This update reminds me of "New Coke"

[hitthedeck]

do i hear
"Classic Coke" from the fickle public.

[agerhart]

Remember what happened to "New Coke"? It was pulled from the shelves very quickly.

[Helpmebe1]

now theirs vanilla coke....ahhh.,.not bad stuff actually..just shows, be creative, roll with the punches and you to can keep your company lucrative :)

[ciml]

"New Coke" was removed quickly, but I suspect that Google might move back to a more targeted ranking process quite slowly.

Hopefully, people won't notice, in which case there won't be a new set of high profile 'googlebombings' and Google won't have to de-optimse their results again in quite the same way.

[rfgdxm1]

Actually ciml, whatever Google has changed has to be more complex than that. All Google should have had to do to prevent Googlebombings is make that that the search query in fact matched text on the page. Unless, for some technical reason, with the old algo this wasn't trivial to do. It also may be that Google decided that inbound anchor text was overweighted and led to poorer results. Personally, on the searches I have been doing I don't see the algo being really worse.

[martinibuster]

inbound anchor text was overweighted

Yes, so they may have expanded this part of the algo to include, for inbound votes, on-the-page/meta/title factors as well, for determining relevancy. Which makes sense, in a way.

[rfgdxm1]

>Yes, so they may have expanded this part of the algo to include, for inbound votes, on-the-page/meta/title factors as well, for determining relevancy. Which makes sense, in a way.

Although, I notice that my main site dropped from #3 to #5 based on this low weighting of anchor text. This is relevant, because of a peculiarity about my main site (check profile if you want to see what I am talking about.) It turns out that my site is about "widgets", which is actually the keyword in my main sites domain name. However, *everyone* else out there links to me in their anchor text using a 3 letter acronym which stands for "widgets". None of the sites that link to mine in fact, AFAIK, use "widgets" in the anchor text.

This 3 letter acronym most definitely is in the page title, on page text, metas, etc. yet I still dropped. Thus even if the achor text is relevant (which in the case of Googlebombs it isn't), Google seems to be weighting down anchor text of links across the board. However, I rocketed all the way to Google dominance with the #1 place on a search just for "widgets". I'm not sure exactly why. It might be that keyword in domain name explains it. However, this site also happens to be listed in the Yahoo! directory category for this "widgets" keyword. Yahoo and Google are still partners. Thus, it is possible that Google is emphasizing Yahoo directory listings. Along also with the traditional ODP/Google directory, where this site is also listed.