Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
In my case mycompanyname is a single word, which I invented. The only references to it online are links to my site. For the last couple years, when I search for mycompanyname, I was always #1, and then all the folks who link to me are refenced below.
Since Allegra, mycompanyname.com is not in the SERPs at all for a search on mycompanyname. I also don't appear in searches on directory.google.com, although you can SEE mycompanyname.com listed in the directory! What on earth!
Some facts:
- My PR recently went from 6 to 3 as of Allegra.
- for the last month I had a 301 redirect on / to route it to /cityname/
- if I search: mycompanyname site:mycompanyname.com I get a couple hundred hits, which is right
- if I search: allinurl:mycompanyname I see something really weird: first SERP is someone that links to me, 2nd SERP is blank (yes, blank - there's a 1 inch space!), then I get a couple more SERPs, then my /cityname page appears
Something is really weird here....
Comments anyone else?
They know they have a problem in their hands, big one. DCs are still moving and I do great on all the DCs, expect those used to serve results to the public :).
The allinurl shows internal pages as before but the homepage is now listed as supplemental!
Can anyone shed any light on this?
That would be the email Googleguy left for us to write
about the problems. I suggest you write.
If a search engine isn't able to return a site's home page when that site is specifically searched for, there's a problem. My home page has the site name in the title, in the URL, and in a couple of other places on the page. Yet I see other sites that mention my site ranking before I find my site. That just seems wrong.
Now I've been hearing from non-webmaster/non-site owners that Google seems to be screwed up. They aren't finding familiar sites when they search, and they are finding what they want on other SEs. I've had several messages sent to me inquiring why my pages aren't listed in Google any longer. I have to respond that they are, but you just can't find them when doing searches any longer. People can't believe it!
Google needs to get this under control, because the word is starting to spread that Google's messed up. At least, it has been for me for the past 2 months. Google is losing credibility with every day that passes until this is fixed.
I am going to assume that even if this is a glitch, that some component of this Algo will remain so I am going to ask for replies to the following questions to see if there are common factors.
What is the general theme of your site? Search? Money? etc.
Does your domain name contain keywords? ex. (MyFinacneBestMortgageLeadsQuotes .com - This is Fake) Don't provide your name.
Does your domain name contain hyphens?
Do MOST of your In Bound Links Contain Your Domain Name?
Do you have a lot of site wide In Bound Links?
Do your In Bound Links mostly have a "link" without acompanying descriptive text?
Do your In Bound Links mostly have a keywords in the title without your domain name?
Do your Internal Links link back to your homepage with your domain name in the title?
Does the descriptive text surrounding your In Bound Links include your domain name?
apparently they haven't
I just had an idea.I feel extremely unprofessional now that people can't even find my company through a search for "myuniquecompanyname" (and it's not a keyword).
I'm going to start an adwords campaign for myuniquecompanyname, and the ad will be (to paraphrase):
MyUniqueCompanyName
We apologize for Google's poor results.
Click here for the real MyUniqueCompanyName.
And in reply to " Silence is not "golden" in this case!"..
No, but it would seem that the silence can be considered evidence of an issue in the GooglePlex.
I just wish I could get in touch with somebody with authority at this company. I have some great Ideas for Google... or MSN!
I am not sure why you would assume there is an issue at Google
Well, there are many people out there that cannot find their own sites with the uniquename... this has been a recent issue, and I would hardly say that it is a "desired function", even by Google.
I know that if I operated a search engine, then from a usability standpoint, the most authoritive / relavant site for a search term should be returned.
If we were talking keywords here, then proving a higher degree of relavance for your own site wouldn't really be possible because the relavance is in the opinion of the searcher (it's "relative").
However if someone is searching for "myuniquecompanyname" (which didn't exists at all before I created it), and if I'm the only company operating under that name, then having me listed nowhere in the top can hardly be considered good performance. The top 10 all link to me, but aren't me, nor are any of those links paid for nor sponsor links (they are scraper sites)... so how can they be more relavant than the company itself?
That's why I believe there is an issue, and even though GoogleGuy did post a reply to me the other day (in the update thread), he didn't seem overly confident in Googles performance right now.
I'm not trying to #*$! all day long here, I'm just very dissapointed thay my brand image is being somewhat diluted by Google (Hundreds of people found me last month in a search for mycompanyname, it's a known brand in the industry).
[edited by: Chico_Loco at 10:28 pm (utc) on Feb. 14, 2005]
When you do an info:www.yourdomain.com search, and mouse over Google's links for specialized searches, do you see your own URL or somebody else's?
the reply was: we test results and if they weren't better we wouldn't release the update.
It's #1 in MSN and #1 in Yahoo, and was #1 in Google for about two years until now. No cross linking whatever, no keyword stuffing whatever, no seo beyond writing a meta title and short meta description, only one outbound link (relevant), and numerous inbound links from other sites (totally natural, not one requested link exchange of any type) including DMOZ, Google's own dir, an untold number of related sites, etc...
It's not a competitive keyword combo, but just about a certain cultural niche for a certain Caribbean country (for which I though it was the authority site). It didn't drop, it just disappeared. No adword potential here either, no competitors, no affiliate links, no advertising, nothing. No possible violations of any kind, still it's gone.
The only conceivable reason that this site could have been filtered/sandboxed/eliminated is that it's on a virtual host and shares an IP with many other sites. Do any of you use virtual hosting/ips? I mean, this site is a control group onto itself. There are only two possibilities: Either Google is actively trying to taking down anything remotely resembling a network or it's just gone totally mad.
This was my canary in the mineshaft. Google's losing it's touch.
I see my own. At least they got that right.
This was the first DC where the update was first seen as per the original update thread. (See the first post here [webmasterworld.com...]
Comments?
Comments?
"I'm seeing my MIA sites back on DC [216.239.53.99...]
This was the first DC where the update was first seen as per the original update thread. (See the first post here [webmasterworld.com...] "
In January Google unsandboxed sites for several hours, but heaping piles of the worst spam were introduced into the index. The sandbox sites went back into the box, the spam was mostly cleaned up over a few weeks.
Now we see them try to unsandbox sites again, and tons of sites are lost due to pagejacking. They, as yet, have not been able to merge the batch of results with non-lost sites with an index that includes un-sandboxed sites.
No big puzzle. Sergey said in the Wall Street Journal a few days ago they don't have the technology (or staffpower) to do some of the things they want. Here we go. They want to fix problems they have, but as yet they haven't figured it out.
No big puzzle. Sergey said in the Wall Street Journal a few days ago they don't have the technology (or staffpower) to do some of the things they want. Here we go. They want to fix problems they have, but as yet they haven't figured it out.
Interesting comment.
THE FACT IS if you really are a serious marketing individual and you focus on your site with natural methods full-time (quality articles, quality links, quality directory submissions) your site will get crapped on and pushed to the side in Google. The algorithm doesnt let a serious business owner spend a serious amount of time on his site promoting it. You have to settle and be limited with Google which is a poor business model. Why should you as a business owner have to worry about over marketing your business while others spend 1/4 the time with their business and get better results because it looks more natural-
If Google wants to get rid of spam, why don't they start doing a bit of manual editing? They do manage to respond to every email, why don't they harvest a bit of this energy to sift through their spam reports? They'll NEVER be able to create universal mathematical solutions to all spam related issues becuase spammers will always be able to adapt.
There is a trade off between spam and being sure that good sites aren't penalized. I think they're on the worng side of things currrently. They need to apply an innocent until proven guilty standard rather the third-world dictator model of killing all the suspects to make sure you get the "guilty" one.
Another alternative is to simply give a sanbox pass to all the sites listed in DMOZ. All of my sandboxed sites are listed there, have passed human screening, and are not spam.
I'm begining to belive that there is no standard for producing a spam free site that is not in danger of being sandboxed at any moment... besides being a multibillion dollar corporate "authority site".
(sitename.com point to nada. [sitename.com...] and www.sitename.com work fine.)
Can this adversely affect Google results?
