Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
We need to keep this thread focused on the followings:
- Changes on your own site ranking on the serps (lost & gained positions or disappearance of the site).
- Changes you have noticed on the new serps (both google.com and your local google site) especially in regards to the nature of the top 10 or 20 ranking sites.
- Stability of the serps. I.e do you get the same serps when you run the same query within the same day or 2-3 successive days (both google.com and your local google site).
- Effective ethical measures to deal with the above mentioned changes.
Thanks.
My traffic on other SE's Yahoo (and family),msn and some local SE's is increasing allready.. So the visitors will come again they will turn there back on Google this way (thank G ..(not Google ¦-)) ...
A star will rise and fall even harder!.Thats always for the best of the internet. Be honnest, they had to much power anyway. And now it will bring them down...
Maybe they will come to theis sences and wake up. But to wake up a to big and lazy animal won't be easy I tink ..
Maybe someone of them will read this topic?. Don't think so ..They think they are far above us, The people who have made them so big in the first place...
Ann
Ann
I saw the same thing. Im asking around a bit today and If I have more info about it I'll post it okay?
Mayby others have noticed this to?..
I think in the end of this the SE's who work mainly (or at least more than Google.,) with on-page and actual content. Will win the battle.. And to be honest.. Isn't this for the best intrest of our visitors on the long spot. All they want is that what they're asking for.. That information (reed content) that they're looking for?.
What does a visitor really care when you're talking about PR ,links, link text ect...?
Its all just to much. And to vunerable in relation to manipulating the results. Isn't it kind of strange buying links? when you begin to think about it? Is it healty when you must have exact the good link text to score.., while maybe your content is thje best you
will not show up when you don't do all those (strange?) tings..
When I start thinking about it I wonder... What a strange thing I'm doing to get a good position in google.While only my content sets my no 1 in Yahoo..
Personal view:
1. Google will survive and stay as the greatest SE
for years. They have only two serious
competitors, MSN and Yahoo. It is about financial
strenght, hardware and superfast connections and
not only algorithms.
2. Try to best understand this game, and you may be
light years ahead of others.
3. Google, GoogleGuy have invited you. People that
are Beta testers for Microsoft get a head start
on VS 2005 etc. Nothing wrong with that?
4. RMA = Right Mental Attitude. TRY to turn a
negative experience into a positive.
KBleivik
Life is too short to program in assembler.
What I did notice, however, was that all three sites had plenty of relevant sponsored ads (and only a couple of the ads appeared in the SERPs), and clicking on the ads would get you where you wanted to go with ease.
On MSN there were 11 ads; on Yahoo, 11; on Google, 13 if you include their 3 product search results. The SERPs are in direct competition with the paid adverts and in fact there are more adverts than results on each page, though I'm sure this will not be the case with less commercial searches.
Seeing this, and realizing that money talks, I cannot call any of these search results clean.
The SERPs are crowded by adverts on three sides. I think the next move is for the SEs to run a column of ads on the left side of the results, completely surrounding the search results.
Additionally, the adverts have generally better positioning and design over the SERPs, which are randomly KWs, meta results, snippets and are therefore inconsistent and possibly confusing. The adverts are cleaner in presentation than the SERPs.
So, what's happened? The search engines have a need to make money and they've done it in the most practical way, by placing relevant ads all over the results pages.
I can't blame them. They have to make money, but I believe what we are seeing here is the death of free, unbiased, relevant search from the biggest players.
If one wishes to compete at any serious level, one would have to consider paid advertising as an alternative or addition to free rankings on the SEs.
There is no doubt in my mind that the bourbon update, and quick on its heels, updates by Yahoo and MSN, are designed to maximize revenue by serving up results that are relevant but ads that are highly competitive.
It's the new game and there's no going back.
[edited by: ciml at 10:58 pm (utc) on June 25, 2005]
[edit reason] Widgetised [/edit]
You've left out one major "survival" tip. ADVERTISE ON THE SEARCH ENGINES.
The days of relying on free search are nearly over.
Don't forget that if the SERP doesn't show the best content sites. people will click on the adwords, so indeed money can be playing a role in this..
The next time they will try another SE first normal behaviour isn't it?
It's not willing to play Google's game, it is in fact a game that has come alive as a result of the algo from google. But I wonder if it is natural and if it is for the benefit of vistors, I have serious doubt concerning this.
The days of relying on free search are nearly over.That will never happen and technology and human editing will get better.
Too many false conspiracies being posted here and not really relevant to Bourbon. Google has in fact cleaned up many of the results during Bourbon if you take the time to look at a wide range of sectors.
You know, I have noticed quite a jump in Yahoo and MSN traffic to both my sites lately. Could be the searchers are abandoning Google?
I haven't seen any big changes in Yahoo and MSN referrals. Mind you, I wouldn't make any broader assumptions based on that fact. That would be like assuming that Google was more "broken" than usual because I didn't like the results for a handful of search terms.
As for the assertions that Google search results are lousy, it really depends what you're searching for, doesn't it?
A SERP for "widgets" might not be much different than it was pre-Bourbon (or pre-Allegra, or pre-Florida), while a search for "jelly widgets" or "lemon custard-filled widgets" might be very different. It all depends on the keyword or keyphrase.
Also, what constitutes "broken" is in the eye of the beholder. Most of us would probably agree that scraper pages and really blatant spam doesn't deserve a top ranking, but beyond that, some of us may feel that articles and reference material should be ranked highest for a given keyphrase, or that affiliate or e-commerce pages should be ranked highest for that keyphrase. Some people here might even believe that autogenerated, template-based sites with sketchy user-created content deserve top rankings (which seemed to be what was happening betweeen the unnamed March 23 update and Bourbon but isn't quite so much the case now). Even the www vs. non-www canonical issue inspires different reactions among different Webmaster World members; some think that Google shouldn't be so easily confused, while others may feel that Webmasters who haven't guarded against potential problems with 301 redirects in their .htaccess files are simply getting what they deserve.
It's okay to be unhappy with search results, and it's even okay to believe that a drop in your own rankings reflects larger problems at Google, but sweeping statements like "Google is broken," "Google is corrupting its results to sell more AdWords," "searchers will soon abandon Google in droves," or "Google's search results are obviously skewed to favor the international Masonic conspiracy" smack more of hyperventilation than of serious discussion.
I don't believs there is a list of things to do and than the update will leave you where you are, stop dreaming. Get to the point and lets discus the update and whats happening out there.
Its not so that I've lost all my positions but I look whats standing next to my pages and its a kind of shock to see what coming up..
Maybey some people rather discus details so be it..
It won't help you
>Reseller, Have you copy protected your survival kit? Write a book on this update. It may become a bestseller. It may also generate traffic to your site.<
Thanks for the kind thoughts.
However.. Webmasterworld.com is graciously providing the bandwidth and I´m compiling fellow members suggestions and mine into one document Google-Updates Survival Kit aiming to help as many publishers as possible.
As such the document Google-Updates Survival Kit is (c)Copyright 2005 by www.webmasterworld.com, All rights reserved.
And its hereby announced as such ;-)
>resller,
>The days of relying on free search are nearly over.<
Interesting remark which need to be discussed further. But that mightbe one of the consequences of Allegra and Bourbon updates, or at least that what the Folks at Google wish us to think ;-)
My site is www.the-landscape-design-site.com . I have held top position in most search engines for almost all my keywords for a couple of years. My homepage for "do it yourself landscape design" still sits at #1 in Google.
I made it through the bourbon update just fine it seemed. However, on June 16 I disappeared from Google except for my homepage with keyword phrase "do it yourself landscape design" and a few other pages that held close rank.
So if my homepage still holds #1 on Google it would seem that I haven't been penalized for something. Or is that still a possibility?
Also, my raw access logs show hundreds of 404 errors which my host says are normal because of pages "not being in their respective places". I haven't a clue what that means. I haven't moved them.
Any ideas? Do I have a network problem with Google? Have I been penalized? Should I sit and wait for a little while longer?
Please help or redirect me to the right forum.
Thank you.
Sounds fishy.
You might want to try the new Google sitemap function.
Also, what constitutes "broken" is in the eye of the beholder.
EFV,
One of my sites is about "fluffy pink widgets". Says so in some of the titles, meta descriptions, h1 tags, and page contents. No tricks, no "black hat" techniques.
MSN Search ranks my site #3 for that key phrase. Yahoo! ranks it #64.
Pre-Bourbon, Google ranked the site #49 for that key phrase. Post-Bourbon, the site doesn't rank at all! It has vanished from the SERPs! (Note: There are other keywords and keyphrases where this site still ranks highly, in some cases #1, in the Google SERPs.)
Moreover, for this common key phrase, Google now reports just five pages of SERPs before hitting the duplicate and supplemental results. It is ludicrous to think that there are only about 400+ unique mentions of this common key phrase on the Web. Out of what Google reports is 29,000,000 total pages!
I am talking about a significant niche in a major market segment.
To my eye, also objectively speaking, this is clear, 20/20 evidence that--in this particular niche--the Google SERPs are broken, and the index is corrupted.
I have no opinion outside this particular niche. (Oh, I suppose I can say that I don't see similar "brokenness" in the niche for my other site, which was unaffected by the Bourbon update.)
Your Mileage May (and probably does) Vary.
To my eye, also objectively speaking, this is clear, 20/20 evidence that--in this particular niche--the Google SERPs are broken, and the index is corrupted.
I don't doubt your assessment. The relevant phrase is "in this particular niche"--which is a lot different from the nonsense we often read about how "Google is completely broken, Larry Page and Sergey Brin are now supervised by a Wall Street investment-banking firm, and pretty soon the searchers will all defect to Yahoo and MSN."
"Brin's research interests include search engines, information extraction from unstructured sources, and data mining of large text collections and scientific data. He has published more than a dozen academic papers, including Extracting Patterns and Relations from the World Wide Web; Dynamic Data Mining: A New Architecture for Data with High Dimensionality , which he published with Larry Page; Scalable Techniques for Mining Casual Structures ; Dynamic Itemset Counting and Implication Rules for Market Basket Data ; and Beyond Market Baskets: Generalizing Association Rules to Correlations".
"The son of Michigan State University computer science professor Dr. Carl Victor Page, Page's love of computers began at age six. While following in his father's footsteps in academics, Page became an honors graduate from the University of Michigan, where he earned a bachelor of science degree in engineering, with a concentration on computer engineering. During his time in Ann Arbor, Page built an inkjet printer out of Lego™."
Not easy to beat the Google team.
KBleivik
Make it simple, as simple as possible, but no simpler.
This thread is going nowhere want to get out of this no no....
- 00 -
"You might want to try the new Google sitemap function"
All my pages are there.
My site < > started out as an SBI site. However, I broke away from them, took what I learned, and did even better at ranking high for years now.
Is it possible that what I learned from SBI as far as keyword density, H1 tags, links, etc. has been outdated and changed that much to send most of my site to the bottom?
Does anyone have an opinion as to whether I should just sit tight or start rebuilding? Is the update completely over?
[edited by: ciml at 10:51 pm (utc) on June 25, 2005]
[edit reason] No specific URLs please. [/edit]
Possible to do both? Build another site and streamline the first. Necessity is the mother of invention.
Or have I misunderstood?
KBleivik
"Men who can both be right and sit tight are uncommon. I found it one of the hardest things to learn."
Not easy to beat the Google team.
What's the sqrt(-25)? I believe the correct answer is 'error'. Sometimes people are too smart for their audience.
My affected site fits into two major niches, one of them being "fluffy pink widgets."
On one major page of this site, the exact phrase "fluffy pink widgets" appears twice in the body text. A bit farther down the page, the phrase "antique burnished gold wydgets" appears once.
If I do a search of the four-word key phrase "antique burnished gold wydgets," Google ranks the page #1 with quotes and #199 without quotes.
If I do a search of the three-word key phrase "fluffy pink widgets," Google doesn't rank this very same page (or any other page on the site mentioning that key phrase) at all, whether the key phrase is quoted or not. Moreover, for both the quoted and the unquoted search, the SERPs stop showing (exhaust the uniques and reach the duplicate and supplemental results) on the fifth page (at 472 and 477 entries, out of 12,900 and 29,600,000 total pages respectively) for this not uncommon key phrase.
(MSN Search ranks this very same page #3 for the key phrase "fluffy pink widgets". Yahoo! ranks it #64.)
So, what? Well, Bourbon has dropped this site entirely from the SERPs (as of ~6/16) for "fluffy pink widgets"--one of this site's two major niches. It's this sort of thing that has caused my Google referrals to drop by as much as 90% and lead me to the inescapable conclusion that the SERPs, also the index, are broken in this niche.
I don't want to just accept this and suffer in silence until the next update, G knows when. (Well, aside from bringing it to the attention of this forum.) If I raise the issue with Google Help, is there any prospect they will deal with this "brokenness"? Sorry if I can't track it down in this looooooooong Bourbon Update thread, but is there a better, more direct contact point at Google than the generic help page? Has anybody had any success getting Google to deal with specific instances of "brokenness" like this one?
"What's the sqrt(-25)? I believe the correct answer is 'error'. Sometimes people are too smart for their audience."
sqrt(-25) = 5i
It has complex, but no real solution.
I have never had my smaller site rank very high in Google and, barring a miracle, it probably won't anytime soon even though MSN and Yahoo seem to love it.
I am speaking from a surfers point of view as I use Google daily to look up various things from health related sites to cooking. In the past month I have gotten so tiried of wading through the garbage, descriptions that were right on the money but did not deliver, that I have literally pulled up other swearch engines and used them...quite frankly I was also disapointed in a lot of the Yahoo results.
Ann
I don't believe I said Google was broken. What I was saying was the serps are so contaminated with spammers now that surfers are not able to find relevant information without digging through tons of spam to wind up on page 5 or more before getting away from the spammers.
Again, it all depends on what you're searching for.
