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Especially sites with many links from site A to B with the same Anchor text across the site.
As far as I can tell the links are not worthless they are just devalued.
Also I think the amount of PR passing has been devalued.
Any Ideas.
As far as Google goes, I wouldn't be surprised to see Google drop a lot of market share in the search business in the coming years and the reason is because Microsoft controls the OS and browser. Only a look at the past will show what Google faces, I hope they do well but they have Yahoo to go up against too.
As far as Google goes, I wouldn't be surprised to see Google drop a lot of market share in the search business in the coming years and the reason is because Microsoft controls the OS and browser.
I worked for MSN when Windows 95 was released with MSN on the Windows desktop. A lot of people within and outside of Microsoft believed MSN would take a big chunk of AOL's market share, but it didn't happen because AOL was already a household name and was perceived as being the better product.
The browser wars were different: Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer were parity products, and Netscape required a big download while IE didn't.
Google may well lose market share if Microsoft can introduce a truly competitive search product, but will it lose "a lot of" market share? That remains to be seen. (One thing to keep in mind is that Google has a big head start in search technology and a strong incentive for remaining the leader in search.)
You say they are weeding out paid links. But there's another word for a paid link - an advert. I can't belive that G is penalising sites that have adverts on other sites, it just wouldn't make sense. They may be discounting them as backlinks but where would they draw the line?
If Google starts counting backlinks from AdSense, and its algorithm discounts other links from sites that it finds numerous and unrelated (e.g. ads), then the incentive to advertise with Google goes up, Google's profits go up, and its stock price goes up.
A lot of people within and outside of Microsoft believed MSN would take a big chunk of AOL's market share, but it didn't happen because AOL was already a household name and was perceived as being the better product.
MSN didn't take a big chunk of AOL's market share because Bill G didn't have a fire in his belly to do so. In the search wars he does.
With more cash in the bank than Google is worth MS can and will win the war if they're willing to pay for the arsenal. My bet is they are.
Perhaps it is time to focus on YAHOO!
However search is different and more similar to browsers in that the toolbar may be the battleground and Microsoft can dominate that aspect of the browser. Also if it is imbedded into the OS Google cannot counter that.
The deciding factor may be quality of search as you say, and taking a look at SERPs now many are saying Google's quality is declining and unless they can counter that they are vulnerable. I have seen some excellent SERPs at other engines, quality results Google wishes they might have. Of coarse Microsoft has not beaten Yahoo either even with the browser homepage default advantage, still search is easy come easy go, if everyone starts getting more and more traffic from MSN & Yahoo then who knows, webmasters may switch too.
The pages that "sell" my own service are all unaffected. However, all the pages that describe other local services and link to their sites, have dropped out of previously good positions.
Those that suggest that G is trying to identfy "good links" from "bad links" in some way, may be onto something.
My pages are well established and normally stable within the ususual fluctuations.
Google will stay on top unless G just produces total useless SERPS for everybody for an extended period of time
thats a very very narrow minded view, luckly companies like google dont think that way or they wouldn't be where they are today.
I bet people were saying that same about altavista about 6 years ago.
All it takes is a engine that produces a better / more efficient way of providing the users desired information and the users will leave google in the millions.
Your little world does not count.
But there's another word for a paid link - an advert. I can't belive that G is penalising sites that have adverts on other sites...
Ignoring or devaluing purchased links isn't a penalty, although it may seem like a penalty to a Webmaster who paid money for those links.
There are not many free or even link exchanges you could make with someone in the wedding industry who isn't your competition.
Really? It seems there would be many related places to obtain links. Insurance agents, travel agents, baby shops all come to mind immediately, since these are things that many newly married people will be in the market for.
It's called networking.
WBF
I mean really, when folks get married it's supposed to be for life. Therefore it would not be too difficult to make a case that almost anything could be related to marriage. You just have to get beyond the wedding itself.
WBF
I say none on any of my sites.
I must say that i saw changes in August for some of my websites.
it's like some websites get back in the past, some 4-6 month ago.
this websites loose ranking and get an old google cache (somes).
it seems like google loose the ranking calculation about this webpages and now googlebot crawl like a mad this webpages to make in the future a new PR calculation (?).
if i'm right, this websites will get back in ranking soon (15 days to 1-2 month).
This stuff has just affected my websites created btw february-april and websites who get big changes into this period.
so wait and see?
any ideas
If Google starts counting backlinks from AdSense, and its algorithm discounts other links from sites that it finds numerous and unrelated (e.g. ads), then the incentive to advertise with Google goes up, Google's profits go up, and its stock price goes up.
And then the person looking for a local yoga class finds the SERPs full of ads for yoga CDs and goes to another search engine and then Google's popularity falls and then their stock price goes down. So Google's long-term health depends on them providing searchers with the best results.
My current theory is that I have too much PR for the relatively small number of outgoing links I have - looking at some other sites, I think I'd be better off with fewer incoming links and lower PR so there wasn't so much of a mismatch. Or I need to add more outgoing links.
The duplicate content filter is also much more aggressive than it used to be. I wouldn't mind that except that there are now cases where reviews scraped from my site and decorated with pharmaceutical spam rank ahead of my original reviews - even when the originals are PR 5 and the scraped pages no longer exist and are just "Supplemental Results"!
Weird though...I'm seeing sites that really shouldn't be there on the first page. Some spammy pages and some broad and little relevant sites. The SERPS for our industry are much poorer than they were before the update.
This would apply to basically anyone that does geo-specific keyword targeting ("new york widgets", "california widgets", etc.)
We do geo-specific keyword targeting and had our pages dropped. Not sure if this is related or not, but they were also partial indexed - meaning if I did a "site:www.mysite.com" search, it would pull up my pages, but would not include a title (it would only include the URL of the page) and would not have a full description or cache of the pages.
Has anyone seen this happening?
spammy directories
Yes alot are, but some directories are very useful for new sites to gain some pr. And topic specfic directories are very useful. Not sure how Google decides which are spammy and which are not.
there is no reason to follow this trend, time will not favor those methods.
my large site is getting 30% fewer google referrals and is not as you describe - the same except for a few words. of course, much of the page is the same in the sense that it has the same navigational elements and same basic html structure, but the content itself is completely different page to page.
