Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
complain about a real problem
Can't see the sandbox being a "real" problem, or a problem at all. It's there to stop the SPAM. If I start a new company called Mesothelioma Lawyers Ltd you reckon I should show up in the top 500 purely because that's my company name?
Sure, the "sandbox", whatever it is, hurts some. It hurts people who are creating sites for free traffic. Many of them are spammers/freeloaders. It also hurts others. They - particularly anyone starting a new business with a business plan that relies on free SE traffic - are probably better off staying unemployed (or employed if they can find a job). Any new site starting off on the premise that free traffic will sustain it deserves to fail.
So, if you remove the sandbox as a reasonable cause for complaint, and remove most of the other whining, we'd reduce this thread to one page and those that can't even be bothered to read it will get a personal reply from Googleguy because he owes them.
Not wishing to Yahoo! bash in the Google forum, but the editing is arbitrary and the index is almost static.
Thats great if you are in (and I am very nicely for an unrelated site) but not good if you have been black listed rightly or wrongly by an editor. The problem is there is no practical way back into an index when this happens (I have started a new site just for Yahoo! but so far have not seen more than two pages in the index).
I just think the idea is great in theory but does not work in practice.
and.. I say again, if human intervention is such a good thing then why is it that all the hand edited directories including the original Y! all take back seats to the alorithm aproach.
Anyway I wish Google luck with improving the current algo and guess we will just have to accept that we have different opinions about web "editors".
and.. I say again, if human intervention is such a good thing then why is it that all the hand edited directories including the original Y! all take back seats to the alorithm aproach.
Why do directories keep getting quoted in comparison? We are not talking about directories, we are talking search engines.
The fact remains that Google et al are incapapable of dealing with the spam with their algorithms. Having said that, I am not suggesting that they scrap them. I am just saying that if they were supplemented with manual editing the results would be so much better for it.
The problem seems to be that Google don't really mind the spam when it is carrying Adwords. Many sites can be found that are in contravention of the Adwords T and C's and they are allowed to continue and propagate. They are easy to find and hence would be easy to delete from the index so we must assume that Google chooses not to do this.
[google.com...]
I was trying to do a search to find out how to determine someone's age using their birthdate in active server pages. Yahoo results are MUCH better than Google right now. Wasn't that way in January...
It looks like the anchor weighting/text has really been screwed.
Or perhaps Google is ignoring the words Active Server Pages as they are too common like "and, if etc" :( ;)
BTW: Does anybody know a good program to replace characters in csv- files?
I think this is not right and G schould do something about this...
If I check this on the DC with IP 66.102.7.x the problem is not there, so I think this should be the set that has to go life for the public.
It's still not to late to change this G
did you buy any sitewide links?
Yes, i did but it also happens with websites where I didn't buy a link but were I just have a link exchange with.
Is it not good to have sidewide links?
[edited by: robertpieter at 4:03 pm (utc) on Feb. 14, 2005]
Here's a Riddle... What do concrete, breast cancer, dating and vitamin E have to do with "active server pages"?
Yah, that about sums up the way the new google works. Not great when you come to expect word proximity and relevance to matter. Sure, if you search for your widgets online or whatever your pet search is it may be ok, but trying actually using google right now - 20% of SERPS are relevant maybe...
It is ok for me as many of my big adsense sites are getting tons of off the wall traffic but my focused niches sites are taking the hit - always seems to balance out. As for G's quality, try not to look at 1 spot gone for some spam site as improvement but actually try complex searches like many do and see what you get. Not pretty! :)
Here's a Riddle... What do concrete, breast cancer, dating and vitamin E have to do with "active server pages"?
They have a lot to do with age and active.
They have a lot to do with age and active.
But what about Google's amazing ability for semantic indexing?
if the words "active server pages" are sequential, don't you think they should pass some type of semantic test?
All I can say is that I've done THOUSANDS of Google searches on programming terms in the past, and never received results as poor as these.
Sheesh - Webmasterworld wasn't even in the Top 500!
I also noticed an almost complete LACK of search terms in the titles of the results - look for the bold terms in the search again... [google.com...]
......
uff, these serps are really bad. Today I searched for a possibility to replace a " in a .csv - files with Excel. My Excel always says "Formular too long".
I looked it up in Google and got zero informative sites. Although I didn't find the solution in Yahoo, the yahoo SERPS were much more on topic.BTW: Does anybody know a good program to replace characters in csv- files?
yep .... a text editor ;).
greg
or are you on Windows/xx if so ultraedit
I'm now seeing two identical sites from the same domain, one as a suppplemental result. The pages and url are exactly the same except that one of the urls has the first letter of the first directory name in capital letters.
The webmaster was probably using some zipped files to load replacement pages and typed the directory name wrong, thus creating a new directory. Whatever the reason, he how has two spots on the first page.
My referrals from Google are up 40%, but that hasn't translated into increased sales. Searches must not be serving up what the folks are trying to find. I've seen many note that their referrals were up also, but no comments on resulting sales.
someone posted that now G seems to penalise the entire domain if it finds dupe pages.
GoogleGuy: if you're reading this (and if it's true) please suggest that G change this.
Many forum, CMS and other pages can be accessed via?ID=45445 and /story/45445 or in capital letters etc. Please pick one and get rid of the other; don't hurt entire domains.
Even if the site owner is trying to cheat, they fail because you only pick one page, not both and G is much more accurate in providing results.
if someone linked to your dynamic page and 3 years later you changed format, your entire domain shouldn't be penalized, the page with less rank alone should be penalized.
There's now a scraper4.html that compares the two indexes. If your pages are MIA, it might show you some patterns for particular search terms that would be difficult to isolate otherwise. Or, it might show you that Google is more random and broken than anything else.
Here's a Riddle... What do concrete, breast cancer, dating and vitamin E have to do with "active server pages"?
By Google's own statement, they include "AND" by default and we should not have to include it. When I enter a search phrase and I include the "AND" operator, this is what they say:
The "AND" operator is unnecessary -- we include all search terms by default.
Therefore, their search results for that search should have shown only pages that included ALL of the keywords searched. I can't believe that pages on breast cancer, concrete, dating and vitamin E contained all of those search terms.
So the results suck. This is the first Google update that has shocked me. I think they really blew it this time. Yahoo used to be great, and then their search results got cruddy sometime last year. Now their results are much better than Google's and I've switched back to Yahoo again. If only all the visitors to the sites I manage would do the same!
All the words in the example search are included in the query.
If you look at the cache of the pages you will see that most of the words are in links pointing to the pages. (apparently)
Interesting about the links. Creating spamming. Similarly, it always frosts me when I see porn sites coming up on our keywords (which aren't even remotely related to anything porn, by any possible stretch of the imagination).
About 60-70% DC with those results, stabile."
My site is still MIA in there. I guess that lots others are.
The other night we reached position 90ish for "catering Jobs" the following night we had vanished from the index again. We have position 350ish for "insurance jobs" which never changes.
At the end of the day if google doesnt want to list our site then fine, we have to live with it. What is a dam shame is that it would rather list sites that are not relevent to the search terms way above us .
Currently the SERPS have never looked so bad. As for buying more adwords, frankly ive stopped buying PPC with Google now. Once they let us in the SERPS we will go back to PPC in support. Meanwhile we would rather invest with MSN where we have better support where we dont have this listing problem.
The current google algo is not reducing spam. It is reducing new sites of quality from listing. After a year of this webmasters like us have had enough.
The way we look at google PPC is that if we are paying £6,000 PCM and we are also in the SERPs for some traffic using google is cost effective because the Free SERPs traffic in effect reduces the PPC costs hence a great ROI. By not getting any traffic from the SERPs at all and having to buy traffic at full rate the ROI is not so good, hence moving our spend to MSN and Yahoo.
In the end Google will suffer for having poor SERPS as im confident many other webmasters will do the same
Searches I've been doing over the last few days show pages that were ranking number one on these two IP blocks, but are out of the top 100 on all the other IPs, which are the ones that the public is currently using. So far, nothing new.
But I just discovered that some sites that only showed up two weeks ago by using the -asdf filter trick, now show exactly the opposite behavior with respect to these IP blocks. They are zero in the two blocks mentioned above, and rank well in all the other IPs.
This suggests that the index we're currently seeing on almost all IPs is directly related to Google's effort to take sites out of the -asdf filter. The "other" index on those two IP blocks, the index that some of us have termed the "better" SERPs, is an index where the former -asdf pages still fail to appear! This is so definitive that my -asdf filter scraper is now almost obsolete.
My theory is that Google had to bounce pages out of their main index in order to make room for those pages that were liberated from the -asdf filter.
I have an idea of what was going on with the old -asdf filter. I've claimed elsewhere that the -asdf filter, as of two weeks ago, was a symptom of Google's decision at search time about whether to search Index1 or Index2. These were a theoretical two indexes that are different than the two discussed above. In that old theory, Index1 would be the filled-to-capacity main index, and Index2 would be another, much smaller index of mostly new sites. If a search was extremely complex, as any search with nearly 20 terms in it would be, I claimed that Google just assigned it to Index2 at search time in order to save CPU overhead on the search. That's why it looked like a real-time filter.
Now with this latest update Google has folded Index2 into Index1, but at the cost of having to bounce some pages that used to do well in Index1.
The bottom line is that Google still has a capacity problem. If you see your page where it deserves to place after being sandboxed for all that time, then it means that someone else, somewhere, is paying for it.
Google can patch things together so that to Joe Searcher, the coverage appears more or less comprehensive. It's good enough for Wall Street. What they still cannot do -- and now it's been 22 months since that first capacity crash -- is rank all the indexes and all the pages together, and produce them in a search, in a manner that appears consistent to those who look more closely at Google's history and current behavior.
GoogleGuy has said a lot of things....
As for buying more adwords, frankly ive stopped buying PPC with Google now. Once they let us in the SERPS we will go back to PPC in support.
I still find statemnts like this puzzling. What does one have to do with the other?
We were making $6 for every $1 we spent on adwords BEFORE we had google traffic, and would continue making the same (or more) without it. A properly tested and proven PPC campaign HAS NOTHING to do with free traffic. What you are really saying is your PPC campaign was not profitable (unless you are just cutting off your own PPC profits as a symobloic protest against everything google).
ROI does not and should not have anything to do with your free traffic. A good PPC campaign can stand on it's own (isn;t that the whole reason for it?)
