How Wise is it to Change Now?

Make Changes or Just Hope this New Algo Goes Bye-Bye Next Month?

[jen24815]

Hi guys,

Went from #6 to dropping off the face of the planet this update for my main keyword phrase - ouch. ;_(

My site is keyword-hyphenated domain - and no, it's not spammy - the hyphenated phrase is part of the name of the company itself and describes exactly what I do.

It's PR 6 with 198 backward links (including DMOZ & Yahoo).

I don't understand how it could be #6 and then not worth a rat's tail in Google's opinion from one month to the next, but I'll try not to be bitter. :-)

I have 3 main sites and I'm getting ready to start a 4th. Two of the three are virtual hosting with the same company, same IP (also have 4 more UNRELATED sites on the same - don't know if that matters or not).

I hate not being able to say what it is that it's actually about, but I'll used the old tired widget example:

Site 1 sells widget-related service, site 2 sells same service, BUT different package (more variations, quicker delivery, different price; basically a better, more comprehensive, and more expensive version) aimed at different market. On site 1, I have a link that says something like, "need faster service? visit our sister site..."; there is a link from site 1 to site 2 there, but nowhere else. There is no link from site 2 to site 1.

Questions:

Is the virtual hosting thing killing me?

Should I not link at ALL between the two? That seems incredibly, insanely stupid if Google penalizes me for that.

Should I change to my non-hyphenated domain? (There are still tons of hyphenated ones in my results -even one that repeats the phrase 3 times in the top 20, so Google's being selective if they're dropping sites for that).

Should I change alt text and image names to strip all keywords? The ALT text may be a bit spammy, but the image names are logical (widget-portfolio.html, for example is similar to how I have mine).

Or, just wait it out hoping that a page they seemed to like up until now might bounce back up next month?

As someone else said, I've put all my eggs in the Google basket; so, it's time to diversify. I shouldn't have counted on traffic from them so much anyway, but it's just frustrating to have an extremely relevant site to the keyword phrase I fell for and then for no logical reason, drop off the face of the Earth.

Hello PPC. :-(

Jenny

[bobmark]

Hi jenny,
I won;t make any attempt to comment on the specifics of your question as there are FAR more knowledgable people on here for the minutiae of the techno stuff.
What I DO think is Google is aware of the problem with this month's index - my guess it it was an inadventent effect of an algo change designed to solve a specific problem - so the question is to what degree do you trust them to rectify it by next update.
For myself I have taken the opportunity to review and improve the nagging little flaws that I had hitherto put off fixing and will pursue quality links more aggressively this month. However in my case, I have a large site that still generates good Google traffic to sub-pages on specific searches despite my drop on some major keyphrases. I don't know if I would be so comfortable if I had a site with fewer pages where the bulk of my traffic came to my index page on a few key phrases.

[heini]

>Keywordphrase
2wordphrase or 3wordphrase?

Also: Before doing anything drastic I'd wait a couple of days at least.
Things like: hyphenated domains are out! Virtual hosting equals PR0! Reciprocal linking gets penalized! etc are conclusions that should not be drawn yet.
Reading all the theories posted the last two days makes one thing quite clear: nobody has a definite answer yet.

[chiyo]

Hi Bob, could you let us know why you think "Google is aware of the problem with this month's index"? And any ideas on what the problem may be?

[Marcos]

Iīll said donīt change now. If the new algo prevail, Googelīs reliability is going to heck any how, so who cares. Yea, they are still number one, but if they try to fight SEOs, Webmasters, Geeks and consumers groups, all at once, theyīll fail. Poisoning cash oriented results is the best way to get bad press, and they will get it, not doubt. AOL and others may not be there to help after some mayor glitches are leaked to the press, yahoo will see the oportunity, and we will help, all the way down.

Please Keep in mind they may be trying to turn Webmaster/SEO salaries into Adwords revenues, making us irrelevant by making cash oriented categories totally disfuncional. At disfuncional categories our work will be worthless, forcing Webmaster/SEO costumers to pay totaly inefective Adwords fees. Bad, bad, SF boys.

We are in a excelent position to report those mayor glitches, by the way. Did you notice Googleguy asking repetely us to report them? Could be that giving Google the option to repair potentialy embarrasing glitches, is not the smarter course of acction we can take. Not before the mud hits the fan.

On the other hand, Google may revert the change, rendering your changes useless, avoiding hurting consumers, and making a lot of Webmaster/SEO people happy. So, I will said not change needed.

[edited by: Marcos at 4:30 pm (utc) on Sep. 29, 2002]

[jen24815]

Hi Bob,

Thanks. Yes, I did make a few minor adjustments already that needed to be made. I had been putting them off for a while so as not to jeopardize my ranking (up until this month). I hope you're right about the algo.

Heini,

Thanks for being the voice of reason. You're right. I see a lot of these posts and get worried I'm going to get killed for virtual hosting, etc. Thanks for your observations. I guess I'll adopt a "wait and see" attitude until next month.

Jenny

[bobmark]

If nothing else, chiyo, GoogleGuy who IS a legitimate Google employee has been reading several of the highly critical Google threads. More generally, I don't believe the problems of this month's update could have possibly gone unnoticed and there are some multi-million dollar corporations in my category - I'm not talking amazon or ebay big, but sizable companies - who also lost big and I got to think they have a way of expressing their views to Google.
However, the question is does Google care - or to be specific, if they feel they fixed whatever they set out to will they disregard the negative effects on individual sites. I think the fact that it was middle category sites - not the giants but not the homepages either; solid commercial sites - that in most cases suffered may make them try ro rectify the problem.
As to what the problem is, there a re a lot of hypoytheses that I think come close and probably the answer is a combination of them to do with 3 keyword phrases, link-in shifts and maybe a couple of other things. I assume only Google will ever know precisely, as they know what they changed to produce this effect.

[Go60Guy]

I have pages in many different formats and design. I'm beginning to see that certain types of pages have risen in this update, while other types have been relegated to oblivion.

So far it seems apparent to me that richness of content is being weighted even more emphatically in the new algo. Page rank is still a factor, but seems to have been given less weight. Also, I don't yet buy the theory that hyphenated-keyword domains have gone the way of the buggy whip. DMOZ and Yahoo listings do not necessarily carry the day. My initial impression, again, is that content has been made even more kingly

I believe some patterns will begin to emerge over the coming month, and the watershed changes brought about by this update will become clearer.

[Marcos]

Do you really belive that, Go60Guy? Or is this just old school FUS?
:)
May be you are right. Letīs preach FUS together. Now, boys and girls, be good, nice, google fearing blind folowers, and the Algo will help you... And pay not atention to the Adwords accountant behind the curtain!
;)

[bobmark]

I agree with you on content, Go60Guy. Google continues to like my content rich site.
However the problem with certain "meta classification" type keywords in keyphrases is I think real. It is almost like when these keywords are added the weight of the other two is reduced to an almost negligible level. eg:
search term / result:
fuzzy / fuzzy aarvarks to fuzzy zebras
fuzzy blue / fuzzy blue widgets, fuzzy blue jabberwockies, etc.
fuzzy blue widgets / red widgets, green widgets, widgets on ice

so it seems the spam/link whatever effects on widgets destroys the search relevance.

[Go60Guy]

In general, we judge a page by its links and content.

Straight from GoogleGuy today!

[webmasterworld.com...]

[Marcos]

Thank you all for your tips, they are all welcome. We will try to do the best out of them.
;)

[born2drv]

Jenny, If I were you (or anyone out there) I wouldn't make any drastic changes. You said your alt tags may be a bit spammy. I tend to use alt tags only on images that link to other pages, and the alt tags match the title tags, thus appearing not to be spam but to correctly identify the page the user is likely to go to.

Other than that, I would...

1) Get more themed inbound links from others in your industry
2) Create more pages of valuable, unique content
3) If you don't have CSS yet, get it up on your site and clean out all redundant code and try to trim down on JS as much as possible and have them load externally.

These things in general will not hurt your site no matter what Google does, in my opinion.

I have worked hard on doing all the above and it has done nothing but pay off for me. Good luck.

[bobmark]

Related to whether Google has to be aware of the problem:
I have a site where some of my content is provided by other sites. In one case I noticed yesterday, a major site operated by a 1/2 billion$ multi-national corporation who are also on my site was PR0. They certainly were not spamming and, having talked to their web people, they are extremely angry so my guess is these types of people will be making their feelings plain to Google.