Dissatisfied with results

we'll see how this form works.

[Powdork]

I just ran a search which returned 14 out of the first 20 results that were the same page under different domains. The pages were even named the same. They all also paid homage to their parent corporation on page. I reported it on the dissatisfied with results form. If you would like the search terms sticky me. Not you GoogleGuy, that would be cheating. Please don't check my IP and then find the form that way either as that would render the experiment useless as well.

[creative craig]

I just reported a site to Google that had 50 keywords hidden, but repetead each keyword 150 times (I counted how many on one line then done the math, before anyone asks ;)

I think that it just floated into the Google abyss though once I hit submit!

Craig

[sparrow]

I've been seeing more and more of this type of what I consider spamming appearing higher and higher in Googles serps each month, which means our sites keep losing positioning.

Some one please tell me how an index page with nothing but images, each portion of each images has the same alt text of "XXXX YYYYYYY ZZZZ" (approximately repeated 25 times)and contains only 2 links, none of which are text and none of which are external. There is absolutely no content on the page what so ever.

How is it these type of pages can rank so high. I've check their back links and they only have 5. Last month when we received a decent position and I was able to check our back links we had about 20. Now the site has fallen off the 1st page and only has a PR of 3 and I can find no back links.

I am thoroughly confused and have no idea on how to compete with this type of work. Anybody have any ideas?

[creative craig]

The best thing that you can do is to report the site to Google and keep up the good, clean SEO work on your site.

Or you could join the dark side, they do say the force is stronger on the dark side ;)

Craig

[sparrow]

The force maybe stronger on the dark side, but in the dark you stumble and fall, who knows where I'd fall off too? ;)

[sparrow]

Where is the best place to report such activities?

[heini]

Work on your links, would be my answer.
20 backlinks is not all that much. Of course much depends on the quality of the links, PR wise and regarding keywords.
Make sure to check backlinks thoroughly, do not rely just on the link:www.annoying-competitor.com command.
Lots of links below the threshold, but with keywords in anchor can give a solid boost.

Two more things to consider:
- a bad site may outrank you, but it will have troubles making sales.
- mass generated stuff is hard to beat. It may be removed eventually, but replacing it is just so easy. definitely more fruitful to work on your own stuff, making it better all the time.

[heini]

Added: the only place to report anything is at the engines.

[creative craig]

Best not post it, if you search on Google for google spam report I think you will be happily suprised ;)

Craig

[sparrow]

heini,
That is exactly what I've done, I've totally redesigned the site in November and was sitting no 3 in December but now with the Jan update we've fallen to the 2nd page. I had about 3 pages of backlinks that month, which I believe is more than 20, but give a take, of course we could use more, but now with PR 3 we don't show any.
This is why I am so confused. It seems the harder I work at making the site better, the more it falls.

[jady]

Dont feel bad - our #1 spot for our keywords is being utilized by someone using hidden text all over his website. We have reported it to Google as well as spoken to another one of our competitors whom also has reported this guy several times - NOTHING! Infact, his page rank of 5 just went up to a 6 and all links are TOTALLY irrelevant to his field - basically a "link farm". EVEN BETTER YET - he is now basically selling "Page Rank" by selling a page off of his website for $20 which will include some content and links.

GoogleGuy - is the "2003 Suggestion Box" still open? This is the ONLY gripe I have is that Google needs to carefully review each spam report and take action on the ones that are indeed spam.

[heini]

Sparrow, the first question would be why your PR has been going down?
It might just be a general PR downscaling in your area of the web, not sure how the general consensus is after the update.
Anyhow: this is a low PR. More than 20 backlinks, and just a 3?
Even 4 is not much. In a competitive field you should really try to go up to a 5.
Do you have a dmoz listing? A Yahoo listing?
Any other high PR link?

[jamesyap]

A tree grow bigger and taller one day but it takes time. It will stand wrong then. --> Good Site with Good Contents

A tree will not last long and fall easily if the root is not strong --> Spammers

[sparrow]

We were as high as 6 in the summer then went to 5 in Sept and then in the October update, well enough said there.....
I redesigned the site in November and we got the site back to 4, but now once again we are back to 3, it's like October all over again.

We're no 1 in dmoz for our keywords, we have a "paid sponsor" on Yahoo have been for a couple of years, but it seems irrelevant now with google listing, find our paid sponsorship link is almost impossible now. We also have the normal "paid listing" with yahoo.

We dropped Looksmart, because of all the problems associated with them and Ink. We're in Alta, Lycos, HotBot, you name it we're there. In fact if I remember correctly we're no 1 in Fast also. So, I have know idea what is going on.

[edited by: sparrow at 4:23 pm (utc) on Jan. 6, 2003]

[heini]

Sparrow, really, you must find out why that is happening.
Falling from a 6 to a 3 is pretty dramatic.

[sparrow]

heini, how do I go about finding out what has happened?

[Powdork]

Start by checking your backlinks to see if any of them have lost their pr or are missing. The hard part is knowing what to compare their numbers to if you don't know what they all used to be. Your PR is still going to be the sum (I know its not actually the sum) of all your incoming links, so they must have changed. Making it more difficult is that you should really be comparing what their pr was as of the December crawl to what it was in the months previous to that.
Don't forget to spend some time getting new links ASAP. Its a while til the next index but remember it takes a while for someone who says they'll add a link to actually do it.
Good Luck

[sparrow]

Since dropping to PR3 in GG, I can not see my back links now, I did check them last month and most all were PR4 of better. So, how is it I check my back links for January, if I can not see them. Is there another way to check back links?

[Powdork]

Go to any other search engine and use their backlink command. Then visit the page and see it's pr with the toolbar. You can also go here [linkpopularitycheck.com] and check several engines at once. Beware the WPG ads though. I don't think they're the answer you need.

[sparrow]

Thanks Powdork, boy I didn't know there were so many. I'm going to have to see about some of these. The old webmaster linked to use Link Farms, but I thought I got off most of those. It's been almost a year since we started handling the site, do you think some of these link farms could have re-instated the link?

[Powdork]

do you think some of these link farms could have re-instated the link?

It shouldn't matter as long as you don't link TO them. After all, we can't control who links to us. Also, other search engines may update their link relationships less often than Google.
Do you see any that used show up with the Google backlink check. If there are some with pr above 4 and they are not listed among your backlinks check to see if they have changed their navigation structure. The links may now have changed to a cgi redirect (don't ask me) or from calling a robots protected java script file. I'm sure their are many other methods used to keep from giving away pr with links. Many PPC links pass no pr because of the tracking methods used. If they pass this test then perhaps they are from pages that Google has decided can't pass on pr.

<edited to make sense>

[austtr]

sparrow....

your story sounds familiar to what I and many, many others experienced during that Sept, Oct period.

I'd be looking at your existing linking arrangements. Google seemed to set some traps in the forest to catch those big ole ugly bears that were link farm spammers. Only trouble is, judging from the posts in this forum at the time, they wiped out a whole lot of harmless flora and fauna, possibly even Bambi, who had no idea they had crossed into the dark side... because no-one was putting up signposts spelling out the link rules in enough clarity.

If you had a high PR site, squeaky clean & spam free and then got taken out at the kness, its hard to imagine that you suddenly don't have enough incoming links or that external factors can have such a major influence... I'd concentrate on your own site and what caused Google to reasses its affection for you.

[mosley700]

Google Myth #3:
3. Spam Reports are read on a daily basis.

This lie was easily discovered when I right-clicked, and clicked on "View Source" (it's a specially feature the guys at Microsoft installed on my pc and forgot to remove when they sold it to me). Notice the email address the form is sent to:
Quote:
<input type=hidden name=MAILTO value=[e-mail]>

Found that in some second rate webmaster forum...

[pageoneresults]

Hehehe, good one mosley700. I have those same tools that you are referring to and that report goes to...

services.google.com/cgi-bin/feedback/feedback.py

There are only three hidden values on that form...

<INPUT type=hidden name="u" value="http://www.google.com/">
<INPUT type=hidden name="t" value="spamreport">
<INPUT type=hidden name="e" value="spamreport">

[edited by: pageoneresults at 11:51 pm (utc) on Jan. 6, 2003]

[al_uk]

Not looked at your site, but could the PR be dropping due to the redesign of the site?

Depending on how you organize the internal link structure and how easily googlebot can spider your site can have a significant affect on your PR.

For example if you want all your pages to share the internal and external PR coming into your site roughly equally you'd link up every single page (a sitemap on every page). Whilst if you would rather have high PR on your index and important pages and less on unimportant pages use a hierarchy with a back link (A links to B, B links to C and back to A, C links to D and back to B and A).

I'm relatively new to SEO (less than 3 weeks looking into it), but I've made loads of mistakes on our site that I'm slowly correcting. It's apparently important to standardize your incoming links (not sure how important?). For example most domains can be found in the following ways-

[my;domain.com...]
[my;domain.com...]
[my;domain.com...]
[my;domain.com...]
[my;domain.com...]
[my;domain.com...]
www.my;domain.com
www.my;domain.com/
(had to add the ; as there is a mydomain.com!)

Other than the index.htm they all point to the same page (index.html), but if your incoming links are mixed it 'may' cause problems. So best to pick one format and stick to it just incase.

Then there's the actual internal links themselves, we use an ecommerce program that uses a lot of javascript resulting in googlebot only finding a handful of pages out of over 100. If google doesn't find them they won't count towards your PR (we recently added over 1000 pages each linking back to the homepage with a text link with our keywords wrapped in a h1 tag just for PR/SEO reasons). We've added various pages to mimic the structure of the shop, so googlebot will find every page. Looking forward to the next dance to see how we do.

Also remove all external links from any of your pages which receive a significant number of links (your index page) and if the external links aren't reciprocal seriously consider using javascript to 'hide' them from googlebot. This way the majority of your internal and external PR will be shared around your pages rather than to others sites.

David

[Powdork]

Hi Dave,
Welcome to WebmasterWorld.
Keep in mind that PR is only a (shrinking?)part of the overall equation. When you limit your external links or hide them from googleBot you are possibly hiding other on page factors that could be helping you. External links may play an increasing role in the Google Algo in the year ahead (regurgitating what i heard, there). Personally, and this is just my opinion, I like to only hide links from GoogleBot if I'm worried about cross linking between sites. then I will typically hide all but one or two that occur naturally with good anchor text. If a link is worth having (i.e. helps the user)on my site then I will put it there in all its html glory whether it's reciprocated or not. If it is not worth having I won't put it there even if they do reciprocate. Of course there is a lot of grey area involved and not everyone fits cleanly into one category or another. Focusing so much on PR can lead you down the path to the dark side.;)
Just my $.02

[ciml]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, David.

URLs with index.html, with index.htm, or with www are all different as you point out, but domain.com and domain.com/ are the same. Google usually does pretty well with duplicate content, merging the URLs and even combining the PageRank, but if the content changes between the times that Google fetches those URLs, they don't get merged and the PR is split.

Powdork, focusing too much on PR can also lead to insanity. (but I'm not mad)

[Powdork]

Okay, I have the answer to the original question which was; Does the dissatisfied with results form produce any results. Now that we have our (2nd) January update I can say NO. Now I'll go try the spam report and report back in February.

[sparrow]

just wanted to let you all know that our site is back at no 4 (not no 1 but better than no 5) and the PR is back to 6. I am one happy camper. Just had to stick it out, but boy is that hard.

Thanks everyone for your help and comments :)

[Powdork]

Ok,
So it appears we'll have to wait for the next update to see if the spam report will work. Here are the current serps.
-(mods-this has been completely scrubbed)

1. info.spam1.com/xxxx.cfm/s1/ca30.htm - 54k

(indented) info.spam1.com/xxxx.cfm/s0/xx30.htm?n=1 - 56k

3. www.spam2.com/xxxx.cfm/s0/xx30.htm - 56k

4. www.spam3.com/xxxx.cfm/s0/yy101.htm - 53k

5. www.spam4.com/xxxx.cfm/s0/yy101.htm - 53k

(indented) www.spam4.com/xxxx.cfm/s0/xx102.htm - 55k

7. unique.content.com/keyword/keyword/ - 10k

8. www.whatever.com/location.htm - 4k

9. www.spam5.com/xxxx.cfm/s0/xx30.htm - 59k

10. www.spam6.com/xxxx.cfm/s0/xx102.htm - 56k

All of the spam domains are serving up near identical content. xx represents listings for one state. yy adds three listings from a second state to the xx listings. s0 or s1 refers to the size of the table and the amount of yellow page type non linked listings included. to top it off, all these pages have a powered by 'spamgenerator' link to their leader.
This is not my area of competition. This is where we go for suplliers or references. Sticky me if you would like the search terms.
Powdork