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I am talking about traffic of nearly 7 k from google everyday and hence its a sizable decrease.
Looking for early answers on how we could check the things
The theories are interesting though. I tend to buy into the one about more constant flux with datacenters.
If you all read what is actually said, you might learn something.
I was talking about well rounded sites, that also rank high on their authority-like score. That score is not based on how good the content is, it is based on how much of an authority the site appears to be.
I suspect that my site is rating above average on that count, but certainly not invincibly high. From what I can see, EFV most likely has me beat by a large margin. Danny's site on the other hand doesn't do so well, though it is on its way.
Looking through Danny's site I don't see a linking pattern that would give it a high authority-like score. It is a good and useful site (I've been there before), but if it dropped, there was a reason. Getting pissed at me for "spewing" good advice won't help you find that reason.
Pay attention to who links to a site and how they link to it.
Oh, and by the way, if you don't consider the outdoor industry to be lucrative enough for you, Go to the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City next weekend.
Anyway, I also have pages up on sites that are ranking quite well in two of the most lucrative industries out there. Why are they ranking well? Because they contain good content AND they are on the right sites with the right links.
In fact, one of the pages ranks well in spite of what most SEOs would consider abyssmal site design, navigation and optimization, simply on the power of the site, and the external links from other authority sites to that area of the site.
Now, if you are in a field that is so lucrative that it is incredibly competitive, then there is a very good chance that you will not have a high authority score and there will be a lot of other sites that are pretty close to interchangable with yours. If you lose out one month, do something to improve your situation.
I noticed on a couple of my search terms the pages that rank highly or are #1 are homemade pages with nothing but the keywords in the <title> and photos on the target page. No real content at all.
I am not saying this is happening for everyone - just some areas that I actually reviwed. What does that say about the authority theory or the content theory?
Please dont slam this post - its just an observation guys.
For us, it was a major linking campaign. Single links and sitewides, from related and unrelated sites.
Anybody else want to proffer some info (confessions? heh heh)
The Summer effect argument would only seem valid if people were seeing similar drops (in percentage terms) on the other key engines like Yahoo and MSN. Ive not seen this myslef and Ive not heard much comment about this, hence I believe we are talking about an algo change
This is a complex area we are discussing here and I doubt very much that the change is due to a single factor. Google no doubt tweaks all sorts of parameter and adds and removes all sorts of filters in an update. Hence I dont think it makes sense to say that a particular assetion is wrong because there are a few sites that contradict it. These sites may be affected by other google changes or changes they have made themselves - theres never going to be one golden rule.
Based on my portfolio of sites and the comments above heres what I'm currently considering as possible changes (for what its worth)
- higher page rank erosion for internal links (this would hurt a lot of database driven sites especially with several layers of subcategory)
- increased importance of keywords inurl
- possible penalty for a high concentration of adwords type content
- possible penalty for template based sites where the level of unique content is low
- continued importance of the length of time content has been indexed by google not just for the doamin but for the pages as well
Where I say "penalty" I dont so much mean penalty as more decreased importance
I have total of 4 websites. Two of them are totaly static and two of them are dynamicaly generated for which I use mod_rewrite to be "search engine friendly"
Well, here is the problem. The two "search engine friendly" sites were droped from G index totaly. Each one of them with over 15,000 pages.
The two static sites are doing much better now. So I am about to believe that the google enginiers found the way to cut the mod_rewrite magick off
WIth the exception of the key word bullet, what you are describing is a directory. It seems to me that Google may be trying to curb the proliferation of auto-generated directories by going after sites that display those characteristics.
The problem, of course, is if your site shares characteristics with those types of sites, it may be devalued as well...
I think the problem is in the internal sites the most, but also the index site, but there has been a change here the last 3-4 days, my site is a very stable site, I dident have the problems with florida or other in this or last year, but now I see a little back drop of visits, about 30%, but as I said the results has not got better.
I had expect things like this and I think it will be worse when Google gets listed.
Before IPO, hmm the thing Im afried of is that money will destroy Googles search, more focus on Froogle again and other things, then the normel good old SE will have alot of amazon like sites, forums org,edu sites, so thats what I think its the future og Google, where MSN will have normal search maybe not as good quality as google early this year, but ok SE.
I have to admit that in some of my areas while I have dropped, the results look better on the whole (except for omitting my site from the #1 position of course!)
Of course there will be exceptions but in the areas I look at Im seeing a lot less datafeed type affiliate sites and much more "final destination" shops.
joined:May 21, 2002
posts:762
votes: 0
Rocking the boat? I'd say it's on the verge of capsize:
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]
[hosted.ap.org...]
[hosted.ap.org...]
And that's just the tip of the iceberg... reminds me of the Titantic - "The ship that would never sink".
[edited by: bobothecat at 11:09 pm (utc) on Aug. 9, 2004]
joined:Dec 29, 2003
posts:5428
votes: 0
1. G had failures of some sort (hardware, software, algo etc......) which created the problems encountered. It is working hard to fix the problem and that is why we are seeing (or at least I am) seeing significant improvements today.
2. G has intentionally rocked the boat to push more webmasters towards adwords. A small spike in revenue (or signups) would look good in floating an IPO. Now that they have scared some of us, they are reverting back slowly.
It would be madness on their part to introduce new changes in algos at this time. We should all take of our webmaster blinders and allow more peripheral vision.
The datacenters moving around is normal. A somewhat larger move than usual is not bizarre. I haven't found any serp that is drastically different than a week ago. Maybe some sectors have had major changes, but to think there is some ipo-related reason for some shift in the serps is fanciful at best.
(And there is no such thing as a generic www or "main google".)
joined:Dec 29, 2003
posts:5428
votes: 0
Unless Kenny Boy's team took over Google and wants to make as much as they can this month and then close the doors I doubt it. Google has plenty of cash on hand and messing up the results on purpose would the stupidest, most short sighted thing ever.
On the other hand, I wouldn't be suprised if Y! did it to make it's sites appear higher since search is a small part of their business. Search is everything for Google.
What really caught my attention was that AdSense clicks and revenue nearly doubled for the same period. Don't get me wrong, I'm very pleased! :) FYI, I don't do AdWords.
My point is that Google is a web business, just like yours or mine. They are probably tweaking to maximize revenue, just like any successful affiliate site would. Perhaps we need to consider how AdWords and AdSense figures into Google's algo to effectively understand the algo.
I'm thinking their goal is to strike a balance between SERPs that are good enough to attract users and effective advertising so they keep their advertisers happy (and insure that Google makes plenty of money).
Are we mistakenly looking at one tree in the forest (the SERPs) instead of at the whole forest (the SERPs/AdSense/AdWords/advertizing system)?
It's a different way of thinking about an SE than what we've done in the past and I'm not sure where to start... Or if it's even worth considering... Any thoughts?