Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
No, that is zero sum game. The most useless posts here are from people saying the serps on some datacenter suck or are good because their own stuff ranks bad or good on that datacenter. Not only does nobody else care, there is someone thinking the exact opposite due to how their stuff is ranking.
In any case (repeating mantra from past several updates), a lot folks should consider that screw ups are not deliberate policies. Google has been a technical mess for more than a year now, just over two years really. Allegra was just a blip of an update, but was a huge technical disaster. Google also has a horrible time figuring out canonical pages, particularly when webmasters deliberately do inconsistent things.
This update seems to me to be another minor bit of shuffling, with the added "bonus" of a lot of anomalies, most caused by lazy or uniformed webmastering (meaning if you have been reading webmasterworld and haven't had a 301 on for non-www and www since at least last summer, you only have yourself to blame).
I see almost no changes in my niches, except... a HUGE increase in straight redirect domains. This tactical trash gets discovered fairly quickly but apparently a new tactic has been discovered and needs to be squashed; authority sites performing same as recently; sites still in the sandbox dumped back to pre-Allegra levels, while sites that got out of the sandbox with Allegra doing a bit better.
<sniP>
[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 9:44 pm (utc) on May 26, 2005]
[edit reason] please - no specific kw's [/edit]
From what I see, they have been targeting, among other things, sites related to affiliate program marketing. However, the current serps illustrate that they haven´t been that successful in doing that.
"I think that the folks at Google are just doing "Damage Assessment" at present before launching their final attack, maybe already tonight or tomorrow."
are
Wouldn't most people type in something like:
formula compute airfare
<snippers>
words like 'figure' can be interpreted in many different ways. that's probably would not be a very common search term. I think a few search engines tried 'question' type searches but google hasn't done that as far as I know. hope I'm not sounding like a dick.
[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 9:08 pm (utc) on May 26, 2005]
[edit reason] please - no specific searches [/edit]
Our revenues from AdSense are also down, by around 2/3rd's. Are they the losers here? Serve up results that aren't as good, and invariably they'll get more click-thrus on their own ads, and we all know they make more money on those.
I'm not going all Conspiracy Theory here - I'm just saying that if they did make a mistake, but the mistake was making them more money in the end... well, there's sure no incentive to fix it!
That only works if you are adding, measuring, weighing and comparing the benefits of higher rankings for webmasters.
If you consider, instead, the benefits of a surfer finding what he's looking for efficiently, we can no longer look at the SERPs as "zero-sum."
There is some average way to rank the sites so that, on average, Joe Surfer will find what he's looking for where he expects it to find it from his query, that is in the top ten positions.
Any deviation from this expectation becomes a deficit in the credibility of the search engine.
That is, from the SE's and the surfers' point of view, ranking websites is most definitely not zero sum. In fact, you can't do better than the best expectation, which is to give Joe what he wants at position #1. Anything else adds to the deficit.
Now, Bourbon is sending a lot of the sites Joe is looking for into the depths of pages 15, 25, etc. This is going to be a major deficit as perceived by Joe Surfer.
Some of us are suffering from Google's Boongles now, but in the long run, if the SERPs from Bourbon are indicative of a trend, Google will suffer more. Especially if, when Joe finally finds the site he is looking for, he is greeted with a friendly banner "Find Us in Yahoo - The Better Search Engine."
Anyone thinks the denizens of the 'plex are congratulating themselves when Joe Surfer can no longer find "Aunt Zelda's Bicycles in Akron" in first position when typing that up in the search box? I think not.
Google Dance for Advertising Money
"Well the advertisers come in these places
And the advertisers are all the same
You don’t look at their faces
And you don’t ask their names
You don’t think of them as human
You don’t think of them at all
You keep your mind on the money
Keeping your eyes on the wall
Google your private dancer
A dancer for money
Google do what you want it to do
Google your private dancer
A dancer for money
Any old music will do"
[edited by: reseller at 8:02 pm (utc) on May 26, 2005]
A long time ago I argued against the zero-sum theory. Just nice to see someone who thinks along the same line.
Reminds me of those that think if I make a dollar I take one from someone else.
But when a site is on the 20th page for its own unique company name, that's not a zero-sum thing, it's an error. It annoys searchers, and I doubt it even benefits the sites that are being irrelevantly returned. (Everyone would prefer well-targeted visitors to poorly-targeted visitors, right? I certainly wouldn't be happy if my bandwidth was being wasted on visitors searching for kumquats and no visitors for the site's topic were coming through.)
I'm glad to hear EFV's site is back where it belongs, and hope other truly "disappeared" sites have the same in store.
I see now my google.com (66.249.85.104) showing updated backlinks. Any of you can confirm the same for your websites?
Thanks!
Not that it's helping me any.
More the pity, for you.
Gotta admire those guys who can get 100,000 useless pages indexed on one website, when I know there are people here with good, informational sites that can't even get their entire 200 page site indexed.
I don't compete in these sectors, but I do use them as a 'searcher' trying to find stuff - and the results ARE bad. Yahoo and MSN are better - even Gigablast is better.
I don't see where Google has succeeded in actually eliminating ANY of the 'bad' sites in this update...
I see these two DCs matching the serps of Google.com, also as to backlinks and cache of some of my pages from 25th May too.
Do they also match google.ca as to baclinks and recent cache of your pages:
64.233.183.99
64.233.183.104
Thanks!
Now when I search for my "branded sitename", I come up in # 1 position. Right! That's good, and makes sense. No more "lost on page 2 with mentions of me on other sites coming up first".
But if I do a search on one of my keyword phrases, the results are still buried. In one case, even if I add my sitename to the search (ie "keyword phrase sitename") I get a BRUTAL scraper site that comes up in the first two spots, a scraper blog, then my site.
I'm tellin' ya, we're being dinged for these scraper link sites. Links that happen to be running AdSense, too.
Hope this sorts out like it is for EFV.
Google Dance for Advertising Money"Well the advertisers come in these places
And the advertisers are all the same
You don’t look at their faces
And you don’t ask their names
You don’t think of them as human
You don’t think of them at all
You keep your mind on the money
Keeping your eyes on the wallGoogle your private dancer
A dancer for money
Google do what you want it to do
Google your private dancer
A dancer for money
Any old music will do"
Funny :) (or not :/)
I'm noticing the sponsored ads are coming up with better results than the SERPs. I think this is the obvious true purpose of this update. Make the paid ADS more attractive than the free serps.
"Google Dance for Advertising Money"
By ranking these sites for certain keywords at 70 or worse, rather than at the top where they belong, as is the case for my entire site, the searcher doesn't find what he's looking for but may have to scroll through pages of results, all the time seeing Adwords ads - the same ones that would be running on my site - on Google's own pages.
VIOLA! The user clicks on an ad or two, Google doesn't share any of the revenue with the AdSense publisher, profits skyrocket, price of Google stock soars, employee stock options are golden!
Best part is, if the user clicks on an ad and doesn't find what he's looking for, where does he go? Back to Google, of course.
All this because one of Google's "Ten Things" was not, "Learn to share." We have become the unwitting victims of their poor rearing.
"MikeNoLastName, I believe you may be 100% spot on. Thinking in business terms, how could Google increase their ad revenue. Many ways but perhaps the simplest would be to somehow penalize AdSense advertisers (especially those who are only carrying the content network and are not spending on AdWords)."
Well if spending on adwords prevents the slide you can't prove it by us we spend on adwords. Now that I've provided a counter example that theory is so much burnt toast (hopefully that isn't a KW pair in the Mods eyes ;).
Now is there a crust on the lava field?
My server bandwidth watching says things are still a bit crazy out there.
[edited by: theBear at 10:36 pm (utc) on May 26, 2005]
I'm noticing the sponsored ads are coming up with better results than the SERPs. I think this is the obvious true purpose of this update. Make the paid ADS more attractive than the free serps.
You conspiracy guys have to come up with a better story that this. Obviously the placement of Adwords is determined by the the advertiser - they pick the ad and the phrases through a bidding proces.
- redirecting all non-www urls to www
- redirecting all pages of legacy cobrands (e.g. legacy1.mysite.com/topic1 to www.mysite.com/topic1)
- making sure all internal references to canonical url are in the format: www.mysite.com/, hardcoding where necessary
I'll check in if things improve. Until then, the show must go on...
rick, i don't think you should ignore this 301 stuff. it's real, whether or not it's fair, and whether or not Y has the same problem.
- SERPS are flooded with "supplemental results"
- Some Q sites just disappeared completely / some got "just" buried
- clean/no cheating sites disappeared
- since yesterday there is no more "cache-date" shown (which renders the cache useless => who needs old cache-data?)
- Google doesn't "get" 301s since a few days. This usually took only 24h to 48h ...
Don't get my wrong. My site ist still listed in a good spot.
Hope somebody@google reads this stuff and thinks about it...
Along with the "broken" philosphy. Has anyone else noticed the ordering of their pages on site:mysite.com. I mentioned a while back that ours (on the domains which have taken major hits) place our key pages near the middle of the pack while on the unaffected domains they were "properly" ordered. Anyone see this coincidence?
As far as other things to do:
I've been trying to make minor changes and updates to pages which have taken hits to see if freshness is a major factor this time around. Unfortunately the latest SERPs seem to be using old cache results.
[edited by: MikeNoLastName at 11:05 pm (utc) on May 26, 2005]
The one across town that gives me better accommodations!
If the update is now over, what was the point? Over the last couple of days they have just shuffled up some older sites, directories and black hat redirected listings above sites of quality content.
I keep thinking in a moment they will produce the "real" update, the one i noticed after midnight two days ago, that had some great listings in it rather that the cr@p im currently seeing.
In the sector im in, i can put up with being right down the SERPs but what anoys me is sites that are just utter sh1t ranking above me.
At least MSN and Yahoo dont have this problem
Good luck all
