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However, it is quite obvious that at Webmasterworld, typical posters tend to be commercial webmasters, and SEO types. The very home page of this site proclaims "News and discussion for the independent web professional". Which would suggest that most y'all just ain't the people Google are trying to please. Google is aimed at the average Joe Searcher out there, who probably is just looking for information on a topic of interest to him. Maybe someone trying to settle and argument, find out more about his personal hobby, or some kid doing a paper for school. I almost never use the Internet to find things to buy, and probably this rarely is what most people out there searching have in mind to.
This leads me to the hypothesis that in the latest Google index they have intentionally altered the algo in preference to what this average Joe Searcher wants from Google. Yeah, this has mucked things up a bit for commercial webmasters and their SEOs, but you guys are just collateral damage for the greater good. Besides, if you are selling something on the Internet, that is what Google Adwords are for. ;) The more relevant the SERPs are on commercial searches, the less the average Joe Searcher will need to click on a Google Adword. Thus Google has no particular incentive to want the algo to be most relevant for commercial searches.
Now I ask: how many of you are really having problems finding the content you want when doing searches where the relevant results wouldn't be businesses hawking widgets and stuff? From what I believe to be that changes in the latest algo, they don't seem to be of a nature that they would tend to make it less relevant on non-commercial searches. Am I wrong about this for non-commercial Google searches?
A search on "elboniaville" that returns museums instead of the chamber of commerce is a good result. And if a search for somthing in elboniaville ohio doesn't return what you want because they put elboniaville, OH on their site, I refuse to fault google.
If you are looking on information on cars, and you do a search on "ford" and one of the top results is "the ford foundation" is this irrelevant because you were looking for info on cars?
It sounds like the SEOs that only optimized for the big keyword are quite disappointed, while those that are targeting the more specific combinations finding the number and *quality* of their referals have gone up.
Could someone sticky me a couple of these awful searches so I can see for myself? I am just unable to see the problem in anything that I can think to search for.
