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1) when i do a search on my site with google using the "similar pages"-command in the toolbar i get only 30 guestbookresults and 3-4 similar results! this shows me that the main theme for my website is not my most relevant keyword, but guestbooks. so when you sign guestbooks (no matter if you use your keywords in the link text) google will interpret it in this way that your site is about guestbooks! (why would i otherwise get guestbook-results when using the similar pages-command!)
2) my keywords NEVER appear in the top ten of the serp's although all results above me have lower pr! you don't believe it? sign guestbooks and you'll see! it's really bad, because my keywords are everywhere on my pages (title, meta, alt, filenames, url, link anchor, keyword density, just everything! i used brett ranking tipps)
i would do everything to get a pr4 instead of my pr6 if i could just remove this stupid links from the guestbooks - it was the biggest mistake i could ever make and i really advice everyone who is playing with guestbooks not to do it.
i better get a new domain - all my work since august has been destroyed just because i was so stupid to sign guestbooks :(
Thanks for sharing that with us here. I certainly do hope that somehow you can resolve it at least some way, and it doesent have to be as drastic as starting over with a new domain.
I think we all should be careful about incoming links. I have an inkling, not based on any real world evidence, that Google is slowly and surely accounting for relevance in incoming links, not only in hyperlink text, but also in page title and content and surrounding text. I do take the advise from people here that this would take a lot of computing power, more than G! is likely to want to use, but "if they can" it seems the best way to optimize PR and link popularity (for them!)
The reason why sites with lower PR rank higher than you on your keywords can be down to all kinds of reason - most likely that they have plenty of anchored-texted internal links from pages which perform reasonably in their own right. I have pages on products which rate above their manufacturers on the brand-name keywords, and nothing on my site is above PR5.
Although, I must admit, I have no guestbook links, to my knowledge.
>I have an inkling, not based on any real world evidence,
>that Google is slowly and surely accounting for relevance
>in incoming links
yes, absolutely! i don't know how they do it, but it seems to me that an incoming link is not the same as any other incoming link. quantity of links or quantity of pagerank is not the only thing!
HuFru, you'll have the same problems even if you start from scratch with a new domain!
The fact that the "theme guestbook" weights more than your targeted keywords is logic. It's not a proof of any penalty but a proof of the poor on theme incoming links your site has compared to guestbook links as well as a proof for the google ability to detect themes / patterns. You have to collect links from on theme sites related to your theme.
Just my 2 cents. :)
no, i dont think so, what about the odp-categories with 100 links from one single page?
google is just getting better in *defining the theme of a website*
Now I see another site have PR7 that signs really 1000 of guestbook. It didn't appear as #1 but top 10. And it is also 1 page site with better contents. I would like to see what will happens to him in the next 2 weeks.
If signing guestbook doesn't get you ban, I think at least it will get your site 'Theme'. HuHuFruFru, maybe you can contact the webmasters of the site to ask them remove the link. If possible, use some kind of official court order and they will sure do it for you. One better suggestion, contact the web host of the web site with the court order and I am sure they will remove it in 24 hours.
I think they have already reduce PR pass from this pages.
it's really more than perfect! i worked on it for months, imagine a site with 215 pages all about one topic. each page concentrated on one keyphrase. on each page 25 links to the important parts of the site. i did brett's 12-monthplan, and also the ranking-thing, every single aspect of it. i have several links from odp since october and also theme-related links from good sites. but the big part are links from guestbooks.
>HuHuFruFru, maybe you can contact the webmasters of the
>site to ask them remove the link
that's impossible, there are sooooo many and why should they listen to someone who has spammed their guestbook.
whatever, just wanted to tell you this thing about guestbooks - that you should never do it. i'm 100% sure that i would be in the top ten for my keywords without these guestbook-links, because competition in my area is *very small* and i have a second site (without guestbook-links!) which is doing extremely well although pr4. i get lots of traffic for that site.
There is a way to cure this and I will sticky the details direct to HuhuFruFru. But this is a verification of this addition to the Google algo.
Admin, I suggest you put this up on the main page.
If what you're saying about themes is correct, it would make all the more sense for Google to ignore guestbook entries.
I think that's a bit extreme. Where would sites put up links to related resources? I think it would be unfair to reduce PR pass based on the url of the page in this instance links.html/php.
>it would make all the more sense for Google to ignore
>guestbook entries
how true, i don't understand why google just wouldn't do it. i mean it is so obvious: you can get a high pr within *some minutes* and waiting for the next updates. this will inspire many people to do it and most of the pr5-guestbooks i know are really spammed with bad links. i did it too because i thought high pr is everything, but it's not!
Yes, we expect Google to be the most intelligent and commonsense types in town, but they have their limitations. If it was some other search engine doing this, we all wouldn't bat an eyelid, because we expect them to be clumsy. Hopefully Google will soon iron this out.
First off, Google has been placing a lot more emphasis on on-page factors than PR lately, and this has resulted in a lot of low-PR sites getting top billing. They tried this once before, everybody complained about poor-quality search results, and they went back. This more recent shift may have been the result of negative press stories about "Googlebombing", as this change happened right after that. I expect it likely that the pendelum may swing in the other direction again soon, after all, PageRank is suppose to be what makes them "different" and "better" than the other search engines.
Second, were these guestbooks relevent to your site, or were you just signing them will-nilly? If you were making valid postings that were relevant (such as making an relevent posting about your "blue widgets" on a site that is dedicated to "blue widgets"), I don't see a problem. But if you were signing any g/b you could get your hands on, even ones totally unrelated to your site, then the theme of your inbound links would be so messed-up that any SE that uses themes won't know what to think!
LOL ... well pointed! :)
but i don't understand what you are saying, is pr or theming for google more important in your opinion (at the moment at least)?
So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query
PR is still important, although it is presently a lot less important that it was six months ago, as can be seen by the plethora of low-PR sites enjoying many top listings at the moment.
There has been much discussion over the last couple years about whether and to what extent certain SEs utilize themes as part of their ranking algo. Some of them are known to do so, others we're not sure about, and even some of those that may not now have indicated (in published research papers, etc.) that they may be considering it in the future.
From a practical perspective, it is always a good idea to consider themes in your inbound linking. This will help you for those SEs that use it, it won't harm you for those that do not, and if more search engines start emphasizing this down the road, your forethought will benefit you greatly in the future!
THIS is my guess about what is going on here. The guestbooks aren't doing the damage, but it is just that Google's "similar pages" link is pretty much a guess, and has little importance. The error that HuhuFruFru and some others are making is the belief that PageRank is king. This is the fallacy of the logic of those who think that signing guestbooks to get decent PR make. *Other* factors are VERY important with Google. I'll give a specific example here of one of my sites. It has a decent PR of 5 (which, because the topic of the site is very uncompetitive, quite good), has a listing in both the ODP AND Yahoo! directories, along with inbound links from the 3 other sites most relevant to the theme of my site. [This is a non-commercial site, thus sites on the same topic link to each other.] There is a not very competitive keyword that my site is well optimized for, and based on theming considerations also matches the themes of those ODP and Yahoo! directory categories, plus those 3 other main sites on the topic that are linking to me.
Guess what? I'm on page 2 for this keyword. A rather trivial Angelfire page with a PR of 2, and no incoming links on theme, is #5 on page 1!? That page doesn't even have great keyword density for this search term. Looks like this page got there by having this keyword as the only word on the title of the page, plus it is in the H1 tag big and bold at the top of the page. That alone with the current algo was enough for this page to clean my clock on Google, even though I have done everything else right. :(
Thus, I think what we have going on with HuhuFruFru is a case of "I oughta be on page 1. Since I am not on page 1, the reason is that must be those guestbook links." No, there are other possibilities. My guess is it is just those other pages coming up on page 1 just happen either by accident or design hitting the Google algo just right that they are doing well. What people think Google's algo is, and what it actually is, often seem to be quite different.
Also, one other possibility. HuhuFruFru wrote:
"my keywords NEVER appear in the top ten of the serp's although all results above me have lower pr! you don't believe it? sign guestbooks and you'll see! it's really bad, because my keywords are everywhere on my pages (title, meta, alt, filenames, url, link anchor, keyword density, just everything! i used brett ranking tipps)"
Ever consider the possibility that you are *overdoing* it with the keywords? I have been developing a theory that the way the Google algo works with keywords is that they benefit you in the SERPs on a bell shaped curve. Which means that up to a certain point, the more the keyword appears on the page the better. However, after a certain point more instances of the keyword *hurt* the page's ranking. Makes some sense. Doesn't a page where keywords are everywhere (title, meta, alt, filenames, url, link anchor, keyword density, just everything!) possibly seem that the algo would think it is over SEOed, and pick up on it? It would make sense that Google would do this to combat doorway pages.
How do you find the *right* point on the curve? Just common sense?
my site is exactly in the same position. sites which really look awful in the way their keywords are used on the site are doing better. their pr is bad and they have maybe only some very low pr-links. this is escpecially true for non-commercial-sites (my site is non-commercial too, although a .com-address)
so why is this so? why is the angelfire-site above you rfgdxm1? is there sth wrong with google's algo or what?
over-SEOing could be a possibility...
when freshbot is back i will try to get rid of some of my keywords and then see if anything has changed.
For that Angelfire page and that keyword:
Results 1 - 100 of about 5,180.
It isn't that non-competitive. Yet, they are still page 1, and beating out over 5,100 sites for it. They just somehow by accident got things just right with the Google algo.
I am not so sure that this will remain the case long-term, however. Google tried this approach before, early last year, and then backed-off a few months later.
The problem is that placing emphasis on on-page criteria (like title, keyword density, etc.) makes the rankings too easy to manipulate. Recognizing this and placing heavy emphasis on an off-page criteria (PageRank) is what distiguished Google at the start from the other spam-laden SEs of the time and helped propel it to it's current success (remember what AV's listings looked like when Google first got started?).
Since then, people have figured-out ways to try to manipulate off-site criteria as well. But the fact remains, that it is still a lot harder to manipulate external sites than it is to change your own HTML.
Look at what happened last time Google tried this. The spammers figured-out what was going on, and next thing you know, everybody was complaining about spam-filled and non-relevent search results, even to the point of suggesting that Google was going to become "the next AltaVista!" So Google switched back.
I can just see all the spammers dusting-off their "old school" on-page criteria "book of tricks" now! I would expect it is likely that we may see a shift in the balance back towards off-site criteria within the next few months.
With regards to keywords usage, you make a valid point. If he is over-using his keywords, this could be causing as much damage as not enough, particularly with the current emphasis on on-page criteria. He may want to use something to check his on-page keyword density, weight, etc., and adjust them as necessary.
