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Anyone else noticing any major changes?
That makes no sense to me. Are you saying that most commerce sites don't contain good or accurate information about what they sell? And if the commerce site contains information why isn't it being treatly like every other site. What you need to realize is Adword commerce sites can't provide revenue streams to Adsense totally from those Adword campaigns or Froogle while and at the same time be relegated lower in the serps. It takes a combination. Few sites can go strictly the Adwords route.
I was trying to purchase some computer supplies today and again I had wade through a plethora of sites (link sites, doorway pages) on Google to find a commerce site selling the products. I don’t want to see a picture of the product and a link to a site selling it. I want to buy as quickly as possible. The commerce sites give me all the information I need about the product. I don’t need to see a page optimized for click throughs or Adsense calling itself an information site.
I requested a Google webalert for backlinks to my front page. One arrived this morning. It lists backlinks that I already knew about, but which must be new discoveries by Googlebot. These backlinks are also listed in the same order on the the first two pages of backlinks that Google shows with the link: command. (Some other links are mixed in with them, mainly internal.)
Dead meat doesnt mean that Google doesnt know about them.
Marcia is dead on. This is not a glitch. IMO this is also not stupid on Google's part.
Google has stated many times over that gaming the system with links is a problem that they have in their sites. Confusing the hell out of webmasters, SEOs and PR/link brokers about which links are of value is a good start. Of course they could just eliminate the PR part of the toolbar, but that wouldn't give them near as much pleasure.
One thing a fairly accurate backlink command does is help webmasters avoid bad neighborhoods. This is something Google suggests webmasters do, and now has mostly taken away the best tool to gauge that. yes, some super spammy sites now show tons of guestbook links that make them easier to see as bad neighborhood residents, but so many PR4 and PR5 pages show between zero and two backlinks now that you can't judge anything at all about them (unless of course you use Yahoo or other means to see the backlinks).
This is fundementally two things. First, Google deliberately shows inaccurate results for a search. This is no small thing, even if it is an obscure, webmaster-only search. The results are low quality. Google completely sucks and is an embarrassment as a backlink search engine. Then second, this is basically a betrayal of their own guidelines and public comments to webmasters.
Hey Googleplex, if you say people should avoid bad neighborhoods, don't lie to them and make it harder to do (for no good reason since again this info can be found elsewhere with a little extra work).
I can't see why content is more important than ecommerce.
The inherent value of content or e-commerce isn't at issue. My point was simply that, according to Google's mission statement, Google's role is to organize information and make it universally accessible to users. Google has never claimed to be a shopping engine, so it would be well within its rights to filter out order pages or pages that use boilerplate catalog or affiliate content. (I'm not saying it should do that, although that certainly would reduce a lot of clutter in the SERPs.)
In any case, the discussion is academic because there's no evidence that Google really is filtering out e-commerce or affiliate pages per se. It may tweaking its algorithm to favor "organic" sites over those that practice aggressive SEO, and it may be attempting (without much success) to filter out boilerplate duplicate content, but that isn't the same thing as filtering out commercial pages.
