Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
[webmasterworld.com...]
My website has plenty of outbound links, but they are on relevant pages. The problem my site has always had, was a lack of "inbound links." I got tired of searching for people to link to me (with all the spammy sites around) and gave up. So my pages have acquired some links naturally I guess(and I'll bet I still don't have more than 30 inbound links for the whole site) Still have a PR4, which I've had since it disappeared in Nov.
[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 8:54 pm (utc) on May 27, 2005]
>Reseller, Mike, etc.: How do you figure they're doing that without destroying directories, which are mostly links and not much text? I still see Yahoo and ODP directory pages high up in the SERPs. Is it just that those are such high-ranking and high-regarded directories, and smaller directories really are getting creamed?<
I havenīt studied the "smaller" directories through this Bourbon update. But as to the majors I guess its a matter of high PR etc.. as you mentioned.
This being said, small directory entries continue to outrank me - by miles - for my business name.
My old index page was loaded with 450 internal links, and quite a bit of KW-rich text, only the text came below the internal links. I might have been penalized, as you speculate, for a suspicious link/text ratio.
I have fixed this in my new index. I've dropped the internal links, and still increased the amount of text. I made these changes early in Bourbon, that is, last Saturday.
I'll of course never know what might have happened had I not made these changes (no control group unless Chopin volunteers), but I'll be sure to inform everyone if there are changes in the situation.
Say, I'm specifying "no archives" because my Ratfink competitor was directly stealing my contents despite banning him in htaccess. Is there a way to know if Google has my new index page or the old one in its database?
>I have a smaller, niche directory, and we've lost about 30% of our traffic with this update.<
Sorry to hear that but sound very interesting. It seems that this Bourbon is a real killer.
Would you be kind to tell us the maximum number of oubound links on any given page of your directory.
Thanks!
Like I think I heard EFV mention too, the pages with the most external links have been degraded the most.
Um, I didn't actually say that. The drops in rankings haven't followed any obvious pattern. Just in the past several hours, for example, I've fallen like a rock for "keyword1 keyword2" (as has the Keyword2ean Keyword1 Commission), but I'm still #4 for "keyword2 keyword1" and it doesn't appear that any of the other keyphrases that I track have changed.
I'm convinced that an Alphabet Soup Factor is now part of the Google algorithm: As the soup in the pot bubbles, nobody knows what will rise to the top.
Let's say my home page URL is www.widgetorama.com. The title tag is "Great widgets at great prices".
If I search for widgets, my site comes up with the correct title tag. Now if I click "more from widgetorama" the top listing is my main page (www.widgetorama.com), but the title tag is "Widgetorama" instead of what it should be.
Thisis the first time that's happened. Any idea as to where it's getting that title from? In both results, it's showing my meta description.
I think there is one more minor(?) piece to this puzzle. The presense of Adsense on the page in question is the clincher/killer! And before you jump on me, follow this through. It fits nicely when you figure, the scraper sites are only there to serve Adsense ads. So if you are a "directory" site which looks like a Scraper, but you don't have Adsense ads (or perhaps one of another list of similar ads or affiliate programs) then maybe you're NOT a scraper after all and you get passed through. But if you aren't a directory site (just kinda look like one by having alot of offsite links), and you happen to serve Adsense ads, then you lose anyway.
It bothered me for a while why some of our similar pages were still doing well, while others dropped, and it seems to be because we DON'T have Adsense on those paricular pages still ranking.
If this sounds farfetched, keep in mind, it's all about trapping out scraper sites and then it makes total sense. From the profit side, keep in mind, half the posts on the Adsense and Adwords Forums are complaining about how bad these sites are for business and how badly G needs to get rid of them from the Adwords side. In the long term they see it as good for the adwords customers who will then hopefully bid more. So instead they decided to do it from the supply side and now they're finally doing something about them by getting rid of their traffic.
>It bothered me for a while why some of our similar pages were still doing well, while others dropped, and it seems to be because we DON'T have Adsense on those paricular pages still ranking.<
You might be right, but we can only assume and guess ;-)
One of my resource pages with several outbound links and which retained its #6 position through allegra and Bourbon till now for a keyphrase search of about 19,400,000 has 3 spots of Adsense.
So what that tells us?
I made some changes to the site in hopes of taking advantage of the new crawls to restate my titles & descriptions. So many scrapper sites had snaked these I figured it could be part of the reason our site is losing rankings...still lower today!
Just FYI, this is a total content driven site, few advertisers with adsense and ranked very highly for almost all search terms related to the niche. Totally white hat (couldn't be black hat...wouldn't know the first place to start...not that I would want to?)
