Questions for GoogleGuy

[Brett_Tabke]

Rules of this thread:

1- ask one question
2- be brief.
3- no commenting on other posts.
4- no specifics please
5- violators will go posting off ;-)
6- 1 q - 1 q only.
7- thread will be scrubbed of junk/offtopic/etc

After we get 10-20 q's we will submit them to the plex...

[Galtego]

We serve our diverse content on a single domain and we have been low in Google since the beginning of February. We had long thought that a single domain was the right approach, but we are wondering if varying content on one domain is now seen by Google as a bad thing.

[ska_demon]

GoogleGuy.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Thanks

Ska

[helleborine]

QUESTION:

Some of us can't rank out of the gutters for their company name "helleborine's spinning widget plans."

Is there hope that we will recover in this update, or will we simply see applications of penalties to even more sites?

Why are we coming up dead last for our names, our page titles, etc? Absurdly, the allinanchor data is more relevant than the "real" SERPs.

Please give hope, and explain!

[steve40]

HI GG welcome

One of the problems I have seen since G started looking at maturity of site as a way of providing reliable serps

New site created genuine content G Y and MSN index site all OK

site does well in Y and scumbags steal content or use 302 redirect to content. G never ever sees the content as original I am afraid I believe some of this is G's fault for not monitering sites with adsense as most of these sites use adsense to moniterise

The problem is there are so many using 302 and outright stealing content often hidden contact details or ISP not willing to respond and based in countries that do not have enforcement . Do G and the other search engines envision a time when they can act on this type of theft together or could G at least put more effort into monitering of adsense publishers

thanks steve

[esllou]

I have an education site that has been hit hard. I hope it recovers in the remaining 1.5 parts of Bourbon but I'm not that optimistic really.

My question has two parts and covers the two things that have really concerned me as they are the only two things I can think of as being a problem with the site which used to be solid top 5 in G for its niche and still holds those positions in Y and MSN.

a) do three year old backlinks count less than one year old ones? I had a huge number of high quality (pr 6 and 7) edu/org links to me in the first year or two online which have slowed up in last year or so. Afterall, the BBC and Guardian can only link to me once!

b) does having two or three sites on the same server hurt you? Especially when they are linked via same AdSense account and one inter-site link. Only one!

would appreciate just a yes/no/dunno/maybe on these questions GoogleGuy as I know your time is even more precious than mine! :-)

BTW, I think the biggest problem facing G today is the issue of not checking every site that AdSense is put on, only checking the first domain. It has changed the amount of poor, spammy sites out there and I feel control has to be retaken. But that's only my opinion.

[JoeyBall]

GoogleGuy

My site has been online since January 2004, it has about 300 backlinks and regular content is being added.

The site is not anywhere in the serps but when i type in allinanchor:keyword, allintitle:keyword the site exists in the top20.

The site gets regular visits from googlebot also the site has a pr of 4.

I want my site to be included in the serps, i thought with time my site will be included but its being so long that i am about to give up.

What should i do?

[MrSchmidt]

Do you think in the near future Google could up their API Query limit. It's currently 1000 per day and I've maxed out several times. The competition is giving away 5000 queries a day! I've emailed for an increase, but never got a response.

Thanks alot.......this is the best thread I've ever read at WebmasterWorld.

[Wonderstuff]

Hi GoogleGuy

Firstly, many thanks to Google's Adsense for offering an income stream that buys me and my family a few previously unexpect luxuries in life.

A cheeky question if I may, what is the split between google and the site publishers in terms of Adwords income (and does it alter for any reason)?

Many thanks.

[Liane]

GG, A two part question which recurs on WebmasterWorld:

Do reciprocal links hurt your rankings? Do outgoing links "sap" your PR?

I don't take part in reciprocal link campaigns. I had an aunt and uncle who were members of opposing political parties. Every election, they went to the poles in order to cancel out each others vote. They did that right up until they died within 6 weeks of one another at the age of 93! :)

That is how I view the usefulness of reciprical links ... I figure they pretty much cancel one another out. I don't go hunting for incoming links either. Instead, I wait (hope) for natural links.

I link to that "content" in which I think my potentential customers may be interested and I am pleased when somebody links to my site. In fact, I likely have more outgoing links on my site than a lot of so called directories. I certainly have more outgoing links than I do incoming links.

So ... do reciprocal links hurt a site/page rankings? Do outgoing links "sap" your PR?

[nomatter]

hi GG,

With respect to spam detection, I believe it's implemented quite well in English language.

However, I wonder if it also implemented in other languages, for example asian language. I checked some Chinese queries with competitive keywords, sometime the results come out with many spam websites, which are simply nonsense articles with keywords or some 'fake' search results.

[henry0]

GoogleGuy,
What will be the reason for G cached pages to reverse to older pages cached a while ago?
For ex: I had pages cached from the day before and since 10 days cache reversed and serves 10 days old cached pages?

I have a regular site that was easy to found and since a few days without adding or doing anything it vanished from the SERPS in thin air

Any clue?

[Alina]

Does a reciprocal-link count differently to a one-way link?

[danny]

Is there any chance that having too many Open Directory entries could be bad for a site?

(I guess this is a question about scrapers affecting a site - the only pages of mine that have lots of junk incoming links are those that are listed in the ODP.)

I know the idea that ODP entries may be bad for a site seems bizarre, but I've been reduced to considering totally insane explanations for what's happened to my site. (I guess my idea that AdSense might adversely affect Google rankings was also pretty silly.)

[TinkyWinky]

GG.

Is there any hope for a site that was banned previously to be re-evaluated given that it has new owners (see Nominet information), a new design (complete change) and new content (all new content)?

I have filled out requestes but have never had a reply and it doesn't seem that it is getting spidered despite some good links.
Thanks

[graywolf]

Does Google consider buying/selling advertising links an acceptable technique, and what would be some good guidelines to keep in mind reguarding the buying/selling of advertising links to not be considered spam.

[HitProf]

Pfff you guys type faster than I can read.

I'd like to know if Google would consider a "Qualified SEO" plan along the lines of the Qualified Professional Advertisers program?

[zeus]

I think many want to know a reply to this:
After been hit by hijackers and 302 links(which had our site in the cache), all now removed through your removal tool(think about it we remove sites that is not our own) and as far we can see are hit by dublicated content filter.
Situation was only 5-10% of the site indexed and gone from all ranks in the serps, sometime maybe once a month I see a hit in the logs from google for our main keyword, then nothing for a month.

Question when will we be back in the serps, maybe a you should update your supplemental result database.

thats it,

[bnhall]

GG, how can I tell if a site has a penalty?

[NetRoll]

A simple question regarding multi-language sites.

Is it better to have different URLs for different language, or is cookie-language based page content a good thing?

I have a few sites where we build page that renders content based on visitor's choice, so one page that has a good ocntent for one language, is as good in the onther language, but I guess that gbot will probably only get one language of the content in his index this way.

[howiejs]

Re-inclusion request for site that was "hijacked" by a re-direct. We followed the intstructions GG posted in contacting support.

Is there a way to follow up on this? Fast track it?

This is a signifcant issue as it enables another site to "hurt" yours

[Brett_Tabke]

Rules of this thread:

1- ask one question
2- be brief.
3- no commenting on other posts.
4- no specifics please
5- violators will go posting off ;-)
6- 1 q - 1 q only.
7- thread will be scrubbed of junk/offtopic/etc

[incywincy]

Hi GoogleGuy,

How does Google test its Search Engine? What I mean is how do you quantify relevance? A set of results that is excellent for me may be another mans poison.

[Rogi]

Hi GoogleGuy,

With SERPS and Updates thereof, is Google more focused toward lowering the rank of 'bad sites' or increasing the rank of of 'good sites'? Which has more prevalence in updates?

[bts111]

GG,

Are your work days happier pre or post IPO?

[irock]

Hi GoogleGuy,

When I searched my very unique homepage <title> with double quotes on Google last week, a few scrapper sites ranked on top of my listing and a bunch of other scrapper sites were below.

Today, when I searched the same title again, my homepage ranked much higher, and at the same time, ranks of my other pages improved as well. I was wondering if this is a sign of the site recovering.

I hope this isn't very site specific, but I saw many people commenting that a search on their extremely unique page title didn't produce a listing of their site on top 50. So, I believe your answer will help a lot of other desperated people too.

Thanx.

[edited by: irock at 1:46 pm (utc) on June 2, 2005]

[vabtz]

On the issue of Cloaking would you please elaborate on what is acceptable and what is not.

There is some confusion amongst some of us as to when google considers cloaking bad. As an example I present robots and cellphones a lite version of my site, same content just less bloat.

[mickeymart]

Whats the difference between saying google provides accurate results and the actual results google provides?

[beer234]

Hello GoogleGuy thanks for your answers.

I've had several sites buried in the bourbon update, they all use no black had SEO schemes just simple relavance and I put the core information out there plain and simple. Name,address,phone,hours,review and pictures. The pages were typically business info for those businesses that had no internet presense, thus they always ranked 1-5. Now I cannot find them anywhere or even my own company name in quotes. Instead I get pages where someone has linked to me because of articles I published etc. These same pages still rank 1-3 in Yahoo and MSN so i'm reluctant to change them. I'm having trouble creating new content as I don't know if it will ever show up. Would you recommend sitting tight? Creating an entirely new site and cease publishing articles? Thanks

[drall]

On several websites we own in our network we have differing percentages of our sites pages that are url only ranging from 10% to 70% of the given site.

These are quality aged high pr sites and there percentages flux monthly. The same page will come in and back out month to month.

What is causing the url only effect as I am now bald from pulling my hair out trying to figure it out:)

[Spine]

Googleguy - Is my domain-name-with-three hyphens dragging me down?