Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Google have now overtaken eBay as the biggest internet firm in terms of stock market value.
Google made profits of $204.1m (£108m) in the three months to 31 December.
Just aggree, my site search points now to Y! and Adsense is dropped as well as I'm spreading the message of G$$gles illness to the people arround me looking at my judge ...
BTW:
Don't like even to have the old Google back now - there should be some more big players in SE area to bring some market and free information back in.
[edited by: xcomm at 11:41 pm (utc) on Feb. 3, 2005]
That makes today perfect to unfold an update that seemingly has irked so many. It's annoying, but I'd say Google believes investors could not care less about flustered webmasters ... especially on a day when they annouce record earnings / profits.
Google Inc. is all about money. And IMHO ... so are Yahoo Inc. and Microsft Corp.. As webmasters we are the people who build sites and depend on these money hungry companies, who at the heels of the hunt, put their interests miles ahead of ours.
It sucks.
Shares in Google closed up more than 7% on Wednesday following the firm's announcement of a huge rise in profits.Google have now overtaken eBay as the biggest internet firm in terms of stock market value.
Google made profits of $204.1m (£108m) in the three months to 31 December.
I haven't bothered reading Google's accounts, perhaps someone else can say how much of Google's asset base is attributed to "goodwill" and the value of the brand name?
These are areas where Google is shooting itself in the foot with this update.
I'm just going to freely express my opinion as a webmaster. If someone visits my site and they are referred by google, they are being deliverd a popup message which states that MSN Search is currently showing better results. They are then given the option to visit MSN Search.
I can understand that sometimes things go your way, and then sometimes they don't - but Google seems to want the best of both worlds (be popular and not have to answer to webmasters). Ultimately, it was webmasters that promoted and educated users about their search product.
If webmasters made them, we also have the power to break them. My goal here is not to break anybody, but Google were referring me 90% of my traffic... My goal is balance out the engines in whatever small way I can. Google need to be taken down a peg or 2. I've alo got a 10,000+ email database of subscribers (mostly webmasters & tech people) which will come in useful.
My main concern with this new update is that if you search for my brand name (and there are quite a few that do based on referrals), then right now my site does not even rank. Our brand name is perhaps the best in my industry, and Google are, in my opinion, diluting my brand name and causing my company money. The first result for my brand name is a spammy page which is a "scraper site" which is actually SERP's page from somewhere - so that's basically useless.
In fact, I just realized. This first result for my brand name is an AdSense site - is it possible that this was done deliberately, or at least is a known side-effect os something they've done in order to make me advertise with AdSense or something? That won't happen, in fact quite the opposite. I am just about to go over to AdWords and cancel my advertising there (we spend about $4/week on that).
And yeah, what is with the name. 'Update Allegra'?
If you want good results, I reckon Overture's Alltheweb is the way to go.
We have a whole set of sites clearly not properly indexed (as several people have mentioned). If one of those improperly indexed sites contacts inbound links to *your* site, then isn't it quite possible that Google is missing some of your inbounds?
Where my rankings have dropped, for all intents and purposes it looks like a PageRank drop - so perhaps it *is*, because there are missing backlinks.
It looks like Google is running on a partial index and has an incomplete PageRank calculation.. perhaps.
backlinks appear to have been updated [216.239.37.104...]
As webmasters we are the people who build sites and depend on these money hungry companies, who at the heels of the hunt, put their interests miles ahead of ours.
When you build your house at the foot of a volcano because you like the warmth, and one day the lava comes for you, do you blame the volcano?
Every day the bot visits and takes information yet does nothing to index any of it. Today its hit our site hard and taken what pages we did have in the index away!. All of our main index pages have now gone and all of our specialist sub divisions have gone. I can only conclude that google hates relevant rich site content now.
I just cant see the point in a bot that is crawling sites hard to do nothing with the information it gets. Whats the point!
This update is a complete joke by the looks of it!
just doing my occassional check of standard type keyword combos for my industry/region and this is the first tiime they have been this bad.
4 days ago the algo was spot on, now it's all over the shop, with completely irrelvant web pages (e.g. car panel beaters for holiday and vacation accommodation searches), and some rediculously long urls at #1 and 2 that return a 404 or 300 error message.
Hope this is a glitch ....
Cheers
JP
Our links are now 3000 more, but our index page still shows the old one from Jan 21st...
oh, and we dropped 70 spots for no reason...
F google, MSN rules!
I've tried many searches and the results are bad, bad, bad -- I mean bad for the average user, not bad for sites I run.
Somebody must have commented out some very important code by accident. Surely this is not the best that Google has to offer.
>> I see these sites that are just basic names but have lists and lists of keywords for searches appearing. MSN looks way better! maybe google and yahoo will start using MSN results.
I see more of that on MSN than Google, as a matter of fact, a few keywords I checked on MSN returned nothing but those pages - total crap.
Havent changed anything and only have added some new content along the way yet the big flux - and i mean big flux of traffic from G.
Still working on getting better foothold in Y and new MSN for main site so this big flux doesnt hurt me as much in future.
It floor me how I use the company name + a keyword and we are no where to be found. It is like the domain name (proper one of a kind name mind you) is useless. In other searches we can find the page. It is like there is no URL weight.
I do have faith that Google will do something about these serps before the public takes notice.
Google search results have gone from great to pathetic in the last day or so.
Great? lol
backlinks appear to have been updated [216.239.37.104<...]A few hours ago I had a backlink increase when I checked the above. Now it is back to normal. Anybody else seeing backlink changes anywhere?
Man - this dancing or whatever you want to call it makes me nuts
If this is really going to be an old style dance it's waaaay to early to go nuts.
I'm not sure though. I don't see any difference in the data centers for the words I'm checking.
My top keyword has moved from 7 to 6 but it's the same across the centers. That's not dancing.
I only have a single site ( but it is large ) so perhaps I don't have enough to compare.
