Forum Moderators: open
"This thread is ONLY for serious, generic discussion of changes that you are observing with the new algo in this update. As in things like "Looks to me like PR is less important this month, and anchor text of inbound links counts more.", etc. How your site is doing has no relevance here unless you can explain why you think so in terms of a general algo analysis."
This thread is NOT for y'all to say how much you think Google sucks, or alternatively how great the new SERPs are. The idea is to pick apart how Google is working, and not to criticize their quality.
non sequitur
OK, back to the fight....
:-)
It's a tendency of people here to continually focus (and look for) ONE THING responsible for changes. With one particular site, it might be one thing, but ti doesn't necessarily have to be so.
Put another way, if internal anchor text became more important, but you removed all the title tags and all the other text from all pages on your domain, those other choices will have affected your ranking more than the change of anchor text weight from .37 to .46 or whatever.
So you asking to explain a phenomenon solely from one ingredient doesn't make any sense. The question doesn't relate to what was being talked about.
Back to the topic. What things are you seeing in play now that are different than before Brandy?
my post was in reply to somebody posting that 'internal (anchor) links' have more weight than used to be which I disagree.
I was the someone. You might be right, I might be wrong.
Maybe it's a theming thing... our site is very focussed on one subject although it has pages that cover a lot of related subjects. (We usually get arrivals on over 50 different kw combinations a day, on 30+ pages, but the 200+ pages on the site are all tied to a basic theme.)
Whatever it is, we're doing very well and getting hit by the bot more than ever. I've never seen it this active. Fresh tags are showing almost daily for many more pages than before. There has been a real change with Brandy, not just a tweak. Maybe it started with Austin, I don't know. I was away from the net, doing the underground survey stuff when that one came through....
ADDED: The discussion on regular changes to pages, new pages added, enticing the bot to visit more often has merit. All of the 20+ pages I added in the last two weeks are getting crawled daily and fresh-tagged. (But so are all the main, PR5+ pages that don't change much). It seems to extend back to new pages 2 - 3 months ago. The PR4, totally static field notes pages aren't being crawled as much but they're still getting hit.
I do agree that given the constant smaller changes of Algo that my position change cant all be down to this one change. It is however the only change i made in my pages which now rank heavily..even when the keywords are not in the title, not in the metas and sometimes not even in the body. However the body is on topic .
Take from the above what you will, however i have been watching this thread carefully and many people seem to be saying the same thing.
Before it assumed all the versions of the word were the SAME word and ended up penalizing sites for having too much of it if it happened to match their keyword. Now it seems to recognize that the words are other versions of it and it's beneficial for you to have them.
This also would explain why it seemed like a filter was in effect on certain ones because those particular words had more stemming versions used on the sites.
Hope that makes sense!
It seems like the total amount of domains linking to a site are playing an important role, more than sites with a lot of links but only from a few domains.
Off topic: Anyone know a lot about how a subdomain spammer could do so well without any inbounds from other than his/her own subdomains that are 80-90% similar (literally, I checked with .php analyzer)? If so, Sticky me.
Brandy has seen my site rise from c. #8 to #1 on the key phrase.
Not cheering (not much anyhow) but the prima facie evidence would seem to indicate that importance of external anchor text has been turned up somewhat.
It's a reasonably popular phrase, over 8m results.
Has anyone done absolutely nothing to their site since before Florida and come back into play (ie top page) after Brandy?
Some people ignored the doomsayers and sat it out - just wondering how much correlation there really is between the pre Florida and Post brandy algo's.
Yep. Several big money phrases - back to top 5 in SERPs .... for now
On one, I have been waiting to completely overhaul the site so it has gone untouched since at least October.
It was consistently in the top 10 (usually #2,3 sometimes #1) for the past 3 yrs till last Nov. for a particular 2 word search.
The index page had dropped out of site completely in Nov. but the other pages would come up with other detailed searches.
I noticed it appeared as #6 in the previous 64 results but now it seems to have settled into #21 position.
About a million more pages are showing up now too.
It still comes up #5 & #6 on the other search engines.
some relaxation on authority sites (for all those portal sites that were rubbing their hands with glee at just sticking a load of words into their homes page, I am afraid life has just got a little tougher!)
If anything there has been an increase in the importance of theming.
Also, backlinks have regained some of their importance
But the most important thing is the one constant that has applied throughout all of these updates: If you are well themed and ranking well under relatively generic search terms then you can make hay with many other more specific related search terms. On the other hand, you have to be very careful about ending up being "pigeon-holed" into a particular theme which is fairly peripheral to what your site is about (BEWARE Open Directory listings!). And on the third hand (if that is possible!) you have to avoid the danger of being too loosely themed and losing all your positions, sort of falling between two stools if you like. This last point is in our view the main reason for those who have vanished from the SERPS altogether.
But then again, maybe you should just make your title longer...:)
Anyway, based on the little research I have done I would have to concur with the couple recent posts (and others) that mention linking. Brandy seems to be giving even more weight than before to both incoming and outgoing links, as well as to internal links within the same site.
And in some cases, I'm thinking there may be less emphasis on the title tag than before. But I don't have enough evidence to say that with any confidence. I'd love to hear more discussion of this aspect, esp. since so much emphasis has been placed on the title tag in the past.
I think this has been an unanticipated effect of all the upheaval caused by Florida/Austin. It has given more incentive to spammers to improve than before.
(and as a side-note, as a previously honest webmaster, I now keep these sites in a favourites folder now - because if they ever start to push me out of business, I may have to resort to the same techniques.)
I appreciate that GG wants spam reports, but Google attempts to try to deal with this with algo tweaks. The sort of spam I am seeing is too focussed, and small scale, to be affected by an algo.
I've seen a generic recovery for both large city searches (though in the travel industry) as well as smaller ones.
It looks to me like Google has slackened the filter - if there is or was one, and SERPs are starting to look more like pre florida.
a singles club
a plasma TV dealer
a dental plan provider
a moving company
a drug rehab center
a digital camera store
a debt consolidation company
a cellphone store
etc.
In one case I gave up trying to find property for sale because I could not cut through all of the 'ddd' SERP's to find what I was looking for.
All this was returned on a simple city state search. It appears that having the city state as the first words of the title tag outweighs meaningful content on page.
WBF
If these towns have less than 600 population, spamming SERPs for which there are no relevant sites should *all kinds* of easy.
The town in question is home to the Northwest Champion Sheepdog Trials. You can find it under that search.
The common thread for the top sites on this search is a title tag that reads, 'City State - whatever the subject is'. (Note the lack of comma between City and State.)
And that is the point I was trying to make. If, on an obscure search, exactly matching the first words in the title to the search query gives top spot, then we can guess that there is a pretty good liklihood that the same would give a boost on more competitive terms.
WBF
Mc
2) Anchor has Keyword1 (Main killer keyword)
Page Content has Keyword2 (free, services, american, indian, LA, city, country, we, online etc.)
Site ranks high for Keyword2 Keyword1 OR Keyword1 Keyword2
IMHO
Has anyone else seen this? :o
Phil
keywords within the domain HAVE ALWAYS BEEN imp, make search for any keyword and you would find many top listings to have the keyword within the url.
Make a search for sco, scot, scott, scottish and see how the listings are influenced by the keywords within domain (main and sub domain)
-michael
SiteXPage1
Description
SiteXPage2
Description
SiteYPage1
Description
In fact, it could be just conjecture because there's no way to know for sure since it's generally more than one thing involved and can be a change on Google's end, but I believe that keyword 1 keyword 2 thing may have had something to do with a site coming back after anchor text was modified in the way you described.
Most of the sites in that search that generally turn up came back pretty quickly, and mine took a while longer so I assume it was something on my end.
I also decreased the density slightly as you indicated, even though it was appropriate just as it was. What I'm seeing on many sites is that it's not only density, there's a difference in the number of occurrences, regardless of page size.
