Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Looking at 40 of these sites, here is my input on Allegra.
1. Old onsite optimization has regained weight.
2. Many filters have eased off significantly, trapping less sites in purgatory. This is true in the case of both old and new sites.
3. The need to have anchor text to break filters, has been greatly minimized.
4. Inbound links are being treated differently.
Questions rolling around in my head regarding inbounds.
A. Is google considering accumulative linkage?
Not only current inbounds, but linkage over a period of time.
A link gone, still carries weight?
I have sites that currenly have next to zero inbounds that rank well on terms that they haven't for a least a year.
Or is due to old fashioned on page optimization?
B. Are the benefits to inbound links, traveling farther throughout a site?
Not to long ago one heavy PR link to a homepage could raise a site overall. Are we back to this with a twist?
Of the 40 sites all but one are ecoms sites and the age of these sites range from 6 years to 5 months.
24 sites gained significantly in this update.
8 of the above sites were released from purgatory.
12 sites held steady. No significant changes.
4 sites plunged. No tricky stuff related to these, not much different compared to the others, they just went MIA
[edited by: minnapple at 8:09 am (utc) on Feb. 7, 2005]
Hope they use them!
Walkman - I still do good at these DCs:
64.233.171.99
64.233.171.104
64.233.171.105
64.233.171.147 "
The only thing I noticed on these datacenters is that my sandboxed sites which are currently out at www.google.com are still sandboxed on those datacenters.
Unique visitors on 3 Feb were 63% down on the previous day's numbers. 78% of this drop was due to Google referral losses. Curiously:
Has history ever seen the sort of commercial situation that site-owners like ourselves face now? In such mass numbers? Certainly not a scenario for the faint-hearted, eh? It does remind me of the dangers of monopolies, and of the value of diversification. This was, after all, the problem with the Soviet monopolisation of Russia.
Or not. :)
Google is playing with you guys. There are vastly different opinions here about what's going on, what factors now count, and what don't. They've created hype, disappointment, elation, speculation, calculation and conspiracy theories. The one they're probably chuckling about most though is the "confusion". It must always please Google when SEOs are confused. :)
You guys could get smarter than exchanging Woe Is Me posts and get down to some serious analysis and everyone could cooperate to share here actual results you are noticing. But, even that may be to no avail.
Google could be in a flux, yes. But, they could also be trying different algos on different keywords/markets. They could be doing A/B testing. In fact, that may be a continuous process from here on. Because results used to "settle" in the past is not enough reason for them to "settle" now. They may never do.
That's why, if you are relying too much on Google traffic, you have to diversify. Now. Those of you who have benefiited from Allegra need be most afraid. You're more likely to be complacent and therefore more likely to get burned.
think even about all those Adwords users. Half of them might run out of their budget - if G changes the algo twice or three times a year, they might find more custormers, at least new ones (with a fresh budget).
Changing the algo must not necessary have to do with SERPS improvement, but might have to do with business ...
We've all been through this before and found a solutions it happened last year and it will no doubt happen again.
I see it as a challenge, google has thrown down the guantlet and we should pick it up.
Searches on our products and we don't show up on any of them. Search on our name, and we get mostly link pages to us. This is a 2.5 year old site, large number >3000 pages, diverse phrases but one group of products, different structures within the pages, all hand written, and all our pages still seems to be indexed and can be pulled up on a site search.
I think they have a new spam penalty system and its making a lot of false positives, the searches on major key phrases are a little cleaner of spam than normal.
The filter must be site wide, its affecting all of our pages. I don't think its an inbound link filter, our inbound links are real and solid and with a wide range of many different sites. (We've avoided link exchanging with link farms), DMOZ & Yahoo links.
I think its false positives in that spam filter flagging our site, because theres nothing particularly spammy about our site. Too many links off the front page, a language redirect perhaps? Who knows what triggers it.
In a search with 10000+ good results, it doesn't matter if they get 3000 false spam positives because there are still plenty of other good sites to fill the result with. It causes more problems in obscure product searches where there are only one or two suppliers.
Sure its bad if its your site in the 3000.
I'm not convinced that *old* sites are going into the sandbox. If you have an established site, then just forget about the sandbox.
I think this is just a normal update gone wrong - there are a lot of sites just not indexed properly, and those are impacting on the results. I think the duplicate content filter is over-agressive too though, but basically these seems to be a too-early rollout of the SERPs based on incomplete data.
