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.
G is no longer the big fair authoravite search engine I thought and wished it was,
“Changing the web for the better” , LOL LOL LOL.
Seams like whatever algo/indexing criteria G is implementing now is purely and evidently designed to push millions of web developers WW into the G adwords program (if they wish to see any google hits on their logs). The new algo is clearly designed to take into account sites with adsense code on and to favour or kick out (off the serps) according to the adsense/adwords program targets and needs.
REGARDLESS OF THE CONTENT YOU ARE OFFERING TO YOUR VIEWERS, SITE QUALITY, BACKLINKES, SITE AGE etc. It doe’s not seam to matter anymore. It is now just about money and bottom lines and share holders meetings.
Watch them continue to round up the entire web and suffocate millions of small businesses around the world. If you think this algo affected a couple of your sites, just wait, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
It is now in every webmaster best interest to proactively promote to their viewers G’s competition or there will hardly be anyone visiting these board a year or two from now. The vast majority of us we’ll be too busy with our day jobs.
BTW GG
I have never seen the SERPs in such bad state. I did a search for a few popular sites I normally visit and all I could get were sites linking to these sites while the correct site is berried way far down the list. Great update/algo indeed.
My 50 cents per click ;)
[edited by: max_mm at 4:47 pm (utc) on Feb. 9, 2005]
How can you say that? SERPs are just not stable yet. At the moment, I can see three different sets of results on the data centers. And on google.com or any of the other google regionals, they keep switching.
This update is like hell not over.
What I cant understand is, the so -called new results, they seem to spreading to other datacenters, then disappearing too. then back again. what gives?
The uncertainty - whcih of the 3 different SERPs is gonna be the the final one - is killing me.
question: Are those datacenters (mentioned a few posts before) used by G to serve results for different regions?
For example sites (that don't spam or black hat) can drop by no more than 10 or 20 positions per update.
They would perhaps consider this if they could but they can't. They can't even find text that is the same colour as the background. I still find sites that use this. Yesterday I found a simple Frontpage site in the top position with the following code
<body bgcolor="#74685A" ...
then at the bottom of the page
<font color="#74685A" ... then a long list of spammed keywords and phrases
In this context the algo is obviously not very clever. What more proof do you need that it cannot cope with black hat techniques as basic as this? No style sheets, no fancy tricks, just plain old HTML. The truth is that the algo is just not up to the job. They need to stop these damaging updates and introduce some manual editing but they won't.
(P.S. If you want to use this technique why not go right ahead? It seems to be quite safe and it still works. The only danger would be if someone blows you in :o)
How can you say that? SERPs are just not stable yet.
Well GG is allready collecting feedback. I guss it is over guys.
And my website is still not showing up correctly for its real name. No black hat techniques here, no cheating but excellent fresh content. No spam and a very large site...
If my site disappeared - every site can disappear...
itloc
Macro has made some good points (amongst other I disagree with) but ......
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?
Is a very good point when coming down on the companies name argument.
I dont agree with this update Google has done but it is a reflection of the web/spammers out there.
But what I am seeing is that new sites has similar anchor text coming to their website. This is kind of really strong thing I am seeing. Anyone else seeing this also?
Also there are 3 things here
1) Site totally wiped out
2) Sites out of "Sandbox"
3) Shuffles among the results
Point 1 is bad for peolpe like me.
2 is good for all of us as our new sites out of it.
3 good and bad depending on who went up or down.
Anyone who lost their site (related to point 1):
1) We changed our hosting company (really good one now) like 2 months ago
2) % of the Anchor text of the incoming links is less and varied somewhat
3) Interlinking between different pages of site is not that much. Maximum say 200 pages links to one page out of more than 2000 pages.
4) Google keep showing different total page with site:wwWebmasterWorldebsite.com
Present google shows: 70K pages ( we are no where here)
64.233.171.99 shows 130k (we are doing awesome here)
Both of them showing almost same number of incoming link to home page.
Is the GoogleGuy the Fat Lady then? and Is he going to sing something?
Nope. This is not a good point. How many companies are called that way? How about the rest of the 99% of all the other companies that are not found for their names?
Sites should get found after their names.
this was before the filter or whatever they did on the 5-6th was applied. I rule on those serps! However, I think the update is over and we're screwed.
You are correct. I said this yesterday but no one wanted to listen. The DC's that include many of the missing sites are going to be history soon. It's over. GG soliciting free quality control from here solidifies this as there is no reason for him to want feedback if the results were not finished dancing.
The new algo is clearly designed to take into account sites with adsense code on and to favour or kick out (off the serps) according to the adsense/adwords program targets and needs.
Not true, I had a totally innocent Adsense site that was kicked into oblivion.
I know, I am just feeling resigned and depressed over the nature of the web. :( (and have spent the afternoon down the pub)
Dayo
[edited by: Dayo_UK at 5:20 pm (utc) on Feb. 9, 2005]
But I've never seen any real EVIDENCE posted that supports this. Did I miss it?
FWIW, in the areas I look at, this update has either improved the results or done no harm, if you define improvement as "getting off-topic or garbage sites out of the top results."
How many companies are called that way? How about the rest of the 99% of all the other companies that are not found for their names?
Absolutely! One of my clients has a business name that is something zany (funny-phrase) and unrelated to the site content in any way. The domain name is funny-phrase.com and it is no where to be found. I mean not in the first 700 results. This is a fault. It has nothing to do with SEO.
You have a company called Widget. You have a website widget.com. You have a listing in DMOZ for Widget, pointing to Widget.com. And you have a Listing in Yahoo pointing to Widget.com. You have thousands of websites linking you.
You have a pagerank above 5
You go to Google and enter "Widget" and it returns a site that has made a link to you? Your website appears on position 65 with a subpage widget.com/tralala/getreal.htm
NO WAY - but thats exactly how the index is at the moment...and therefore this update is not over yet.
From my experience: Google is not stupid and they have some excellent people. But shuffling and weighting so many pages needs a lot of time. I am amazed that is even possible...
Years ago i did some larger realtime financial systems (stock market data) and i learned one thing: it needs time to process large amounts of data.
itloc
I know, I am just feeling resigned and depressed over the nature of the web. (and have spent the afternoon down the pub)
LOL. Perhaps this would be a good time for you to provide GG with some feedback?
greg
[edited by: djgreg at 5:35 pm (utc) on Feb. 9, 2005]
Dayo – I feel you. I could not work anything today. I am just steering at the SEPR from the other DCs. I went to the gym and do serious work out. Each Google update decreases my life with one year. I prefer to do something when G is dancing.
exactly. Especially if you've been there for ages and have hundreds of backlinks with "Gargamel". At least you should rank higher than a stupid page in directory with 10,000+ pages, that mentions your site name once. I don't see how one wouldn't rank if Google worked normally.
if the update is over why are data centers changing by the minute?
my idea of a settled update is when the data centers are stable (apart from the usual noise) or at least that is how it used to be.
the difference in the amount of results returned by different data centers vary too much for this to be stable, an example for a term we target:
23,100,000 results for one data center
17,500,000 results for another.
so, my question is, is it new Google policy to provide vastly different results to each geographic area?
I too am confused by the fact that googleguy has asked for feedback (when so many here believe the update just aint done).
if it is done then why the big difference in the data centers?
thoughts?
dazz
what if those DCs aren't used to provide Google.com results? They're just there, not accessible by Joe Public
Well in our industrial areas I have many more .edu and research stuff as opposed to commercial sites. Only time will tell if thats what the searcher wants....
any chance of doing a tracert and letting us know which data center you are referring to?
to answer the question of whether the data centers are in use or not is simple.
if people in different locations/countries do a tracert to www.google.com and then report the IP address, we will have a better idea.
dazz
<added> my current DC is 66.102.11.104 </added>
how about offering an "amnesty" so people are encouraged to send you e-mails? Many, many sites have been effected and it seems like a glitch somewhere. Maybe if you get enough e-mails you guys will be able to see a pattern and figure out what happened. You went through this with the 302 redirects and for days no one sent you any e-mails because they were afraid of being banned when G engineers checked it
You can't possibly be serious...."I'm violating google guidelines to try and rank better than I should, but don't ban me if I tell you the URL of my site that has rightfully dropped in the serps".
Yeah, that makes sense.
