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"Any clue as to the possible role greater reliance on semantics is playing in your never ending quest for more relevant results?"
I'd say that's inevitable over time. The goal of a good search engine should be both to understand what a document is really about, and to understand (from a very short query) what a user really wants. And then match those things as well as possible. :) Better semantic understanding helps with both those prerequisites and makes the matching easier.
So a good example is stemming. Stemming is basically SEO-neutral, because spammers can create doorway pages with word variants almost as easily as they can to optimize for a single phrase (maybe it's a bit harder to fake realistic doorways now, come to think of it). But webmasters who never think about search engines don't bother to include word variants--they just write whatever natural text they would normally write. Stemming allows us to pull in more good documents that are near-matches. The example I like is [cert advisory]. We can give more weight to www.cert.org/advisories/ because the page has both "advisory" and "advisories" on the page, and "advisories" in the url. Standard stemming isn't necessarily a win for quality, so we took a while and found a way to do it better.
So yes, I think semantics and document/query understanding will be more important in the future. pavlin, I hope that partly answers the second of the two questions that you posted way up near the start of this thread. If not, please ask it again in case I didn't understand it correctly the first time. :)
Searching for "high-quality" links before the site itself is high-quality is putting the cart before the horse, so to speak. That time would be better invested in enriching the site by adding good content and more reasons for people to like it on its own merits. Just trying to keep folks from going down a blind alley when there's lot of ways to spend that time improving a site itself. As always, Brett's guide to making a site is a great thread to go back and read again.
GG, your advice makes a lot of sense for information or content publishers, but how should widget marketers interpret that statement? Are you suggesting that they make their commerce sites more like information sites, using editorial or advertorial content to attract prospects? Or does clearly written, descriptive, and original catalog copy qualify as "good content" from a Googlesque point of view?
Too bad webmasterworld doesn't have a signature file section. I'd just keep the above two sentences there.
SEO for 2003 was getting links from anybody and anywhere. Links still, and will always, have value, but SEO for 2004 is to build an authoritative (meaning you know what you are talking about), content-rich site that offers the bot "signals of quality".
Signals of quality. I know what those are in my niche, and what I look for in other areas of the Internet when I am being purely a user.
That's the mantra, follow the rules, have quality, find ways to signal the genuine quality of your site to Googlebot. Of course piffle-peddlers will try to fake quality signals, and it is Google's challenge to decide what is a genuine quality signal and what is drivel. (Sounds like a lot more fun down at the 'plex compared to just counting anchor text...)
GG, your advice makes a lot of sense for information or content publishers, but how should widget marketers interpret that statement? Are you suggesting that they make their commerce sites more like information sites, using editorial or advertorial content to attract prospects? Or does clearly written, descriptive, and original catalog copy qualify as "good content" from a Googlesque point of view?
Good question. It will be interesting to see the answer.
I think part of "semantics" is going to be how the word or phrase is most often used. That is to say, most people who are looking for widgets are looking for info on how to clean them, or sell them, or buy them. And, of course, that fits nicely in with Google's business plan--serve the masses well.
Meanwhile, the ads down the side will have what most people who are into the $ side of widgets are interested in, no matter if that's what most people want or not. And that's not a bad mix, useful-wise and moneymaking wise, too. Hmmm, exactly when is that IPO coming, eh?
As I have said before, the impact of "semantics" on search is going to depend to the topic. But, you'll be able to get a pretty good understanding by looking at the search results--if they do as they are suppose to do. Language is an ongoing, evolving process (finding a Hilton hotel in Paris, for example, is a lot more difficult using search now) and what people are interested about a topic changes, too, even seasonally. In the spring, your widget needs cleaning, but no one cleans their widget (for obvious reasons) in the summer. Search will probably reflect this.
Which is why these reports of spam are so frustrating. Gotta say on Sunday night that my US City, State test (using Postal abbreviations) is not good, maybe worse--lots of spam--but when the state is spelled out (Alabama vs AL or Ala. for example) I'm seeing a tad of improvement.
[edited by: 258cib at 10:39 pm (utc) on Feb. 15, 2004]
SEO for 2004 is to build an authoritative (meaning you know what you are talking about), content-rich site that offers the bot "signals of quality"
steveb, I'm not sure I agree with you 100% here.
I've got a page from one of my SEO sites which is a ranking report and it is ranking higher than any of the hundred plus pages of the real site which has tons of information and is much more an "authority" than the SEO ranking report or SEO site.
I think GG was just giving us some general info, but with all the sites that have very little information and "authority" getting better results than real sites with on target information I just can't believe it's all about "high quality" sites.
Also, I'm a little concerned that one of the products my company sells, shares a KW with a health therapy product. It seems that that general area "health" even though they are offering products for sale, has a huge priority over the area my site covers, which used to be #2 for its KW.
I checked out the overture KW matches and yes the health thing is slightly searched for more... BUT my site doesn't deserve to be dropped to the 13th page (on .co.cuk) and the 38th page (.com).
A core product dropped like that is going to end business for my company very quickly. I'v only had about 12 enquiries through the site in the last 2 months. Before december, I was getting close to 150 enquiries per month.
Phil
What does the quality content and good site means?
Especially if it is a commercial site.
It's incorrect to rank pure informative site higher than commercial for the "red widget" or "some widgets".
There is 50/50 that user want to buy "red widget" than to know about it anything else or to see a directory of “widgets”.
So if you run a commercial site and you care about it, you like your consumers, you add important information regularly, your customers find your site very useful and friendly but Google thinks other way. What to do now?
What to do if there are about 10 very quality commercial sites with good content and good customers replies and they competing with each other but some of them are in the top of results and some of them are out.
Some of them have sales and others not.
What to do if you are in the "out" section?
Make your site even better? What is the line for the good and better?
Read it again. If a high quality site doesn't have "signals of quality" it can be doomed.
The first step is making a genuine quality site. The next steps involve helping the bot recognize the legitimate quality of the site.
Did any one know the algo to determine "signals of quality" for a site?
I'll tell even more - does it possible to determine "signals of quality" for a site?
If a high quality site doesn't have "signals of quality" it can be doomed
Agreed, and by the same token a "low quality" site can get great results if it uses certain optimization techniques that Google happens to value.
I've got plenty of examples and I'm sure many other webmasters will concur.
You can bet your chips on it.
Austin gave me hope, now I'm back looking at trying to get over 28000 backlinks to get top position or just hoping Googles next attempt to counteract this spam produces more relevant results than Austin.
