Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
We read it on several threads; Why has my site disappeared from Google? or why my site lost most of its ranking on Google´s serps?
And we guess and suggest reasons in addition to few things to avoid told by our good friend at the plex GoogleGuy.
Actually the list is growing and I can mention few of the reasons suggested by fellow members:
duplicate contents
canonical (www vs. non-www) issues
spam articles
linking to spam sites
using any “cloaking” technique
etc.....
The problem at present is that we read about sites which are dropped without having the above mentioned "incidents". And as usual we suggest and guess new reasons to explain that. And maybe there is no explanation other than; occasionally innocent sites just get a hit in random keeping in mind that they already in accordance with Google´s own Quality Guidelines.
[google.com...]
And then we still have that famous "Gaming Google" business which is a general term still not sharply defined.
In this connection I just wonder whether changing only the title or description metatags of the pages occasionally considered as gaming Google. People may do that for several reasons and mostly in good faith in an attempt to make their pages rank better on SEs if they feel that their pages contents deserve better place on the serps. Nothing "blackhat" about that, IMHO.
And how about number of internal links included in a menubar. Is there a magic number beyond which one might trigger "Gaming Google" filter?
etc..etc..etc...
Its therefor of importance to cover as many factors as possible related to "Gaming Google". Otherwise we shall end asking each other:
Would your site be the next to be caught gaming Google without you being aware of that?
Thoughts?
>>A lot of sites -- probably the majority of very large sites -- follow a template. Thus any change to H1 or TITLE or META tags will propagate to a large proportion of the site.<<
I´m a "Google Gaming Filter" now, and wish to ask ;-)
- why should a webmaster do a global update to change ONLY either <title></title> or <meta name="description" content=""> or The title in <h1></h1> within the text of the area <body></body> WITHOUT any other changes within the rest of contents of already indexed webpages?
Of course we as webmasters might have our reasons, but the question is do Google engineers see it that way?
What I'd like to know is, how does making a global change to any of these tags provide unfair SEO benefits? Sure, if you have an overlong title then you might tighten it up to focus the page, but how does this even potentially cross the line into gaming the system?
i add hundreds of pages/articles a day.
each time google crawls a specific page, it's not the same as in the cache.
so to speak: 100% of pages changing constantly everytime (dynamic title, dynamic description, dynamic link text)
never had a problem with indexing and ranking for years. all unique content, just seo.
don't be cowards.
[edited by: moTi at 8:59 pm (utc) on Sep. 6, 2005]
how does making a global change to any of these tags provide unfair SEO benefits?
Clearly there are an infinite number of reasons that a site may undergo changes like these. Some are innocent, some are related to SEO (defined in this case as the process of trying to improve one's rankings by tweaking page characteristics known to influence page rankings).
Clearly also, the SE's know that this is being done, sometimes (if not often) for SEO reasons.
Personally, I don't think that any SE would necessarily downgrade rankings of pages/sites that occasionally tweak one or more onpage variables, regardless of whether it is on an individual page basis, or a sitewide basis.
But I would not be too surprised if certain kinds of tweaks, especially ones that involve certain keywords and occur on a certain scale, raise a flag that - when combined with other characteristics - might for some period of time dampen a page's ability to rank well.
Not saying it's happening. Just saying it would not surprise me if it were, based on things I've seen and heard, from both site owners and even some SE engineers. Those SE types, they don't like the thought of webmasters sitting around tweaking things to up their rankings. ;-)
Plus, when I keep hearing similar comments from webmasters over a period of time, I start to listen more carefully (even if some poo-poo the comments). And I especially listen if our own experience suggests that there might be something to those comments. Ear to the ground, nose to the grindstone...that's how we do it in the cave. Works for us. :)
One thing I do find ironic: Patterns matter. As relates to this conversation, the more a site demonstrates a pattern of change, the more it is able to change without issue. :o
naval gazing
>>great thread reseller.. but maybe we should all just demand this from googleguy ;):
[webmasterworld.com...] <<
Thanks.
Actually GoogleGuy and Brett had graciously provided such an opportunity in the past, and I wouldn´t be surprised if they do it again soon ;-)
Questions for GoogleGuy
[webmasterworld.com...]
GoogleGuy's posts
[webmasterworld.com...]
Patterns matter
You are actually changing a title that is decriptive to one that is decriptive and has keywords in it?
eg <title>Amazing new widgets from the mountains</title>
change to
<title>Cheap Blue Widgets Rocky Mountains</title>
you now have a page that descibes something but the keywords in the title are many more and probably of greater value?
Matt has just posted on his blog very detailed info about Filing a reinclusion request
[mattcutts.com...]
I hope this helps.
