Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Exactly. Look at the cached pages in the result. Many I seen with the search term above had maybe one mention (even with quotes) and some had none with some links that have the term pointing to it. It is kinda sad.
Don't waste time making simple things complicated. A sprinter can run the same race on ten different days and get ten different times. Who cares? All that really matters on a given day is who got gold, who got silver and who got bronze.
Figure out how to finish in the top three spots on all ten days, and the times don't matter much.
Then, if you want more gold, enter more races. ;-)
I can't believe this little burp was given a name. At least four updates in the past six months have had more significant impact, in particular the sandbox test of early January.
My conclusion is that each of the burps of the past six months have looked like calamities to some people in some niches, and were complete non-events for other people. In my niches there has been some minor shuffling, and a handful current generation of blog comment spam appearing, but aside from that, same old same old.
<It does seem somebody bumped the authority knob up from from .00000000000032 to .00000000000073, and that volume of links helps more -- two semi-contradictory things -- but not much else to see here; certainly zilch sandbox impact>
There you go. If you didn't get the gold then create a race that you will get the gold. But the person who wins the gold didn't take it away from someone else. It was the thoughts and actions that were of the greatest value in accordance to the conditions of the race that the gold was paid. Value for value.
I saw the changes happen a few days before things were reported here. Most serps are similar. But, at last, ab*ut.com has been seriously clipped. Those parasites have 5 links from their most pertinent page to our site, (incoming to different pages), and were grabbing first place in our main kw search for a long time. Now, they're where they should be, #9, and we've moved from #2 to first place. Looks good on them. I hope all of those glorified scraper sites got nailed the same.
<edit>realized they're at #9, not #8, as I first posted. Looking forward to them hitting #100.</edit>
You know, I have a theory. Google likes stemming, right? What if they took it one step further, and introduced a thesaurus into the algorithm? That way, cheap widgets, discount widgets and inexpensive widgets would all be relevant. It could boost relevancy and help eliminate highly optimized spam pages. It only makes sense that Google would be thinking along those lines.
In this dance, I've seen pages all about "discount widgets" ranking in the #1 spot (which I used to occupy) for the search term "cheap widgets". What's intetresting is that "cheap widgets" may only be mentioned once on their page. I've seen this for a few different pages. Anyone have a thought about this?
Thesaurus in Algo?
Sure it is called Latent Semantic Indexing
Latent Semantic Indexing [google.com]
Baked Jake brought it up earlier in this thread. I am beginning to think that google is slowly rolling this out across the index piece by piece that is why some people are saying what update and others are getting killed.
There you go. If you didn't get the gold then create a race that you will get the gold. But the person who wins the gold didn't take it away from someone else.
There you go. Missing the point. Again.
The person who won the gold took it away from those who might have won the gold.
Want more gold (after winning it in your races)?
Enter more races. Win more gold.
Failing to place in one race, and running off to try in another race, is a loser's mentality. Face up, compete, win. Or explain away your losses with intellectual mind games.
Definitely no sign of that in my area. The results are very literally. Seeing sites with low PR, 4 backlinks, but the keyword phrase stuffed into their page fifteen times.
Google is going more literal. What's working well on this update is pages solely focused on one keyword phrase. You don't need many links, but if don't use your thesaurus either. Repetition seems to be the key!
And, that's why good content sites are dropping. Because most wouldn't dream of stuffing a single keyword phrase into even link, heading, and paragraph on the page!
Suggy.
All I can think is that there's a duplicate content problem (I can't see any sign of this) or my link structure is setting off an anti-spam penalty. Either that or I'm being penalised for having too many incoming links. I gave up tracking those long ago because there were simply too many.
My consolation prize is that Google Images really likes my photographs -- I'm now getting 12x as many referrals from images.google.com as from www.google.com! Maybe it's a sign that I should give up writing and take up photography more seriously.
There are two bits of evidence I can bring to support this - one is that many sites are clearly not indexed properly, and I'm talking about small sites with much less that 100 pages which are listed in the ODP, and second the Googlebot is crawling at an incredibly fast rate on many sites, probably trying to fill in the holes in the index.
FACK. This topic is worth a thread of its own .
2)
I also found quite interesting what bobx reported on page 28 on the lenght of url ands folder-levels. Any other supports on that?
3)
Quite recently I followed the sources on LSI given in webmasterworld. Most research papers I found were several years old. What if substantial progress has been made meanwhile by shifting from statistical vector-space-based analysis towards a deeper understanding of webpages, integrating research from linguistics and not only shannon-like information science?
A website on trees, for example, might be an authority for other websites dealing with oaks and the like. The thorrough relationsship between oaks and trees cannot be covered by statistic measurements of word-occurence, but semantic research has done a lot on that and I'm quite sure large databases exist. Has google bounced into this? Has anyone followed their job offers in this respect? Calum? wasn't this your major field of interest?
They have been for years (or rather the outbound anchor text has counted).
> LSI
vitaplease, DigitalGhost and some other folks have followed LSI closer than I have. As normal, I think it'll take a while to formulate firm opinions on the main difference here.
"The person who won the gold took it away from those who might have won the gold."
Explain how this takes away from the other when he never had it in the first place nor gave the necessary value for the exchange. It is a value for value exchange. If the other person didn't create enough value, the exchange for the gold medal isn't made. He gets the silver, bronze, or a nice try. (But due to the subjectivness of humans the guy who just gave it his all, the experience was just as valuable to him as the gold medal.
"Failing to place in one race, and running off to try in another race, is a loser's mentality. Face up, compete, win. Or explain away your losses with intellectual mind games."
If what you are doing isn't working change your approach. You can keep competing all you want if you maintain the same value and that value is below someone elses then you will never win the gold (if that is what you value from the experience). You have to change the circumstances by changing you approach. Try going fishing in the middle of a field with just a rock and no pond. Just keep tossing the rock around all day for the rest of your life. Compete and persevere all you want. Face up to the challenge. Unless you change your approach, which creates different circumstances and value, all you will get is me crossig your path asking you if you had any luck.
Edison kept on going many many times before the lightbulb was invented. He didn't run the same race. If he ran the same race over and over again he wouldn't have gotten anywhere. He learned from the other races he attempted. Each time he took that value of his experiences and created new races with different circumstances. He kept creating more new races, learning from experience, and changing his approach until he finally won the gold.
A looser's mentality isn't walking away from the race. A looser's mentality is one who gives up without deriving something of value from the experience.
Well enough about this stuff. It is way off topic. It is best for another thread or by sticky.
Yes, but some - including me - have the feeling that outbound links in some manner may have a positive impact on the linking site itself. Maybe in such a way that with valuable outbound links a site looks more like an authority on a given topic. I know that this would be very much contradictory to googles initial approach but things have dveloped a lot since then. How could we test/verify this speculation?
Joseph Swan actually invented the light bulb. Edison fell foul of a duplicate content filter and wasn't granted a patent as his invention was too similar to Swans existing invention of a filament in a vacuum tube. It wasn't until Swan and Edision teamed up that the first practical light bulb was perfected (after Swan sued).
Definitely no sign of that in my area. The results are very literally. Seeing sites with low PR, 4 backlinks, but the keyword phrase stuffed into their page fifteen times.
I am seeing stuff where the only mention of the keyword is in the title or just image tags. It looks like pure LSI without any filters applied.
some - including me - have the feeling that outbound links in some manner may have a positive impact on the linking site itself. Maybe in such a way that with valuable outbound links a site looks more like an authority on a given topic.
It would also make sense for Google to assign greater weight to one-way links than to reciprocal links (whether outbound or inbound).
Other factors could come into play, too, such as the nature of the pages that are sending or receiving the links.
[/end "what if" scenario]
anyway. I am not sure what the keywords did this time (never watch them any more) - but referrals are up about 5% from google.
One of them is a small specialized directory that has been listed on page 1 of the serps for a keyword that usually generates about 22 million results on G. The site has been around since 1996. It can now be found on page 3 of the serps for this keyword.
Another e-commerce site we have run since 1995 usually has around 590,000 pages listed on G. It has lost 130,000 pages in the serps since Feb 2. The last time we saw something like this was after the Florida update, when we were almost completely dropped by G.
Here is the interesting part, although the overall number of pages listed on G has decreased for the e-commerce site, we are seeing a significant increase in sales since Feb 2. What I suspect has happened is that although a large number of pages have been dropped, other pages seem to have moved up in the serps.
Now, i can't determine the timing with anything near accuracy because a few real life events (tsunami + domestic storm + local election stuff) tend to skew my metrics.
I am absolutely sure, though, that this update has both an algo enhancement and a PR recalculation, and that it started no later than mid january. First, we saw the first signs of the algo changes in selected portions of the web as tests were carried out - now the winning tests are migrating to the whole data set and a data update is performed.
What we are seeing now proves what i stated in some odd post early last year, that in order to do partial/continuous PR calculations you need to make a full scale update once in a while to make sure your data and reference points don't decay. So, this is the first round in the new system.
It also helps my understanding of the so-called "sandbox" somewhat (although not totally), as in the absence of a total count/calculation some data points will miss valid references, and as the inflow of new data don't stop this process will tend to enforce itself (data decay). One year is a long time - i think perhaps we should expect the next round to be within six months or so.
As to whether the SERPS are good or bad - i'll leave opinions and judgement to the Google Search Quality people. Whatever it is we webmasters just have to live with it the way it is :)
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Nice thing with the images btw. - it could make those text-only SERPS a little more exiting. AFAIK, it was tried some time ago too but i guess it was dropped again. Let's see if it makes it into production this time - sofar i've just heard about it, not even seen a screenshot. Added: I can't help it, the word "Picasa" just can't get out of my mind when i hear this. I think there might be a few difficulties regarding potentially offensive pictures though.
From the mouth of a true content builder...
In order to do continuous pr calculations etc .... you need a ton of horse power and correct data.
Chances of having both at anypoint in time is close to nil, all of the calulations done by G are approximations.
If you finally get the horsepower you order, the data set has out stripped that horsepower.
So the results decay and to keep new sites out just makes matters worse.
Some result sets will be better than others. More so if the area is static. However few things on the net are static.
I think there is no easy way to figure out when things start changing because of a major update vs minor updates. But to tag this one on one site I keep track of no later than Jan 28 for the start.
I am also wondering if G has a problem with parked domains, but right now that is just a wondering type of thing.
