Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
How is that possible?
What can I do?
Thanks in advance.
Google takes external links to your site into account much more than MSN or Yahoo.
MSN.Com entries are not included in Google search results.
ZamparStaff
[edited by: Woz at 5:49 am (utc) on April 4, 2005]
[edit reason] No sigs please, see TOS#13 [/edit]
That's how it looks from where I am sitting, anyways…
That's how it looks from where I am sitting, anyways…
Maybe it's time to take off the tinfoil hat and crawl out of the underground shelter that you built in your backyard for "Y2K"?
[edited by: PatrickDeese at 3:10 pm (utc) on April 4, 2005]
If you have a semi-commecrial site (say content with minor affiliate revenue) DON'T YOU TRY TO OPEN AN ADWORDS ACCOUNT. Your organic (free) SERPs will disappear, and you'll be paying for the traffic. I've done it twice now, wanna see if I can replicate it 3rd time, to be sure.
How is it possible? If you are "banned" in Google for any of gazzilion reasons they don't want to disclose. The most famous being "duplicate content" BS filter.
If you have a semi-commecrial site (say content with minor affiliate revenue) DON'T YOU TRY TO OPEN AN ADWORDS ACCOUNT. Your organic (free) SERPs will disappear, and you'll be paying for the traffic. I've done it twice now, wanna see if I can replicate it 3rd time, to be sure.
I have a site that has been top 5 in Google since 2002. It has had an adwords campaign since 2001.
Has my site "slipped through the cracks" of this evil Google adwords conspiracy, or are you just unable to critically analyze algorithmic changes in Google's ranking system that has lead to you losing rankings for 2 sites?
I oversee nearly 200 sites in a wide variety of niches, belonging to myself and to clients. Nearly every one of my clients uses adwords and overture to augment their organic traffic. They all enjoy excellent rankings in Google.
Why weren't they affected? More sites that slipped through the cracks?
I am sorry, but you are wrong. In your limited experience of rankings problems with 2 websites, your conclusion is that the only thing they had in common was an adwords campaign? Ha. Please hang up and try again.
MSN uses on-Page Criteria far more than Google. Google looks more for Off-Page factors than any other search engine and is likely why their search results are not good as they use to be. Any new site can get a good ranking on MSN much easier than Google or Yahoo, mainly because of link popularity
From my micro (i.e., single site) experience, the first part of the preceding appears to be the case--that "off-page factors" (read: "number of backlinks" in my case).
Mine is hardly a new site, however, and for the two top keywords, it returns SERPs at position 1 at MSN and 2 at Yahoo on the first, and positions 1 and 5, respectively, on the second. By sharp contrast, SERPs at Google for these keywords are buried somewhere in the hundreds.
So based entirely on my experience with a single site, I'd amend the above to read "everything else being equal, a site without a significant number of backlinks can get a high ranking on MSN and Yahoo but not on Google."
Granted, I've not gone out of my way to solicit links, and I'm quite aware of Google and "link popularity," so I'm hardly complaining--just making an observation based on what I've noticed. Besides, Google has indexed hundreds if not thousands of pages from the site, and many folks do visit after Googling.
So, yes, Google looks at many more off page criteria than MSN -- and if you read that patent Google filed last Thursday [webmasterworld.com], it looks like they have plans to look at just about any data they can conceivably access.
Even though I struggle with them, their search results are still pretty darned good for the end user. I head to Google first for my personal research - even though I do wish I could get high rankings there as easily as I could a while ago.
In contrast to the struggle with Google, I've got some results on Yahoo and MSN that honestly are not worthy of that high a spot - but don't tell anyone, OK? We're working on improving those sites so they do deserve the top spots.
PatrickDeese: I have a site that has been top 5 in Google since 2002
Here's your answer. The last site I have that IS in Google was launched sometime before October 2004. Since then - its like a clock, 2 paths:
1) buy domain - develop site - launch - sandbox
2) buy domain that is in G$ - develop site - launch - purchase AdWords - you are out of G$.
Call me a conspiracy theorist, sure :)
Nearly every one of my clients uses adwords and overture to augment their organic traffic.
There's your answer again. Now, what I'd like to know, is the % of your traffic that is "free organic from G$" vs. paid, and NO, your affiliate partners don't count either. If you have an honest look there, it is likely you'll find that this % is getting smaller by the day.
Again, your experience may differ from mine because we have a different niches, different sites, etc.
It's very simple to understand what's behind seemingly random SERP changes if you remember two things:
1. Google wants users to be happy. The thing that the people that work at Google want more than anything is to quickly show the user the best ten results they can for each search. More than making money, more than eating fancy free food, more than anything. It was true when Google was two guys in a dorm, and it's still true today.
2. Mistakes happen. Crawling, indexing, and serving 8B pages is hard, and picking the best ten results out of 8B to show for each search is even harder. Good pages get lost, bad data gets built into the indexes, changes that improve the results in some areas hurt the results in others, and yes, 'innocent' sites get hurt in the ongoing efforts to sort out what really are the best ten results from sites run by people attempting to fool Google into showing their sites instead.
If you remember these two things you may get less caught up in bogus conspiracy theories.
To address the issue raised in this thread specifically, Google would never throw pages out just because someone signs up for AdWords because they might be removing the best result for a bunch of searches. Does it even make sense to the conspiricy mongers that they would want to do that?
To address the issue raised in this thread specifically, Google would never throw pages out just because someone signs up for AdWords because they might be removing the best result for a bunch of searches. Does it even make sense to the conspiricy mongers that they would want to do that?
Google happily consigns millions of pages on new domains to the sandbox. Many of these are great results. This does not seem to be a concern to them?
Here's a question for you commercial people. As part of your marketing you let someone have a service for free in the hope that they will buy something from you. They subsequently do decide to buy another service from you. Later they decide to drop the service. Do you continue to let them have the original service for free?
Incidentally, I am not saying that there is any "conspiracy". All I am saying is that if it were part of a policy who could complain? They are a 100% commercial company after all. I am sure many of us in here wouldn't think twice about doing something similar.
<It's very simple to understand what's behind seemingly random SERP changes if you remember two things:>
Lets call it "Rotating Algos" :-)
<1. Google wants users to be happy. The thing that the people that work at Google want more than anything is to quickly show the user the best ten results they can for each search. More than making money, more than eating fancy free food, more than anything. It was true when Google was two guys in a dorm, and it's still true today.>
You must be kidding. What do you think most important for Googles shareholders at the end of each fiscal year? Number of happy searchers or the turnover?
Lets assume that at a given fiscal year, searchers were 100% happy but profit was 50% less than expected.
Would that be a "happy ending" for the shareholders?
<To address the issue raised in this thread specifically, Google would never throw pages out just because someone signs up for AdWords because they might be removing the best result for a bunch of searches. Does it even make sense to the conspiricy mongers that they would want to do that?>
We shouldn´t expect to know the exact fact about this one, even from GG :-).
But it might make sense for the folks at Google (not me) if Google remove a high ranking page from a serp if/when there is an Adwords spot on the same serp redirecting to the same page. I.e there is the risk of DUPLICATES.
Google wants users to be happy. The thing that the people that work at Google want more than anything is to quickly show the user the best ten results they can for each search. More than making money, more than eating fancy free food, more than anything. It was true when Google was two guys in a dorm, and it's still true today.
Rearrange the following well known phrase or expression ...
:) :) cuckoo - land - cloud :) :)
Believe what you like. If it makes you feel better to believe that Google purposely sabotages organic listings for adwords advertisers, then continue to believe it.
I have clients in all kinds of niches, but I will only cite one example. You seem to think that the fact that they have adwords campaigns to increase their traffic, that proves your theory.
The reality is that organic traffic and rankings to my client's website for a bed and breakfast has increased 38% since the start of an adwords campaign 16 months ago.
The reason that they use an adwords campaign is that even though they rank for "bed and breakfast city", and "city bed and breakfast", they are bidding on terms like "city", "city country", "city hotels", "country bed and breakfasts" and misspellings.
My client doesn't feel like it is appropriate to make a bunch of misspelling landing pages on their site, nor integrate intentional misspells into the copy, so we bid on them in adwords - and they bring him 50-80 people a day for 5-10 cents a click.
My client is getting an average of 1 room night reserved for every $2 dollars that he spends in adwords.
My client's organic SE traffic has been ramping up since we started his site in 2000. He currently gets more unique visitors per day than he got per week 12 months ago.
PPC traffic accounts for 11% of his overall traffic, 37% comes from organic SE traffic, and the remaining 52% comes from directory listings, bookmarks, type-ins, etc.
Now, there's my honest look. I have 36 other domains with adwords campaigns I can analyze in detail, but I am not interested in convincing Aleksl, I just want to make sure that someone reading this thread gets a balanced response to these ridiculous "authoritative" conspiracy theories.
Phleem said: Crawling, indexing, and serving 8B pages is hard, and picking the best ten results out of 8B to show for each search is even harder.
You completely missed the point. As other things've been pointed out, I'll just comment on this one: we are talking about "completely removing legitimate pages and sites from SERPs", not "not getting into top 10". Also, out of 8B results how many you think are legit pages and how many are links and 302-redirects? I bet a lot.
PatrickDeese said: ...my client's website for a bed and breakfast has increased 38% since the start of an adwords campaign 16 months ago. PPC traffic accounts for 11% of his overall traffic, 37% comes from organic SE traffic, and the remaining 52% comes from directory listings, bookmarks, type-ins, etc.
I'll get back to "conspiracy" fingerpointing a bit later. Let me answer this. First of all, again, you are showing a site that has been online at least a year and a half. In that prehistoric age, a site would be in Google$ in 1 day, and getting PageRank of 5 was a piece of cake within a month. Lots has changed now, and I don't think one can see these SIGNIFICANT changes by simply working with existing sites. Try building and promoting one from scratch, without investing significant $.
Look, I have a content site that hit 10,000 visitors a day in February (just to let you know I understand something in this business, and to answer your "conspirator" claim), before its main page being banned by Google$. Google$'s free traffic was getting over 50%, and is now in high teens. Site was #1 in the niche - now it is nowhere. MSN and Yahoo! are now taking over, all G$ rankings are shot.
As I said before, you CAN'T compare an eCommerse site (or site that sells products like your B&B) that has an existing physical business to support it (in fact these usually support each other) to a pure-play content site. And judging by how it's going, G$ seems to like eCommerce more and more, and new sites less and less.
Here, here Joe Surfer, click on this ad, buy this crappy widget.
:) Not a hard-core conspiracy theorist. I am just SERIOUSLY pissed at Google$ lately.
>You completely missed the point. As other
>things've been pointed out, I'll just comment
>on this one: we are talking about "completely
>removing legitimate pages and sites from SERPs",
>not "not getting into top 10".
No, you missed the point. Perhaps I confused you by simplifying things to talk about the first ten results. I'll try again. The Google results are limited for technical reasons to 1000 items. Picking which 1000 items match the search, and then putting them into order from best to worst is the essense of what Google does.
To suggest that they would throw a page out of these 1000 because it overlapped with an ad is like suggesting that the New York Times would pull an article because someone had taken out an ad that contained similar information.
I worked at Google for years, and I'm telling you that from the top of the company to the bottom this idea would be unthinkable. From the first day an ad went on the site we talked internally about the division of the search results and the ads, and how important it was to keep them completely independent.
This isn't based on some philosophical abstraction or internal koolaid induced madness. It's a practical choice, because part of what why many people like Google is that they trust it to try to fairly rank the search results, and the only way to maintain that trust is to hold yourself to the standards you want people to perceive you to have.
Though even then not everyone will understand what you're trying to do, as this thread demonstrates. Imagine if there was actually a single provable case of Google tossing out an obviously good search result on purpose because the site had signed up for AdWords - it would be news in the New York Times. In addition to the externally visible evidence of the results themselves, imagine how many people inside the company would have to know this was going on, and think about how over time those people will be leaving Google. The only way for Google to prevent that news from showing up some day is to not do it. And I'm telling you, as someone who knows, they do not.
>Also, out of 8B results how many you think
>are legit pages and how many are links
>and 302-redirects? I bet a lot.
I'm not sure what your point here is. My point was that there are a lot of pages in Google, and providing search over them is hard, whether there are 8B unique or 4B, it's still a lot. But FYI, the 8B number is after redirects and duplicates have been handled.
<From the first day an ad went on the site we talked internally about the division of the search results and the ads, and how important it was to keep them completely independent.>
But search results and AdWords spots aren't "completely independent" of each other.
Technically a query for "free online widgets" will generate, in best cases, serps covering "organic" listings of sites related to "free online widgets" and AdWords spots related to some extents to "online widgets".
One might expect, the higher the quality "relevancy" of the organic listings, the less the possibility of searchers clicking on AdWords spots.
For example, in a perfect Google world, if top 20 organic listings cover sites with very relevant titles and snippets, searchers are expected to visit those 20 organic listed sites first. After all, a searcher go to Google searching for sites offering "free Online Widgets" and not chasing ad spots. Otherwise he/she would have run a query "free classifieds" :-)
Accordingly, with the decline of quality of Google serps which we have witnessed since 3rd Feb. 2005 and mentioned within several threads of this forum, one might expect a higher CTR on AdWords spots.
Please don´t get me wrong.. I´m not saying that It is the intention of Google engineers to write algos which generate poor serps.
I worked at Google for years, and I'm telling you that from the top of the company to the bottom this idea would be unthinkable.
Have you worked there since the IPO? ;)
>But search results and AdWords spots aren't
>"completely independent" of each other.
>
>[snip]
>
>One might expect, the higher the quality
>"relevancy" of the organic listings, the less
>the possibility of searchers clicking on AdWords
>spots.
By 'independent', I mean that the criteria for choosing which search results to show and which ads to show are completely seperate.
You're talking above about user behaviour that happens after the results are shown, which in your eyes could potentially motivate Google to violate this independence between search results and ads to shift people toward more ad clicks by showing worse results. I'll repeat that they do not do this. In fact, it is so alien to the way things are done it makes people there laugh out loud when they hear people seriously suggesting it.
Is it possible there are search result quality problems that started in feb 2005? Sure, I don't know one way or the other. Is it possible that these problems are a result of Google trying to get more ad clicks by giving out worse search results to users on purpose? No, that is not possible, because it would be stupid and go against everything the people there believe.
I've said all that I will on this, and people will have to decide for themselves what makes more sense and who is more credible.
I highly appreciate your reply.
But it seems that Google has brought itself in a position which has made it difficult for its friends to defend, unfortunately.
Phleem: I worked at Google for years...
As who, as probrammer, or visionary-business key figure? Dude, I've been in IT/consulting industry for 10 years, I KNOW FOR FACT that engineers get fed one "truth", and what's going on where business BRINGS MONEY is a completely different animal.
Reply to other comments later, gotta go now...
The Google algorithm has become exceedingly complex, and therefore diffifcult to reverse engineer. With well over 100 factors to consider and weight, plus rotating live algorithms for you to look at, you've got a situation that is very difficult to suss out.
That doesn't mean that the answer for what we see is a simplistic theory (one with many counter-examples, by the way) it just means the answer is harder to discover.
