear. :) But if you do see some, feel free to drop me a spam report. You can use "austinupdate" until Brett and the mods decide if this change is worth a name. :)
Come to think of it, I am getting a little sleepy.
Not a huge change though. Mostly just adding two lame results per ten good results.
markus007, we removed the need to do that -asdfasdq stuff, so I'd just leave it off altogether. site:domain.com will give you a pretty fair estimate. I think adding the -sadfasdfq stuff makes the server go partway through the index before it says "Wait a minute. That's a nonsense word!" So it's basically nondeterministic depending on which nonsense word you add. I'd just use site: and not worry about it. :)
I would argue that in many cases people are in fact looking for commercial sites and not reference sites, Google recognises that the internet carries a high proportion of commercially orientated sites and naturally has introduced Adwords etc to offer enhanced ways to bring these to the fore but surely these same sites offer value to the visitor and not just from a commercial perspective.
I, like many people using this forum have been affected by the change in Algo's and are constantly scratching heads to understand what can be done to lift our listings but it is disheartening when principally competitive commercial sites offering similar products and services to the same market place maintain or significantly improve their listings when your own disappear.
Please don’t get me wrong, while our site is hard to find after Nov03,(after maintaining page 1 listings for months), I just want to understand Googles perspective on the listing of commercial sites against reference sites when they both offer visitor value.
Thanks and Regards
It's not a no-brainer to find the right balance. I think if you asked a sample of WebmasterWorld folks, they might lean toward returning more commercial results. My hunch is that if you asked regular users, they would want fewer commercial results in their search results than a typical SEO would prefer. As for me personally, as long as the user is happy, then I'm happy. I think that to find the right balance, we get valuable feedback from both regular users and from site owners. We'll keep doing our best to find the balance that makes users the happiest, but we're open to suggestions from both sides of the spectrum about how to make searching better.
I've noticed a couple of the large search-based directory sites that have been dominating this area are sliding down, which can only be a good thing for serp quality imo.
Quite honestly, while I am a website owner the most important thing I would of thought from Goolges point of view is that of their customer (aka users) and the information that they receive from their searches.
Web owners will always bleat about their sites going down and praise Google when they go up, and for us we just bleat in silence :).
Anyway the visitor is king, if they don't get the results they are looking for they devalue the methodology and service in delivering those results. Its almost impossible 'to teach the world to search' as most users don't know '+' etc search terms, therefore with one search box to use they typically type a couple of words that could lead to almost any results.
One suggestion would be to review the way that Google presents their search box, perhaps by offering the user several additional selections to choose from, these maybe in the form of tick boxes 'commercial, reference, adult, etc' almost allowing them to self filter their results. Alternatively giving them additional options once the primary search has been made, an extension of the 'spelling error' system that is currently in place.
These are only ideas of how the visitors experience can be improved, Google can only do so much in tuning the se results, perhaps Google should also be looking at how to achieve better results by obtaining more defined search terms in the first place.
Anyway I'm off to scratch my head even more as the 64 and 216 results are not helping me.
Thanks ad Regards
Okay, that sentence doesn't scan very well. And my music has wrapped around from Bruce Springsteen to Phil Collins (bleah), so I think I'm heading to bed. I'll be around tomorra and over the weekend some to answer whatever questions I can.
Who were Crazy Janie and the Chicken Man?
Catch you tomorrow..
I'm not seeing dramatic improvements, but the results do look better. What I find amazing, having quickly skimmed this thread, is that no one seems to think the sky is falling yet - it won't be long now.
Kaled.
He runs a really nice site which he puts a lot of work into and following the Florida update he removed any duplicate phrases from his home page which might have led to the so called Over Optimization Penalty. I really can't see any keyword stuffing anywhere on his site, or in fact anything I would call spam whatsoever.
He's just started returning to the SERPs the last 30 days, but he has been whacked by the big hammer for his most important keywords again.
Who said the meek would inherit the earth?
And many thanks to everyone for the informative posts this morning.
Flora
