Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I've been through this sort of stuff before. I made absolutely no changes with the site when it tanked in September. Now its back. Go figure.
Interesting to see the similarities between this thread and the one 6 weeks ago at [webmasterworld.com...] . Seems to me there is something of a reversal going on - I see a number of people commenting here with the opposite of what they commented in the last thread. Seems to me that whatever they tweaked last time seems to be something similar this time around. Perhaps not a complete reversal of the past as others seem to be impacted this time - but similar sorts of conversation. Just my two cents worth.
This is something new and bad - at least in my area. Yes the SERPs used to contain a smattering of affiliate sites, but at least they were bang on topic. Now everything seems to have been replaced with generic shopping comparision (affiliate) sites with zillions of pages and no focus or real value.
Suggy
I mean the kind that refer to one of the intermediaries (Affiliate Window / Tradedoubler / etc) before redirecting.
I have just had a look a one of the sites in my market that's held it's position. Backlinks show numerous references to pages that only contain affiliate links through Affiliate Window to that site. Is this new?
Suggy
It looks as if they've turned down (again) the weighting given to TITLE and Hx tags. Whenever they do this it results in SERPs showing more irrelevant pages that just happen to mention the search term once or twice. That's what I'm seeing today.
This sort of change hits spammers aiming junk pages at single valuable key phrases. Unfortunately it also clobbers specific, highly relevant niche pages with spot-on content.
Which is exactly the sort of page I want to find as a user. So much for "content is king".
agree fully, same thing happened/happens to one of my sites.
For about 80 keywords i am back in top 10 positions as i've been before (OK, not really competitive ones, but ones that give you 10 visits a day each).
I noticed even that the pages got their PR back (they went from 2 to 0 in dec)
Overall, commerce sites seem to be losing out a little to informational sites, but I guess your mileage may vary.
We operate a very rich in content job site. All of our main sector pages are out the index now and so are our dedicated Job areas. We never featured anywhere high with Google anyway but now we are out altogether.
Meanwhile the same old sites in the top ten remain, why i have no idea other than the Google Algo favours sites over a certain age irrespective of content.
Content is certainly no longer a factor.
Search on the search term "insurance Jobs" and the results are just dire. Our dedicated section would be high in content for this search term, yet sites about being gay, divorced, life insurance, buying a car and travel insurance for holidays feature high in the results.
Just when you think Google cant get any worse
