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Why do some sites, that have no adherence to any SEO technique, achieve (enjoy) top rankings for a very competitive word/phrase? Does anyone know?
I don't expect an answer from anyone involved in these sites as they are either involved in corruption or judging by their SEO would never visit webmasterworld!
Since last weekend (13th March) two sites I run with good original content, text hyperlinks, good inbound links (all the good advise offered on this very forum!) and in completely different genres have suffered poor google rankings. They previously performed very well and were entirely specific to the keyword search of google customers and are now several pages down the SERPS.
Now the same top SERPS appear to me to be odd, ambiguous and definately worse, where they were previously very accurate.
Ironically, this week I have achieved a PR4 where I had a PR0 before.
I also agree, in theory, that google must try to act against spammers etc and that there will always be collateral damage to innocent sites whenever there is a shift in the algos.
I know that everyone in this forum is somewhat biased (myself included) when analysing google results, but opinions voiced here will be reflected in public opinion over time.
I think good search results should be googles #1 priority but, for whatever reason, I'm not sure that it is any more.
I am biased and sulking because my sites have been adversely affected, so don't forget to take what I say with a pinch of salt, just keep an eye on those SERPs because I think, and hope, the people at google are listening.
Google ain't a monopoly. I remember when Altavista was king of the hill. My sites do extremely well in Google, and yet I see lot of hits from Yahoo and MSN. Pretty much everyone on the Net knows about Yahoo and MSN. There is zero cost for a searcher to switch from Google to something else. Google *does* have to worry about where people will be searching 3 years from now.
one of best ways to do that is to make your site the best that you can while you forget that search engines even exist.
I agree with this sentiment, and its a good base plan, but...
Think about authoring books. You might write a book about fly-fishing, but the publisher will generally design the jacket. And they'll make damn sure that the target audience looking at the bookshelves in stores knows what it is about!
So whilst your original title, for your afficiandos, might have been 'Piscatorial adventures with a stiff rod' - your publisher is likely to want to get a few mentions of, er, 'Fly Fishing' liberally on the book jacket.
Returning to the web, as such SEO isn't necessarily in any way dishonest. I put some academic stuff on the web a couple of years ago, and was disappointed that it hardly made page 100. So I gave a few hints on the index page about its content (i.e. I titled it according to content, and gave that word a few more mentions) Now its a big hitter, and gets the visitors it deserves. Dishonest? No. Commonsense? Yes :) I just made the 'book jacket' reflect the content a bit more clearly.
Certainly, if I wrote a book about 'fly-fishing in the UK', I wouldn't expect to have to call it 'Otter Baiting in Mongolia' in order to get it into the right section of the bookstore. But in Google's post-Florida 'bookstore' - hey its got as much chance as any :)
[edited by: SyntheticUpper at 2:38 pm (utc) on Mar. 20, 2004]
In our case we should be no 1 for our keyword as we have better content, more pages, more page views and users(comparing publicly available results) and better Alexa ranking. Yet we hover between 20th and 30th position for our keyword.
As an experiment, for one day, we served up a copy of the No 1 ranked page for our keyword to Google -- we dropped in the rankings. It wasn't the on-page text that made the difference, it was obviously inbound links or some other part of the algorithm. Then we used a variety of tools to check link popularity and quality.
I believe that the problem is that in the early days of the net, everyone wanted to make links with everyone else, but now they dont care. Link requests go unanswered, but some sites, like ours, are growing and living in the present, not tied to with the dead links of the past. After considerable expense I have now given up dealing with Google "optimisation".
The lack of transparency from Google is extremely frustrating for legitimate sites that are incorrectly indexed. A legitimate site should not have to spend weeks trying one aspect of page/link optimisation to get to their rightful position only to have the algorithm change. They should not have to risk penalities for trying to manipulate the index to get to where they belong. They should get help from Google, not silence, because it is in everyone's interest to have the best index.
But, the bottom line is that Google probably control more than 70% of the results so they are in the driving seat at the moment.
You will notice that I used the word "currently" in my original post. I think that if Google continue to produce questionable results then it is inevitable that this will lead if not to their demise then certainly to a decrease in their popularity. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that Joe Public has noticed that the results ain't what they used to be. If this continues people will start to drift away to other SE's. IMHO all it would take would be a trendy television advertising campaign to start this ball rolling big-time.
Bill Gates has been quoted often enough on his desire to become a major player in Search Engines and if this is what he sets out to do then make no mistake about he will do it. With his money and control Google are just a fly in the ointment at the moment.
[edited by: ciml at 3:04 pm (utc) on Mar. 20, 2004]
[edit reason] Please see StickyMail [/edit]
I tend to agree with you about Google's preoccupation with SPAM.
I recently ran across a site after a 2 word (very competitive) search term. In position 17 was a site/page that had one word. "underconstruction" PR3
It had 4 back links, one to Yahoo Asia (how in the world did he get that?) and the other 3 were ... um ... obscure.
We then show them their Yahoo and MSN results with their sites stable in the top listings - they start to smile again - and start to use Yahoo and MSN.
They have no real loyalty to Google - so seem to move across to Yahoo and MSN without blinking. They just see that Google has inconsistant, irratating and useless results. Why should anyone one want to use any search engine that performs like this - find a better engine
The future - Yahoo and MSN are showing much better results. My Clients love them and our stats are starting to show that.
We then show them their Yahoo and MSN results with their sites stable in the top listings - they start to smile again - and start to use Yahoo and MSN.
This is a very interesting point Beach, and one which could have repercussions. Let's say that the larger companies who are in this situation get impatient enough to start telling their employees to do like wise, i.e. tell them to use MSN or Yahoo. Google inconsistencies must be causing many larger companies to get a bit restless so there is chance that this could gather momentum. But then again we cannot dispute that Google know the SE business. They also have a good idea what effect their tweaks will have so they must think that they can get away with it.
Our clients are already looking at other search engines because of their stablity.
Since the Florida update Google has been very inconsistant; caused by rolling out new aglo adjustments without fully testing them to see if they have the desired effect.
Very short sighted - it's certainly damaging their reputation
Perplexed-
Scapegoat
