Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
complain about a real problem
Can't see the sandbox being a "real" problem, or a problem at all. It's there to stop the SPAM. If I start a new company called Mesothelioma Lawyers Ltd you reckon I should show up in the top 500 purely because that's my company name?
Sure, the "sandbox", whatever it is, hurts some. It hurts people who are creating sites for free traffic. Many of them are spammers/freeloaders. It also hurts others. They - particularly anyone starting a new business with a business plan that relies on free SE traffic - are probably better off staying unemployed (or employed if they can find a job). Any new site starting off on the premise that free traffic will sustain it deserves to fail.
So, if you remove the sandbox as a reasonable cause for complaint, and remove most of the other whining, we'd reduce this thread to one page and those that can't even be bothered to read it will get a personal reply from Googleguy because he owes them.
the overall perception of all of our 500+++ clients is that there is a dramtic increase in there rankings in the serp's.
over the past 6-9 months we have been doing all the "leg work" waiting for an update like this to happen.
sure where gonna have a few drops to look over but this is like any major update or algorithm change that we just have to adjust too, most are starting to come through with this update.. which is good news and why i see it as a good update, for us anyway. serp's look much better in the areas i monitor. (i monitor quite a few industries / spectrums.)
"well that could play out with the same as my post....
duplicate content - but I don't think google is that silly to not know that domain.com and www.domain.com are the same."
In reference to things such as Google spliting my site, duplicate content filter, yada, yada, etc ...
Yes a simple screwup on google's part could cause that problem and in fact is part of what we are seeing.
It isn't rocket science but in any program it is extremely easy to have a simple boo boo really foul up the whole system.
We installed rewrite rules on our primary site to do permanent redirects to www.mysite.com as well after seeing a number of our pages in the index under our www.mysite.com, mysite.com, mysite.net, and ip addy etc. Site has been live since T-rex times.
We started noticing a problem in December. It got worse with this update ... well duh, G had a chance to gather more pages, thus more "dup" content ...
Anyone with parked domains or allows www.mysite.com mysite.com references could have been bitten.
That is a sweeping statement that would wipe out more than 50% of my clients and probably me along with it.
In my part of the UK, there are many small businesses that are one and two man bands or frequently Husband and Wife. Having saved enough to venture into a Website to hopefully fuel some expansion, you are telling them not to bother until they can afford a PPC budget, sponsored links and any other promotional Whistle or Bell that would cost more than they actually have available at the moment.
Sounds like we are promoting some sort of closed shop against small businesses here and put ME out of business as well.
Can't see the sandbox being a "real" problem, or a problem at all. It's there to stop the SPAM. If I start a new company called Mesothelioma Lawyers Ltd you reckon I should show up in the top 500 purely because that's my company name?
Absolutely! I reckon that a unique company name should show up FIRST in the results. And I mean a unique name, not like the example you quoted. If a company is in the index and someone searches for the company name it is almost certain that the searcher would like to see their website. This is a no brainer for anyone but Google at present.
Sure, the "sandbox", whatever it is, hurts some. It hurts people who are creating sites for free traffic. Many of them are spammers/freeloaders.
It also hurts genuine people who have created real informational websites that deserve to be seen by those who are searching for the content they include. Please don't try to justify the sandbox. There is no justification for what they are doing and who says that it was created to minimise spam?
During the last four months I have created two excellent websites myself as a labour of love. The feedback I have received from these has been 100% complimentary. I did all the web design, copy and research at no charge because both sites are for private clubs and both are are about subjects that I know about and qualified to write about. Google makes them invisible and that is sad. One of these sites has an absolutely unique name and when you search for it it is nowhere to be found.
As far as I can see Allegra did nothing to address this.
I forgot to mention two other facts which may be important,
My site was and is listed without the www in the domain name.
Recently I added a page with affiliate links, to clickbank etc.
Here is my previous post again if someone can shed some light ...
Ive been hit,
Was #1 for several search terms in my field, for over a year, used to get thousands of visitors every day from google but now its down to 20 per day. My site has moved to #150 from being #1, allinanchor, allintext and allintitle still shows my site as #1. link: shows about 2000 backlinks in google, site: shows 60,000 pages.
Site is MIA (shows at #120) for domain name search, my domain name has no keywords, its a brand name, directories and sites linking to my site are showing above my site.
Some facts,
1> Recently shifted web host
2> Site Uses subdomains
3> No black hat tricks used
4> Has plenty of duplicate as well as original content - its an article directory where people submit their articles and I approve the good ones after reviewing them. It is likely the people who submit the articles submit the same articles elsewhere also and if they have a website they would have the article on their site too.
5> Its a template based site, so every page on the site has the same menu and layout
6> Uses excessive adsense, multiple units (max 3 I know) on every page.
7> I had modified the template few weeks ago to shift the position of the adsense. This would result in every page being changed.I have not filtered my access logs to see the pattern of googlebot visits but I can do it if that helps understanding what is happening. Infact I did not know Allerga update is going on until yesterday when I found that google traffic has dropped since 7th Feb.
May be others who have been hit can share the features of their site. So far it looks like its not just a devaluation of internal links. Aggressive duplicate content penalty is likely, but its not fair. Even pages with unique content are off, its like every page on my domain is hijacked out of the top results where it belongs and buried somewhere deep inside.
I hope its not over yet ...
Mufad.
By the way, I could not login to webmasterworld using my old handle of mufad, my previous post just after googleguy's shows my registration date as jan 1970, wow, and [webmasterworld.com...] shows that I have never made a post ... strange. Anyway now I have a new handle.
Mufad.
In my area, generally speaking and ignoring the sandbox, they were doing a pretty good job, not without fault but vastly superior to any other search engine.
After this update sadly that is no longer the case!
There will always be individual winners and losers following an update, the problem here is that overall the searcher is the loser as many good sites have disappeared and others are clearly being ranked poorly, not only in the eyes of webmasters etc but frankly the village idiot can see that many of the results are skewed and embarrassing for Google in my opinion
In my area, generally speaking and ignoring the sandbox, they were doing a pretty good job,
But we cannot ignore the sandbox and while it exists there is no way that Google can be said to be "doing a good job". Come on, they are knowingly hiding millions of perfectly good sites!
They have now had about 12 months to fix it [ [webmasterworld.com...] ] and they don't seem to be near a solution. Allegra has done nothing to solve this.
websites that deserve to be seen
Google (or the algo they made) says the site doesn't deserve to be seen. Or that other sites show up before it. Feel free to disagree with them. They don't particularly care about your personal opinion. (The sooner people realise this, the better. They care about the collective reactions of the user base + their market share of the Search business)
who says that it was created to minimise spam
Are Google providing results in order of relevancy?
That is a sweeping statement that would wipe out more than 50% of my clients and probably me along with it.
you are telling them not to bother until they can afford a PPC budget, sponsored links and any other promotional Whistle or Bell that would cost more
[edited by: Macro at 1:35 pm (utc) on Feb. 9, 2005]
Spam Vader - "Join with us young one, feel the power of the dark spam, you can not win....."
Luke Whitehatwalker - Though gritted teeth...."Never!"
Spam Vader - "The Rebel alliance are no match for the Empire's content scrapers, and imperial cloakers.....The rebels are slowly sinking under an avalanche of duplicate content penalties, and hijacked, redirected pages....Join with us! Victory will be glorious!"
Luke Whitehatwalker - "NEVER!" - Lashes out weakly with Rebel W3C endorsed lightsabre. "Take this you big poof!"
Spam Vader - (sighs) - "So be it" - Swings lightsabre.
Luke Whitewalker - (Looking down a stump)
"Father......If I join do I get to push the big yellow button on the imperial Content cranker?"
Spam Vader - "Of course my son.....You have made a wise choice....This way.....Let us return to the death star, where the emperor will reveal many hidden Dark spam secrets including meta refresh, cloaking, and how to hijack Rebel alliance member pages using sneaky redirects...."
Google makes (the sites) invisible
Nobel idea, but supply and demand will eventually kick in big time.
On the update issue: I take this is over at least judging by what GG said.
[edited by: walkman at 1:47 pm (utc) on Feb. 9, 2005]
Here's a quarter, buy a clue.
Can anyone explain what the heck George123 said?
Back on topic.
Allegra
What are your thoughts on what factors have gained importance in Google's new/tweaked algo? Any comments on semantics? LSI? Extent of application of LSI principles to the "linked from" page? Stuff that this forum is noted around the world for?
The guys who can really help those who have lost are staying away from this thread for all the noise and whining.
[edited by: Macro at 1:56 pm (utc) on Feb. 9, 2005]
May the 'farce' be with you!
Big G has been collecting data from use of toolbar and tracking with some URL's over last 6 months ( making decision if user query result matched user needs )and has put that into the current algo
Sites with adsense ( possibly only those sites owned by UPS club members )who achieve abnormally high ctr have been looked at due to the fact the data collected by G would provide a +- on percentage outside the norm ( many I think forget G possibly spends more time monitoring it's adsense side for fraud / abuse / duplicate sites not found with algo ) and manual penalties applied due to making sure the programme does not go into disrepute
I also think there does seem to be a problem with companies not coming up for their own name which will possibly need G to tweak the algo to resolve
The sandbox ( or whatever it's called ) has been eased slightly with some sites in excess of 5 months old obtaining better ranking ( this dispels theory that it is a storage issue ) more a G decision to controll new sites and even old sites with major rewrites ( possibly to stop the heavy use that was occuring of throwaway domains and purchase of older domains and moniterising heavily)
Some additional use of LSI to try to distinguish genuine content from scraped content and help to stop heavy SEO ruling the serps
A tighter check for duplicate content overall using a dedicated spider that does just that but does not put spidered data into database just produces report or whatever
just my 2 cents and only guesses at that not informed comment
steve
I hate to say this but if you can't rank for "domain.com" with hundreds of one way backlinks, no SEO can help you. Now if one moved to #4 from #3, that's a different story.
to george: "a couple of months or so "
probably, but I'm hoping that it comes back in the next mini-update. It still is high on a few obscure DCs.
[edited by: walkman at 2:26 pm (utc) on Feb. 9, 2005]
A tighter check for duplicate content
If that's the case it may be that the "knob" wasn't sensitive enough to see http:// and [www...] content as being on the same site. Some sites seem to have suffered because of this.
