Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
you did not see my previous question: is that a picture of you on top of your site?
Just did a Google site search restricted to my own domain for a unique/technical word that appears on 52 pages... fifty two pages according to Google. There is one page dedicated to the technical word itself, and almost all instances of the word on the other pages link to my page about the word... so clearly that is the page to rank first.Instead, Google ranks first:
a supplemental result...
I have been dealing with this for the past 4 months, with my newer 1 year old site. In fact, I pasted a whole unique paragraph into Google search, and a site linking to me (that is supplemental and a scraper) is outranking me for the whole paragraph! And since I am so small to matter, Google disregards things like this. Thats the way it is I guess, until more competition becomes available.
Why do people even defend Google - there is a bug.
No kidding. For those of you defending Google, you just don't realize how unpredictable Google is. They have some evident problems, and they don't seem to fix the problems according to smaller and newer sites.
you did not see my previous question: is that a picture of you on top of your site?
Yes (not that it has anything to with Google Search News!).
Yes (not that it has anything to with Google Search News!).
Cool. Yeah, nothing to do with search, sorry for going a bit offtopic. Anyway a discussion that stays 100% on topic cannot go anywhere since the whole spice of forums is in having an eclectic selection of views that boil down to the entropy of a more important message that, in turn, may be on topic.
we all give Google free content. Google produces zero original content. natural that they give back some free traffic.
but i know hwere you're coming from, people abuse this...so we reach a point where it's become natural to punish sites.
but i disagree nonetheless. if google paid to spider my content i'd abide by their guidelines.
what they're doing now is blackmail, their algo is broken and they're going for the emotional threats, email threats, imposing, etc....
google is definitely gone. i'm waiting for the next great idea already.
I have the impression the problem is growing and more and more sites are hit by the filter. The filter must be dealing with several aspects but I am convinced my site is getting penalty points with searchword combinations.
With or without &filter=0 searches show large differences for some search word combinations or small differences with others. A page can still be shown with some search word combination but not with another. Strange..
Is the problem growing? I had the impression in the first days that not so many sites where affected by the filter but now the problem seems to grow and so is the amount of people on this threat. Anybody's problem started only a few days ago?
EFV isn't a Google rep, he is a good chap.
You have to learn to look beyond the induced emotional trauma that comes with changes that impact you.
There are many things that are going on and not all will stand.
Google changes that take days or weeks to propagate cause all sorts of distress. Those that are affected now may not be the next go around.
EFV got hit earlier this year.
In fact, I pasted a whole unique paragraph into Google search, and a site linking to me (that is supplemental and a scraper) is outranking me for the whole paragraph!
I think that's a common issue with people who's sites have disappeared - In almost all cases it seems to be sites that ranked well in fairly competitive terms, either high search volume or some reasonable $$ value.
Clearly Google have either tweaked an existing/added a new dup content filter, or applied some sort of site wide "original ness" score.
I don't think it's to do with adsense, aff links, navigation structure etc - but I'm just guessing, as we all are :)
I think, whatever the change is, they are either incorrectly flagging the original site as the duplicate, which in fairness, is bound to happen occasionally, or finding the duplicated content on various sites and applying a dampening factor to each of those sites, rather than just the copiers. If it’s the dampening factor it might explain why for some of the more competitive terms my site has dropped 100's of places, whilst on less competitive terms it only drops a few </my opinion / best guess / 2 cents / etc>
and I’m 99.99% sure EFV isn’t a google rep....although now you mention it :P
That is exactly what happens with a site of mine. Like for the more competitive search term combination every site got some kind of filter value. To give every site so many filter values must be a huge operation. There must be an algo behind it. I am not convinced it is a duplication filter since search terms are filtered, not pages.
Forget the tin hat conspiracy theories. In terms of this thread, Google has made a massive error, and very poor choice (the Supplemental index itself). Neither of those things amkes them any different than anyone else here.
>>EFV got hit earlier this year. <<
Yes I recall that too.
Here is a post where EFV tells what happened to his site on a sunny Midwest (USA) day, March 23 2005 ;-)
msg #:514
[webmasterworld.com...]
Don´t think that he has yet recovered totally from that hit. Right EFV?
since search terms are filtered, not pages.
That's what I was trying to say, in a round about way - if your site is flagged with some sort of "this site is just a dup -10 ranking points across the site" type of thing, that may hurt you more when it's a more competitive term rather than a less competitive term, which would make it appear to be search term related - maybe that's a too simplistic view, or maybe over complicating it...just a guess based what I'm seeing one of my sites that's been affected by whatever was implemented around the 22nd of Sept.
Sometimes I wonder if it is a filter or is Google just churning the results. The exception would be the ordained sites that never get touched.
Good point and it fits nearly with what I see.
However: there are some highly competitive search terms I still have a good ranking. With filter=0 position in the SERPS is dropped only one or two places. But when I change the search term slightly, page is dropped 80 positions. When the site has only one filter value for all search terms no competitive search term with good ranking should be left.
Given that, I'm surprised he hasn’t put this one out of its misery.
it could be that to rank means being very different from your competiots rather than having just better or more original content...
on the other hand ive seen the most replavnt page filtered and less relevnat pages included from the same site instead...
maybe steveb is on the mark by just going with the 'screwed up' thoery...
Don´t think that he has yet recovered totally from that hit. Right EFV?
I did recover completely (except for four or five pages out of 5,000 or so pages that are still MIA) with Bourbon.
A number of people here have mentioned losing their Google referrals for two months after Google updates or changes, and that was my experience: my Google referrals were down substantially (though not completely) for almost two months to the day.
since search terms are filtered, not pages.
It could be true that search terms are filtered, but it also appears that whole domains are filtered as well.
