Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
In doing searches for topics that I am interested in, but unrelated to my sites, I have noticed it takes longer to find good pages. Just a year or so ago, I could find four to eight good web pages on the first page. Now, sometimes I find one or none on the first page. Some keyword phrases are so bad they have been literally crippled to search with.
This is not really Google's fault. The web is just getting littered with all kinds of 'high tech' tricky stuff to make web sites easily and get traffic quickly. I assume this is to make a quick buck. A real driving force is the fact that people can put pay-per-click ads on their very own sites for free. These types of ads, such as Google's own Adsense is a great idea, but there is bound to be a downside to every new thing.
I am sure Google is trying hard to fix these problems because I am seeing different results every few weeks or so for the same search phrases. The phrases I check the most are ones that bring my own web sites up on the first page. This way I can tell how much of my traffic is coming from the search engines.
Luckily my web sites rank pretty much the same, but the other sites that are ranked above and below mine keep changing. Some sites that are ranked near mine help my traffic while others don't. It seems that since there are so many 'trick' sites showing up, that it can be good for you to be next to one. People will notice it is crappy and then visit yours and realize it is better and bookmark it and come back again later.
With the amount of web pages growing fast and the amount of 'quick buck' folks showing up, this situation can only get harder for Google to handle, but imaging having a slew of crap pages all around your listing? Your quality listing will show up very well and your will get higher quality traffic and possibly more of it.
Google is looking into a way to 'register' your domains with them and give you an ever growing 'boost' in ranking for registering as the system grows and matures. The 'bad folks' can then easily be tracked and removed for breaking ethical rules in web design to cheat their way to the top. If these pesky folks decide not to register to 'hide' from Google, then there rankings will start to suffer as legit registered sites get ranked higher. It is like a hybrid of a search engine and a directory.
As for these latest changes. Lots of movement has taken place. My site is the only one that hasn’t moved on this update. Every other site has moved and a few new ones added. It saddens me to see that a few 'quick buck' sites are now on the same page as mine. But, like I mentioned above, this isn't always a bad thing. I wont be able to tell if it helps my site for a week or so. Sometimes these neighbors of mine can have a huge impact on my traffic from the Google search pages!
Another thing that I have noticed over the past few years is that more and more of the best quality traffic to my sites comes from links on other sites. Google's search pages only provide about 15% of the income earning traffic to my sites. If you 'lose' a ranking on the Google pages, that may not affect your income at all. Get links from other sites similar to yours and watch your quality traffic grow. Trust me it works. I have been doing it for years. People have even said that if you get links Google will actually place your pages higher on theirs! A double bonus in my book!
Besides those links from other sites, add two or three pages per day with information about your topic. These pages will get indexed very fast and other sites will link to the pages. Make sure people can get to the main part of your site from each new page you make. I have read in this forum that adding new pages not only brings links, but once again, Google will move your site above the others just for adding new pages all the time. You don’t need to add more then two or three a day though. If you run out of subjects start to branch out. Don't write anything boring. People will leave and will forget about the site and wont link to it. Boring things include sales tactics or repeating the same thing over.
On bad thing about making the site with article pages is that you will get TONS of email from sites trying to swap links! It is a royal pain and you should prepare for it. Ironically, most of these people write web sites that try to make a quick buck! (See Above) Someone said that linking to some of these sites will get you ignored by Google! Do not answer these emails and do not swap links! Don't let these bad guys stop you from adding to your site. Also be ready for bad guys that want to buy links from you. Google might ignore you if you link to them. I am not sure if Google is trying to keep these crappy sites from getting links, but the less they have, the less people that will visit them and they will give up an go away! We can only hope.
In the time some of us spend checking the Google data servers, we could have written one good article on our very own site.
Good luck with your web site...
[edited by: tedster at 1:57 am (utc) on July 7, 2006]
Here is mine.
as retrieved on Dec 23, 2004 21:30:55 GMT.
I'm wondering if 6/27 is, possibly among other things, the result of www to non-www (or vice versa) 301 redirects. Most webmasters do this to increase PR of non-www (or vv), which could be seen as spam.
If you don't have a 301 and still got hit by 6/27 then there might be something other than 301 too, so would it be a good idea to ask MC what his current ideas on www << >> non-www are?
My sitemap has been refreshed now and several of my established pages have settled back into their 'regular' positions. I've still got many supp pages listed, dating back to June 2005.
I've checked my records and this is exactly the same progress the last time I got hit. Back in March it took 3 weeks to get back to full strength, so I'm guessing another week or so and I will check back again.
All the Best
Col :-)
For some 2 and 3 word terms I follow all of the DCs on McNameless give good results in terms of relevance and authority and real content in my niche.
Last night the really bad results for one 2 word term that were lurking on a few DCs (I reported earlier in the thread on this) have migrated to the majority of DCs. When I go to each DC directly I'm getting the same bad results.
This makes me wonder what they are playing with that can produce very good results for one 2 word term in a very specific niche and also produce very bad results for a similar closely related 2 word term?
I'm not looking for a list of tweaks that they might be making, rather I'm wondering what we can learn from changes, movements in the algo.
I'm becoming increasingly convinced that this is related to semantic webs.
Sid
December 2004 is the earliest I can find.
The screwed up 64.233.189.107 results seem to require URL to be a foot long the rank a page... Also all those URL-only rss blog feed listings show the weakness of that data, plus the listing of pages not in site:example.com/section/ showing up as if part of /section/ is a bad sign.
- my home page and about half of my other pages have disappeared off google.
- Went from #1 to #3 for keywords for my domain name.
- Completely gone for phrase for my site type. Meanwhile several defunct sites for many years are on page 1.
- went from PR7 to PR3.
What worries me I put my site up for-sale on Ebay and mentioned my Google rank. So not sure if it is a coincidence this happened or I am in the same boat as you guys.
btw - also for the 1st time in 5 years about 2 weeks ago my site description changed to the DMOZ one.
Command site:.info "theme.example.com" Saturday July 8th 2006
74 a.example.com
10 b.example.com
17 c.example.com
0 l.example.com
100 n.example.com
22 p.example.com
15 r.example.com
110 w.example.com
25 www.example.com
20 other.example.com
Command site:.info "theme.example.com" Sunday July 9th 2006
73 a.example.com
9 b.example.com
15 c.example.com
0 l.example.com
94 n.example.com
20 p.example.com
16 r.example.com
106 w.example.com
25 www.example.com
18 other.example.com
At one, more .info spam, most lightly reduced.
0 a.example.com
0 b.example.com
0 c.example.com
0 l.example.com
0 n.example.com
1 p.example.com
3 r.example.com
1 w.example.com
0 www.example.com
0 other.example.com
Seems this spam monster is defeated
If it was a roll back to 2004 like Matt said why is my site that was only created in late 2005 doing very well in the top 5 for most major keyords. Some with 10 millinon pages
<<<<<<
Where and when did Matt say "it was a roll back to 2004"?
[theme.example.com...]
Has one link to
[cgi.example.com...]
The CGI formmail page uses the same title, same navigation, the rest of the page is different.
Now I searched
site:example.com keyword
And Google listed the first pages only pages from cgi.example.com
They can not have a great PR, because each such page has only one link from the original page.
When a PR=0 page ranks in front of a PR=5 page, it seems to the dropped sites is a high search penalty applied.
When I test this with a keyword from an uninfluenced site, the first cgi.example.com result is way down the result list.
All the Best
Col :-)
For the last couple days, all my pages were indexed fine (relatvely new site just launched) now I cant find some.
site: went from 19 to 13. I've tried looking at a bunch of different DC's but none show 19 now. I checked my root cached page and they all show an older cached page than they showed before.
Did something revert today?
[edited by: tedster at 2:16 am (utc) on July 12, 2006]
Then with no " - ", repeat no "" , I put the same phrase in and get a supplemental result with the old page [before it was 301 redirected to the page shown above].
Why would Google be serving up our old results differentiated with the changed query parameters?
It looks like Google isn't recognising the 301 redirect on the normal search query.
Is this a Google bug?
I noticed this too... [webmasterworld.com...]
This is not really Google's fault. The web is just getting littered with all kinds of 'high tech' tricky stuff to make web sites easily and get traffic quickly.
Not Google's 'fault' but - to some extent, don't the search engine companies share responsibility for the gaming ("'high tech' tricky stuff") that is going on? I mean, there are financial incentives for getting lots of traffic [the ad programs], and obviously some are manipulating Google PageRank and other search engine results to gain that traffic.
Google, Yahoo, and other search engines and the advertising programs have altered the web landscape over the years - webmasters *do* react to the search engines' tastes. Don't they?
For instance, I now use Google Sitemaps - to try to gain better SE results from Google.
I now use "rel=nofollow" on most outbound links in order to combat splogs and comment spam (which exists mostly to game SE results by creating artificial boosts in IBL rankings) and to prevent being dinged for an OBL to a 'bad neighborhood'.
I add 'captcha' safeguards in order to block spam comments or postings.
Note that these have little if anything to do with the suggestion that we "create great content for users".
This, IMO, is the real 'Google Dance' :D Google sneezes, a bunch of webmasters catch cold!
So, not Google's 'fault' but I think it's safe to say that the SE co's share some responsibility for creating the environment (along with getting credit the tremendous benefits they have created!)
"but I've never seen the "last accessed" date in sitemaps go backwards."I have a few times but I thought I was just going insane.
Google restoring data from a previous backup? (just kidding... maybe)
Also, when I do the site: command everything is normal.
Even though results don't look as good as they used to for our site, it's way better than the rest of the data centers!
