Forum Moderators: open
To totally prove the PR myth here. We have a site rated 4 that is on Google but we have not found it under any search term. I don't understand why they would penalize it if it even is. I think Google has been feeding us lines about how to get good listings because I don't think THEY even know how their spider indexes sites.
So if I dump a pile of playing cards randomly on a desk and the 2 of spades happens to land on top, you are saying that proves that the 2 of spades somehow ranks higher than the other cards below it and therefore you can calculate why the 2 of spades landed on top?
Not if it only happens on average once every 52 throws, but if you keep on throwing the cards down and the 2 of spades regularly comes top, then yes, it's worth trying to calculate, because it reaches a frequency where there's a reason for it.
I love how the moderators like to inject personal attacks where there were none. Keep the love notes coming mods...hugs and kisses!
My point ..since that date the "nic" bar on the left of these BBs has changed at marcia's posts and has shown "Senior member" ...now if you have'nt seen the change yet and you have posted now many times since that event it says to me that you do not pay enough attention to what is on screen in front of your eyes ...
If this is repeated in the way you analyse your pages and those of others and such errors are usually the product of becoming too fixed in your perceptions ... you will not be able to improve your ranking .
For many years I taught drawing and painting ..the hardest thing was always to get people to understand that they need to retrain themselves in how to see ...most people only think they see ...
If I were you ..
look harder and differently..with a much more open mind ..code less for a while ..and I think you'll realise that you've been missing the details ...
SEO is all about paying attention to details ...there is no formula that will work all across the board ...I know that some sites have to be SEO'd totally diffently than others either because the competition is stronger in their niche ...or some high rankers are cloaking etc ..
if it was broke ..it would be broke for all of us ..it aint ..but they keep changing it a lttle ...good ...I prefer it that way...I get easily bored ..
to the rest of you ..my apologies for going off thread for a while there...
Iamlost...I once owned a shop where I changed my window display every 30 days ....I know exactly what you mean ...eventually the shops around me started asking me to do theirs ..because for every customer they got ..I'd had them first and they'd already spent most of their money in my place ....I agree ..it's a lot like SEO ..
Just as in off-line biz, you need to know your market and your industry better than your competitor. G forces you to do that by rewarding you for doing it, and ignoring you if you don't. Works pretty well.
Some may find their lives happier if they get out of the biz that's giving them trouble, and go into something else. Happy is important.
Nonsense. We've never run an automated analysis to attempt to understand the algo, ever. And we're probably better off for it. That may be one way but it's cetainly not the only way. Doing well on the Web is still part science part art.
There are many ways to succeed. Our approach, which works well for us: Figure our what works by reading the papers and studying the SERP's. Focus on what works, and put our resources against what works. Don't sweat the details. When we have time, go back and find the underperfoming pages, and make them perform. When we have time, go back and fiind the gaps and cracks, and don't let things fall thru them any more.
>>Figure our what works by reading the papers and studying the SERP's. Focus on what works, and put our resources against what works.
That's good over the long term. If certain things read in papers aren't in current use chances are they will come into play down the road some time, and having read them it's far easier to spot in the SERPs when something does gain in importance.
Everyone needs to be open-minded and realize that there is enough experience and information (plus you can always send a sticky in an attempt to delve deeper!) laid out on this site alone to turn a novice into a fully functional SEOer after due time. Most people here don't like to brag about "i make great money" but sometimes that's going to appear in their post out of frustration and desperation to get people to really pay attention and start believing that a professional can and will achieve high-rankings and hopefully can and will monetize such.
I would be bummed to think (despite knowing less competition is better for me) that someone ever read a post saying SEO is impossible, or at least that google rankings are not something you can manipulate to some degreee, and just basically left looking for a totally different avenue. There's plenty for everyone and everyone who is successful is just one more person whose work I can analyze and learn from.
I was kind of wondering what happened to the mod status Marcia. Glad to see frequent posting by you has not been absent as well; you're always informative.
Added: you do have two years on me here, but jeez you make me feel inadequate when I compare post counts :-)
Isn't that how MSN works? :)
Yep! I think they do not play with a full deck either. Plus they forget to get rid of the jokers!
I'm just one of the boys now
Isn't that a sexist remark :o)
I was interested to read you come from an art background. So do I. I used to do lectures for big UK companies on problem solving using techniques that artists in the past have adopted. By using lateral thought, generated by juxtapositioning very different elements within a painting, new ideas can be generated. Precise data and logical annalysis is very important, but experimenting and loosing control can open ones mind to whole new areas which would otherwise have never been thought of. In the internet world, art techniques can be applied very effectively and produce sites that are very different from the norm.... and we all know how unique content is king :)
if you think Google is impossible to optimize for, then speak for yourself and yourself alone.
If google were impossible to optimize for then I couldn't possibly target keyword phrase1-5 and achieve top 1-5 positioning for those target phrases within 2-3 weeks of posting the new pages. Some decently competive phrases too.
Then when I wanted to add keyword phrase 1b I wouldn't be able to do that in the same time with a tiny tweak of the page code.
Of course, I would have had to read a decent amount of the google forums to do that, adn learn from my mistakes, and do a lot of trial and error testing, and take some chances now and then, and accept that certain experiments fail (sorry client x...).
However, sad but true, I can do this, and so can many of the people who post here, so I guess it is possible to optimize for google after all. Not spam, just follow some pretty basic rules. There are definitely some tricks that aren't available easily to everyone, but that's life.
If you haven't read the various google white papers why not? They pretty much outline completely how the stuff works in a general sense, after that it's just a matter of seeing what the implementations are.
It's not about loving or hating google, it's about realizing that an algorhythm can only be so complex when it's being run that many times a day, then experimenting until you find the access points.
If google were impossible to optimize for then I couldn't possibly target keyword phrase1-5 and achieve top 1-5 positioning for those target phrases within 2-3 weeks of posting the new pages. Some decently competive phrases too.
Are you saying that you have found a way round the sandbox effect for new pages? I thought that it took much longer than 2-3 weeks for the new pages to show?
Stolen each of my pages and taken my SERPS, and I am nowhere to be found.
Have e-mailed webmaster at G with both fingers and toes crossed.
May all your search terms be No.1
wellzy
Are you saying that you have found a way round the sandbox effect for new pages
I have seen no sandbox affect for new pages, number 1 after about 10 days, hovering 1-2 thereafter. No secrets, just reading the google forums, plus using some information and resources not everyone can use, all fully within both the letter and the spirit of SEO white hat techniques [plus brett's timeless advice, add high quality content pages, as often as possible, give the people what they want to find, and need, offer something of use], my less savory attempts have been wiped out of the google SERPS, huge kudos to google for that work, by the way, yahoo are still way behind.
All subsequent tweaks to add key terms in related areas have the same result, all changes are in the SERPS in the usually speedy Google style, 10-14 days.
It's possible there is a sandbox affect on very large sites. The reasons for this are to me self evident, and are why I take with large grains of salt everything that comes from people too closely connected to google, or any other search engine, as Leosghost has pointed out in his inimitable style. Follow his advice, use your eyes, look at the google home page, then read up here, see who was right and who did not seem to have an adequate connection to that information [to be as fair as possible], it's enlightening.
I have definitely seen the new site sandbox affect, no doubt about that one, like clockwork.
The alleged sandbox affect for new sites, with no existing links, definitely seems to be real, sadly, that's really going to bite me hard the next months, it will be interesting to see how long that actually lasts for, I'll be able to time that one to the day.
This sandbox has I believe the same cause as the new page sandbox on large sites, at least if one opts for the simplest explanation that covers the most possible behaviors, which is traditionally what the empirical method encourages. It also helps to take a close look at the interests and biases of those who argue against the simplest theory, sort of like with global warming.
I also added pages to one of the sites for "purple widgets," and in less than two weeks those pages were in the top five for "purple widgets".
Five weeks ago I submitted another site (1200+ pages), did everything exactly as I have with the other sites, and only five or six pages are showing up in G's index. I'm getting quality backlinks, adding new content every week, and more.
Since this site is a make-or-break endeaver for me, I'm just a tad concerned.
One thing I _did_ do was keep the site block from SE's until I submitted last month. Perhaps the "noindex,nofollow" and the "disallow: * " in the robots.txt file is a penalty?
I agree with you on the fact that:
["I don't think SEO is getting harder, but just more sites fighting for a top spot and there is more SEO garbage (Articles, etc) out there".]
CygnusX1
The response to the submission form said that they were rethinking maintaining a links page, as that was a holdover from the days before Google and other search engines.
So is that the future ...?
They have simply meant that they no longer consider a links page to be necessary because users have other ways to find sites of interest. There's nothing sinister about that; it just shows that the Web has evolved since the era of "My favorite Web pages" and "Cool site of the the day."
FWIW, I used to have a collection of links pages on my nonprofit writing site, but I got rid of it because it duplicated work that other sites were doing better. I still have outbound links from that site, but they're used in an editorial context, not in a separate links directory.
