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It seems that a major google update is under way. I just checked www.google.com with the normal set of keywords that I generally use to monitor any changes and found what I believe is a major update. Now its back to original results. Its kinda on and off.
One of my site had a 50% increase in the number of pages crawled.
I hadn't much chance to check out whether the update spells good news or not, so lets keep our fingers crossed.
<Imaster adds>
The changes are visible on 216.239.39.104
[edited by: ciml at 2:15 pm (utc) on Dec. 16, 2004]
[edit reason] Addition [/edit]
or your searching strategy is less than optimal.
I know how to search. I've always believed that before you learn to optimize you should learn to search. Thanks for the tip though .....
When I want local and specific, Yahoo; when I want obscure or theoretical, Google. When I want interesting and related, AJ. And still I never always get what I want.
I'm not a big fan of Yahoo's results and I'm certainly not a fan of their slow page loading times. MSN Beta seems pretty decent and fast to me, I hope they keep that up when they put it live.
>Always good to check and see the current month's most common searches: Google.com, yahoo.com, www.google.com, www.yahoo.com amazingly still top the charts for the most part, Britney/Briteney/Britany/etc. aside. Doh.
But this isn't a problem Google can deal with beyond the "Did you mean:" at the top of the page. Maybe I really wanted to search "Briteney Spears", and thus that should be the default SERP.
>MSN Beta seems pretty decent and fast to me
Well, certainly there are a lot of SEO's that agree with this. ;-)
Renee, I'm not sure where the image of Google as a kind of saintly entity was born, but let me assure you, saying a business is concerned with profit margins, income, stock prices etc is not libel. And it's not accusing them of criminal behavior. There is nothing criminal in what they are doing. If you prefer to translate the idea of a business making business decisions based on bottom line economics into 'criminal behavior' that's fine, but it's not what I'm saying. Personally I'd tend to agree witht that statement, :-), but that's besides this particular point.
This is how business works. There is nothing libelous in stating a fact. Google is a business, the major stock holders are looking at becoming extremely rich. They aren't doing this for charity, it's business. Why this concept seems extreme to you, again, is utterly beyond me. Hopefully by next year Google will be seen as what it is, a business like any other business, run on the same principles or lack thereof any other business is subject to. And that ridiculous glow of happy talk surrounding it will by then also hopefully be gone. finally.
>MSN Beta seems pretty decent and fast to meWell, certainly there are a lot of SEO's that agree with this. ;-)
You mean it's working when you try it?
From the UK I have a 30% chance it'll be there when I browse it.
It's mind-blowingly disappointing.
Least it doesn't say "General Protection Fault" when it fails to load, though...
DerekH
You have to pity the MSN beta search guys, they're being forced to run it on Windows Servers, huge disadvantage. That gives Google an almost permanent advantage in this game, since they were and are free to pick the best server OS for the job, Linux in this case running custom Google servers.
As opposed to MSN beta working off asp.net and IIS 6.0... there will be problems with that setup, I expect delays. It will require significantly more hardware to run the same requests, more complexity, bloat.. sounds like Windows, must be Windows..
I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. In that case, the "Either we do much different kinds of searches..." I mentioned first must be the case. Which is making me wonder the difference in the types of searches is that would make you write "results as a whole are completely useless from a user's point of view"? My searches are only very rarely to buy something. And even more rarely regional. Thus to the extent those types of searches may be problematic, I probably wouldn't notice it.
to run it on Windows Servers, huge disadvantage. That gives Google an almost permanent advantage in this game,
Is it fair to say google is still runing at least two algos as the results for my sector seem to be shifting around between two sets? Me and a competitor swopping slots periodically for some keywords.. or are tweaks being applied on a daily basis now?
Update over , or rather big update over?
I added a few inbounds with on target anchor and got results within 24 hours.
And if this is a "dupe content" filter, why are all my sites still on page 1? All my sites droped 3-5 places down....and over my head google is listing ".edu" sites or sites with blog and guestbook backlinks.
This is not a new and good filter...this are irrelevant results mixed with the good ones.
travel.yahoo.com/
moved back to the top of the SERPS
Guess they didn't like the Algo chnage last week that hurt their position. Isn't it amazing how Google is so eager to help them out while many other sites continue to suffer...
what a freaking joke
Big Changes Today...
travel.yahoo.com/moved back to the top of the SERPS
Guess they didn't like the Algo chnage last week that hurt their position. Isn't it amazing how Google is so eager to help them out while many other sites continue to suffer...
what a freaking joke
Actually, the joke is webmasters that think Google is the cause of their "suffering".
If your business is "suffering" becuase of google....get a better business model.
what's wrong with that? They seems to have lots of info, very good PR and plenty of backlinks. Any problem?
This thread is about Major Google Changes, not better business models. Your preaching about better business models is getting old.
Update over , or rather big update over?
It looks to me like it's still shifting around a bit.
If your business is "suffering" becuase of google....get a better business model.
I don't see anywhere twebdonny had mentioned his business was suffering due to Google. Besides if he did, he has all the reasons to vent his fury here in this forum, that is dedicated to Google, not about what business models guys should have.
Mc
This thread is about Major Google Changes, not better business models. Your preaching about better business models is getting old.
As is people coming to these boards to whine about how google has "ruined their business, or holidays, or life"...etc.
My take on these "google changes" is a constructive one -diversify beyond google. If you think that is getting "old" - tough. I'll keep saying it til I'm blue in the face. Perhaps if more webmasters would heed that advice, we wouldn't have 50+ page long thread about what amounts to a minor algo tweak, and would instead have more people adopting a more "level-headed" marketing strategy that FINALLY takes their eggs out of one basket.
ps: I tend to disagree about this being a minor algo
change...
Same tweak that is showing pricegrabber, epinions and a couple of larger shopping sites back into the serps?
By the way, a lot of travel.yahoo.com is dupe content, like a lot of the sites I've mentioned.
However, in some areas, I am seeing pretty dramatic effects, even if it is just a "minor algo tweak". In some areas, I have never seen results so awful. Specifically, in one area that I promote an affiliate product, for a while, the top ten results were completely off topic. However, now, the actual company website is first, with unrelated results for the next 10 or so, then some people with webpages promoting the product via affiliate links.
I'm wondering how much of these tweak is an increased sensitivity to duplicate content, or a different way of handling it? The goal being to remove a lot of the affiliate pages / scraper sites with no real original content. Overall, my guess is that any algo changes are going to be geared towards removing "spam", or finding ways to integrate a higher number of pages - and duplicate type content is a problem in both of those categories - but, this is pure speculation on my end as I only have a small sample of sites I follow closely. Some of the sites continue to do fine, and some don't.
As for those that mention relying on free traffic is a bad business strategy - I agree if your only business is the internet. For me, though, free internet traffic was a lucrative hobby that I didn't rely on. It sucks to see the income drop, but it's also frustrating to not know exactly why.
All I've done is spend the last few months cleaning up my sites to remove as much duplicate type content, and continue to promote my sites via getting good partnerships with related sites, and hope that in time, Google will decide that the content is quality enough to start ranking where it used to. If not, it was great while it lasted, and I'm glad I was able to capitalize on some of the simpler ways to SEO that were out there until the past year.
So what is constructive about allowing travel.yahoo.com to rise to the top of the SERPS unfairly disadvantaging other webmasters?
1) In a search on "travel," travel.yahoo.com comes up #3, behind Travelocity and Expedia. So why single out Yahoo as an example of a poor search result?
2) Just out of curiosity, what kinds of sites would you prefer to see in top positions on the SERPs? (In light of Google's corporate mission statement, we might expect information sites to trump e-commerce and affiliate sites. Is that what you're suggesting? Certainly that would be in Google's own economic interest.)
3) Every keyword or keyphrase delivers a different set of search results, so if you can't win with one, you can win with another. At least, that's been my experience.
So what is constructive about allowing travel.yahoo.com to rise to the top of the SERPS unfairly disadvantaging
other webmasters?
What exactly is "unfair" about it?
:Results 1 - 10 of about 6,200,000 from yahoo.com for travel yahoo. (0.38 seconds)
That would be penalized faster than ...for everyone else...
but not Yahoo
Just as Yahoo has retained positions previous to this recent Algo change, while everyone else gets screwed
You want to do all three absolutely, but you will always do better investing your money in optimizing sites relative to spending your money via other means. The challenge is that Google commands the lion’s share of organic traffic, that’s just the way it is, so here we are.
We all get frustrated from time to time and shake our fists at the Google gods, just some steam being let off that’s all. If you can’t do that here, where else? My wife’s a good listener but talking about this over dinner with her just ain’t the same as commiserating with peers.
As far as the change, no doubt there has been an adjustment, what it is begs the question. At least it’s not the spam mess boiling up over at Yahoo. Talk about the inmates running the prison. If you want to really gripe about results, we could spend all day on that.
It's OFFICIAL. Named Scrooge
