Small Site filter?

[martinibuster]

In another thread someone made mention of Google's Mom & Pop Filter.

Hmm... That's a new one on me. I've optimized a couple Mom & Pop websites and they're doing well in the top five across multiple cities and counties.

Sorry, but in my experience there is no Mom and Pop Filter.

[martinibuster]

the inability to generate significant anchor text to your own pages is a definite disadvantage.

That's a problem with corporate sites, too. A links page just doesn't fit in with the look of a typical corporate site.

Although many have Partner pages, and it's smart to convince your partners to reciprocate, unless you cultivate high pr partners a corporate site is going to be at a similar disadvantage.

[phantombookman]

Hi Midhurst
the so called mom and pop sites or as we would call them over here amatuer/enthusiast ventures are now very difficult to evaluate.

I am not so much making the point of how one site may be #1 and another #8 but the fact that some are in and some are out.

I know from trial and error/experience that KWD is a killer now. The oft quoted 7% can get you dropped straight out. I had to reduce down to 2 to 3% to get some pages back in.

I have a site that is dedicated to one author, it used to be on the 1st page of results for just author name but got loads of #1 spots on more refined searches.
It has now been 'filtered' out completely for the author name alone but returns #1 for author name books

I firmly believe that because many of these smaller mom and pop sites are probably about a specialised subject or interest that use of keywords is inevitable and they are now being unfairly penalised by Google.
i hope that G' will alter the balance a little when next they change because many good sites no longer appear for certain keywords when clearly they should.

Nobody condones keyword spamming but how do you build a site for red widgets without referring to red widgets which on a smaller page can give a high KWD if just mentioned twice.
It is very frustrating
Regards
Rod

[Midhurst]

Phantombookman,
Ref: your last para.
Well, that was one of the points I was trying to make in my earlier post.
Have a short page on Widgetitis, for example, and you are bound to mention it several times. Although there may be other words that commonly appear with Widgetitis in most documents which would help with the Latent Semantic Indexing criteria, there won't be any synonyms.
So, you're right.
Your are left with cutting down the keyword/keyphrase content and/ or adding on-theme inward links which is probably not a goer for most sites.
Regards
Midhurst

[phantombookman]

Midhurst
agree entirely, I am now actively avoiding my keywords to the point of it looking ridiculous.
Just doing a new site based one one genre of books.
Got a great domain with the 2 main keywords in seprated by a hyphen (can't believe it was available!) but on the homepage I mention
welcome to red-widgets.com and dare not mention it again though it would be warranted and indeed visually useful.

I did post a question about page size and KWD wondering if there was a minimum page size or number of times keyword/s used before it became an issue. It did not get a reply so I am non-the-wiser sadly.

I'm off for a bottle of claret and hopefully things will look better.
Cheers
Rod

[Midhurst]

Phantombookman,
May I make a few sugestions?
Better to have short pages, but keep each page to a tight theme. Keep the design VERY simple with ultra quick loading and lots of big HTML in the header. Link all the pages within a sub theme together and link this group of pages from the index page. You may decide to make a sub directory (or directories if you have several sub themes).
Can you make these sections so moorish that outsiders will want to link spontaneously to them?
Can you swop links with other on-theme pages from other sites, page to page?I think we all risk over optimization now if link anchor text features our keywords - unless of course the domain includes them. Some people think they get hit too but I'm quite certain that they don't.
If you can get inward links from on-theme pages to individual pages or sections of your own I think you may be able to increase the keywords density; but it all comes down to Latent Semantic Indexing of your page and the page which has the incoming link. Does you page/pages look above average not only for the keywords but also for synonyms and associated words?
This a non techie evaluation.
Am I teaching my grandmother to suck eggs?
Sorry if it sounds that way'
Hope it helps - we are all groping for an answer.Let me know the result in a month or so please.
Good luck.
Midhurst

[BMach]

phantombookman, you mentioned keeping KWD under 3%. Is this for text within the body tag or for the entire page, site? My KWD is under 3% for text in the body tag but just under 20% for the entire page including title, description, etc.

[powerofeyes]

I love google and all their efforts, I have always been a admirer of Google, This particular discussion on small site filter does trigger my attention, I have seen this practically Google likes big sites( especially after austin and Brandys)with lots of pages, Relevant small sites are not ranking well( in some areas) any more but some authority sites in that particular area dominate for many more results than they used to rank before,
For example in moving industry some top moving companies used to rank for 100 phrases before austin, but now the same sites rank for 300 phrases( just a percentage comparison not the exact figure ), the percentage of ranking for a particular authority site has just multiplied, All those authority sites need is the phase or word somewhere on the copy of the site( even if it is some internal page) , So where does that 200 phrase ranking come from, All from the mom and pop relevant smaller sites, those big sites just crush the small sites and takes the spot occupied by the small sites,

Criteria for the large site to rank, be relevant to the industry and just have the word somewhere in the copy of the site,

Criteria for the smaller site to rank, Go design a bigger site with lots of pages,

This looks like a good move, But what are the spammer loop holes I have seen in this type of ranking criteria by Google, One particular guy has 5000 junk doorway pages all just loaded with keywords and link to the SEO company's other clients, Google considers this site as a big site due to the number of pages and this site ranks for lots of keywords, this site doesnt have any proper links, i have seen similiar type of sites rank pretty well, all these spam SEO sites have one thing in common having lots and lots of junk doorway pages, If doorway pages are working well with google then Google index will be slammed with 1000s of auto generated doorway pages,

So what is the solution google has for this if they just want to focus on big sites in ranking,

[JudgeJeffries]

The one thing that this thread sreams out is that Goole is no longer about relevance. Major <mistake> by them I think. They'll soon reallise when the competition starts barking at their heeels so in my view its no change if you have a content rich page.
Patience boys and girls, patience

[edited by: ciml at 8:53 am (utc) on April 14, 2004]
[edit reason] Slight language alteration... [/edit]