Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
1. One of my domains, a 6 year old pioneering website with lots of pages of semi-unique content with a reasonably good PR dropped from receiving approximately 40 thousand users a day to somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 thousand within a month and a half of adding a sitemap to Google base. I experienced somewhat similar fluctuations with other domains.
2. I have been attempting to gain the "trust" of Google for over two years with one of my sites to no avail. Sites that have existed at the top remain at the top and new sites that show up appear to be pushed there almost entirely by artificial Myspace and blog links that are created entirely for the purpose of promoting the website in question.
3. Google's "filters" have become self-defeating: They have, according to me, passed the threshold that all "policing" must be wary of... policing and being so adamantly geared towards removing crime that they clearly, clearly are knocking off lots and lots of innocents on the way. The primary method in which they have done this and continue to do this is penalize new sites for being new.
4. As a result of most of the above, their search engine results are no more relevant than Yahoo or MSN. In fact, most keyword searches on Google lead to a smorgasbord of keyword stuffed URLs, Titles, and descriptions that all say the exact same thing giving the user absolutely no diversity. Therefore, despite its attempts at policing bad websites, its algorithm is still manipulated. In a lame attempt to offset this, it creates "authority" websites such as Amazon or Ebay and stuffs those results in as they are most likely non-spam. This results in exactly what we see: Results that contain listings or sub sites from the same authority domains + spammy results that clearly found the sweet spot in manipulating Google results.
5. As a company, their business decisions have been poor. Their purchase of YouTube for the exorbitant price they paid was the beginning (in my opinion) of their desperate need to try to be innovative. Froogle was a failure, Google Answers was a failure, Google Maps provides no income, Google Groups is stuffed with spam, Google Images is also stuffed with spammy images that often do not even exist anymore. In the end, all they have left is Adwords and their search engine.
6. AdWords is probably the most intuitive keyword control panel I have seen, but as far as I know the conversion rate with it has done nothing but drop as time has progressed. It seems that consumers do not as readily purchase things by clicking on those ads as it may have been in the past.
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Google, unfortunately, seems to be holding onto the lead when it comes to search engines and as a result of this I will probably still use AdWords as is necessary. But I will no longer think about pagerank or optimize for the sake of Google as I feel this is an unreliable and losing battle. Too many large changes occur that threaten the very livelihood of small businesses with absolutely no explanation, and this is an unfortunate effect of Google's poor attempts to police their results.
It has become far too normal for online businesses to spend more resources avoiding being penalized by Google than innovating their own products.
I have submitted site map for one of the site but for my other site i am thinking hard to do it or not.
I feel sitemap should be a different thread becuase G is obviously promoting as a benefit for webmasters, the same way they have been promoted natural linking.
In my house, if I catch a guest stealing anything, they will be lucky to leave alive. I work very hard for what I have and if they try to take it and I catch them, well let's say they will not leave my house untouched. They will know NEVER to try and steal from me again.
aha, the Google propaganda machine has gotten yet another recruit.
First of all, this is not Google's "house"
Heck, it isn't even their neighborhood.
Repeat after me.
Google.
Google is.
Google is not.
Google is not the.
Google is not the internet.
Google is a highly visited WEBSITE on the internet that has done a EXCELLENT job of convincing the lazy and greedy that Google is indeed the "internet" and the only way to make money.
I've said a hundred times, if lazy and short-sighted webmasters would remove Adsense for even a week "in protest" we would not even be having this conversation.
(It shouldn't be amazing that MC "popped" onto the boards shortly after this thread started.)
But instead, we get the extremes.
"Oh google, you are so good to us. Please tell us what we can do to send you more money with our content and hard work."
or
"Oh google, I trusted you and you ruined me. I followed all your rules and you've betrayed me."
[edited by: whitenight at 4:47 pm (utc) on Dec. 15, 2006]
Of course, Skype is no longer going to offer free calls to the US and Canada and will be charging about half of how much it would cost to get a base local plan. Guess how many users are going to stay and use an unreliable service like Skype... and pay for it?
This is yet another completely poor move made in desperation on the part of Google. Totally reminiscent of their YouTube acquisition. They can't beat their competition, so let's try to acquire them. They've lost their ability to create winning brands and products so they desperately cling to products that are hyped without really looking to see if it is a long term business.
Skype was a test project, and it is going to crash and burn... and Google has hopped on right at the end of its run.
Google began with their search engine, and although they tried lots of nice and interesting things, looks like they are going to go down with just what they started.
I had to laugh when i read your post. You are spot on with what you say.
However, the fact remains that most webmasters sites are found via the search engine. If a member of the public is looking for ANY site chances are they will use a search engine to find it - this is the issue and google warts and all control close on 90% of this market and this isnt likely to change.
So like it or not, Google can make or break a webmasters business.
Sure, you can drive users to your site using other marketing methods, sure you can get users to return to your site by providing great content but their is nothing like a search engine to help users that are already on the net at the time to drive them to your specific website.
This is why webmasters are either jumping for joy when they rank well or crying in their beer when it all goes pear shapped
Rich
Where did you get that number from?
Last I checked they had a "vast majority" which amounted to about 50-60 percent. Google changed the search engine world around overnight. Why the mentality that it can't happen again?
None of that is logical, probable, or based on fact. Google owns a significant portion of the market but is in no way untouchable.
Google changed the search engine world around overnight. Why the mentality that it can't happen again?
I want Google to do well, and as long as their power does not go to their heads, I want them to hold onto a solid 25% of the search market (with 25% Yahoo, 25% MSN, and 25% everyone else).
But to me, the status quo is not healthy and as Decius has pointed out, the mighty can fall in the wink of an eye. I don't want that to happen, which is why I spend time on this forum -- if I didn't care, there's a thousand other things to do.
But I'm sorry to say, I am not at all convinced that they even see a problem. Which is too bad, because the feedback from webmasters and site owners on this board is the "canary in the coalmine", and the canary is starting to wheeze.
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I've repeated this, but I'll try to tie it all together: Their IPO signalled the beginning of a static search engine. With trust rank everything became static. That kept the price going up and up and up, and forced newcommers to feed money into adwords.
Now they have an engine that is 2 years overdue on its evolution and aside from that, they have to undo a lot of the "hacks" they implemented (which they call filters) to start getting good clean new listings.
But if they let it be known that their engine is suffering, their stock price will plummet. So they have to keep it looking like its all okay while they try to find alternate revenue streams.
"If you spam and get caught, then you should do the time" and, "9 times out of 10, the webmaster knows those 10 pages violates the guidelines".
The guidelines may be clear but what is not clear are the different penalties to each violation. To webmasters, hiding text or creating money pages that are spam are all the same. Furthermore, since the penalty applied (or to be applied) is unkown, the consequences for violations can't be anticipated therefore the risk can't be assessed. A driver can estimate risk whether crossing a red light or comitting a parking violation. Someone at the wheel will place a lot more effort in trying not to cross a red light while paying less attention to not dropping quarters in a parkimeter.
We just do not know if hiding text is as bad as creating low value landing pages. And as of recent times I always -and honestly- felt that the real culprits that were the highest on Matt Cutts ban list were cloaking and similar black hat attempts. Stating that webmasters could be trying to get away with things may be misjudging what really is happening on the webmaster's end. Some may have unkowningly underestimated the problem only to wake up with a banned site.
The point is how can average webmasters -or those with a clean history- correctly assess the magnitude of possible violations. Real spammers already know this. All too well.
It would be a different story if by reading the guidelines one could become aware that any minor provocation will be met with extreme harshness. To this day, most webmasters are still possibly unaware and Google has only been able to teach this lesson to those who are not in the game anymore. It just looks like a Pyrrhic victory.
As for doing time... Noone ever seems to recover unscathed from a penalty unless you are a larger site capable of making a lot of noise. Small site owners -guilty ones- could be suffering Google's heavy handed blows without any recourse. So you do time. But for what if you may not be given another opportunity. Are big sites with mass exposure expunged?
Google must know that someone hit hard will get the lesson and become completely responsible.
you may be right in that it is Google's house. It's their index.
Let's not forget -- they exist because of US (all the siteowners), and we get much of our traffic because of THEM. It's a symbiotic relationship -- we each should be able to benefit from the other.
But because they have the biggest hammer, they've come to the conclusion that it's best to hit siteowners on the head when a siteowner does not do things the way Google wants. That's not a positive relationship, rather, it's the arrogance of power, which seems more than a little ironic coming from a company that once prided itself on "Do No Evil".
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I agree that a shared market 25,25,25,25 would be just great for webmasters and users and that total domination is not good for the future of the internet search but i fear that its unlikely.
decius
<quote>Google owns a significant portion of the market but is in no way untouchable.</quote>
Sorry to say but his is where i dont agree. As much as i would like to agree, i dont see where the threat to Google search is. Currently the serps are just OK, not great - but no other company can offer anything even close currently. Yahoo is almost as bad and msn, well lets not go there its so poor. So where exactly is the threat?
When i posted 90% Ok that was a bit high, but not far off. In the UK
i think (taking into account the alternative search engines that google feeds, its more like:-
Google 80%
yahoo 9%
msn 5%
Ask 4%
Others 2%
When search engines started out, sure we had the likes of excite, altavista etc, but the market is firmly established now and there isnt one quality alternative in the picture that can take the crown off google
However I was proven wrong!
There were 2 main problems with my site (duplicates/hijacks) which I could not see. I am the developer/seo/administrator/chief editor/business analyst/webmaster/journalist/etc. of what a BBC journalist (I am the host of his personal website) described as a major news site which he visits every day to check about what we publish.
I really could not see what the problem was, even though poor G1smd and poor Tedster have repeatedly provided invaluable advice on multiple threads.
However because I am involved in a gazillion other things apart from seo, I lost the bigger picture for months, and only after a member from here reviewed my site and pointed out a single problem repeated on many sections, I gained an understanding of the issues affecting my site(s).
To those that say sitemaps hurt their rankings, I can not believe that is the case at all. I have adsense/analytics/sitemap installed on all my 20 or so sites. When the problems got fixed, traffic/rankings from google skyrocketed.
Of course I am not thankfull to google, rather the fine folks spending their free time helping other community members.
I am a computer scientist, so I can translate in my head what is needed to merge the datasets of Analytics, Adsense, Sitemaps and combine them to try to extract reports.
This requires immense processing power... We are talking about enormous calculations required to go through the data. One data centre alone with thousands of servers would still not be enough.
So I don't think that is what they are trying to do...
However this does not hold them from identifying patterns in each dataset (e.g.: the analytics dataset) and using their findings to improve search.
As Tedster and Matt Cutts have said, there is no other search engine doing such sincere (in my opinion) efforts to open a communications channel with webmasters.
I mean think of the logistics of having to contact each webmaster individually... It is impossible even if a people farm (as we say server farm) is deployed to the task.
Also, you see Adam and Matt posting things... Ok they can't really say too much, but they do provide insight on key issues (maybe not the hottest one). If we don't support this effort and instead welcome it with conspiracy theories, disbelief and aggression in some instances, it will be just a waste of time for everyone.
The point here is "let's be creative"... They are open to ideas and do value what feedback they get from webmasters (as I have experienced with my hijacked site). They have proven this and if you go through this particular (great) forum...
They may also be slow to take action, but who knows what is required of them to take this action.
And of course, I don't let any of my business' trade secrets out in the open. Neither I do allow any of my new employees to publically disclose critical information. In fact I have demanded a clause in their contract disallowing them to go to any direct or indirect competitor for work for one and a half year after they resign from my company.
I have to safeguard my interests as a business entity, otherwise I am lost. And Google does too (in it's own way). It is not just their shareholders...
As for conspiracy theories, mine is that I strongly believe that some of the spammers/hijackers/scrappers/etc. are actually currently employed by a search engine and know a lot more about algo's than we could have ever dreamed of, allowing them to manipulate search results with ease. Others could be x-SE employees.
And I recently heard this thought from a close friend of mine who is a pure SEO (hence me publicising it)... not doing 100 jobs at the same time..
What about that angle?
All the criticism I've seen on this site is towards Google itself...
Poor Adam each time he has said anything there have been some furious and sometimes offensive comments about them...
I think we should focus more on the key issues and leave criticism and distrust as a secondary objectives...
I never saw anything bad happen to me by signing up to adsense/analytics/adwords/sitemaps.
Sitemaps in particular is an effort by google to help it better understand your site, discover your pages and even have a direct influence on certain aspects of decision making at google.
As for their PR and Legal departments, I would also try to minimise damage from lengthy lawsuits and huge compensations... I don't blame them, in fact they do a quite remarkable job if you can understand the threats they have had to face in the past...
So, well done to google for their efforts... They set the agenda and others just follow (with the exception of yahoo). They have brough innovation and evolution on the Internet, nomatter whether you like it/believe it or not!
I use search engines and directories from their very first days back in the 90's... Google are well worth every single success they've had. And they do keep innovating (not successfully sometimes)...
It is just that now their every move is heavily scrutinised and criticised. Publicity comes at a cost...
An example is people saying that they are trying to grab business from web design companies by offering a site builder, when in fact there have been some quite remarkable systems with a thousands strong communities supporting them, which do the job much better than google's sitebuilder.. They don't get criticised and over scrutinised... Google does... Yahoo does... Microsoft does...
After 5 hours of reading and writting in this forum it is time to go to bed for me... 5:20 am in Greece...
you may take it as a joke that you do not have `nuff time for it.
But my feel is, that Google has by far enough cash to maintain a unit in charge of overlooking what shows up on most popular and basic keywords.
Poor search results make more users click on their own adsense which often look better.
Look at trafficgal`s experience and pls. try to think a little deeper. I would not call it conspiracy, but it looks like short term thinking and a fair dose of arrogancy.
Of course, Google deserves respect for a lot of things, but just for my feel, the search experts seem to have gone over the top for not being able to communicate at least with a bunch of prime content producers and advertisers who spend 20k a month.
So they have to keep it looking like its all okay while they try to find alternate revenue streams.
From today's news headlines:
"Google and NASA Join Forces; Nerds Everywhere Flip Out"
"Google and Orange team up on phone"
What they do is their business, so I have no complaint and make no comment, but only ask this question:
Is search becoming less and less a part of this company?
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You speak about AdSense, because you know about it, it is not something hidden. It is widely used (even by some of my sites) and widely accepted income generating channel.
But what about their business operations which are not disclosed in public? You know, things like click fraud protection, ad choosing algos and so on...
I think they spend a great deal of effort on such issues and of course they will be looking to improve their earnings, but what you suggest is for them crossing a very dangerous line. Google is known as a web search tool. If something like this is proven against them it will be a total disaster.
Most of the changes you see on SERPs (I reckon) are a result of Matt Cutts' and his team's research. They try all sorts of things to root out spam from their index. I don't think they are a result of a conspiracy to make people click on adverts.
To say that they made the ads stand out more is different than saying that they intentionaly degrade the SERPs to generate more clicks.
But then again, this is my (humble) opinion, based on my personal experiences. I can not be 1000% sure that they do this or they do that. Noone can apart from the people involved.
Given their recent efforts all evidence points to a totally different point of view. Is webmaster central an attempt to deceive all of us into believing that they are focusing on helping us, while they are working behind the scenes to degrade search results and allow more spam in?
I think not. Have you visited their help pages lately? Their blogs? Check them out and you will realise that there is evidently a serious effort to bridge the gap between webmasters and Google engineers.
Which other search engine is that helpfull?
90%Where did you get that number from?
That's the reality in Germany.. Land of the nerds (Remember the guys that send your rockets to space, dodgy history and all and the wee guy with the relativity) , big showy Yahoo bling bling and gazzillions of flashy stuff is more frowned upon I guess, although not unheared of.
"keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer".
Now obviously I do not think that Google feels all webmasters are enemies, but these tools would most certainly give Google a greater understanding of webmasters that are employing certain seo practices that they frown upon and a much more refined data set to work with to identify common signals.
Sorry to say but his is where i dont agree. As much as i would like to agree, i dont see where the threat to Google search is. Currently the serps are just OK, not great - but no other company can offer anything even close currently. Yahoo is almost as bad and msn, well lets not go there its so poor. So where exactly is the threat?
The theat is in their finances. Google cuurently has only one channel that brings money - Adsence/Adwords. Yet they have hundreds of channels that take the money away. All these purchases for millions of dollars, acquired debt in the millions, all these little useless things they keep on creating just so they fail 1-2 years later, immence sallaries... Their stock is inflated and it is dropping below the 500, they do the search for myspace, but the have to pay $900m over 3 years... CNN have recently published an article about how there is now people quitting Google (something unheard of an year back).
Face it - whatever G touches (understand "buys") turns into dust. Billions of their dollars poured into things that have no value. Great indies, but no value. And that's what the smart people are doing - comming up with new, progressive ideas, very hard, almost impossible to monetarize - and sell them to Google :)
Google buys youtube - big hype, stock goes over $500 - shortly after - well below $500. They are running out of money, real paper money, not the fixional that shows on the reports.
The next thing I see - Google game console (which will let you search the web, with Adsence of course) ;)
Well, I dont trust they rank my site as well as they should,,,I dont trust they provide the most relevant organic search results..I dont trust they are honest in crediting back my fraudulent ppc clicks...
I trust they realize many feel the same...Should they wish to stay on top, they'll become more efficient, or be relegated to a 3rd tier search engine in the near future
Well , for my main KW...they rank 6 of 10 of the results for the same site under different names...
RIDICULOUS.!
I know they're all the same because they use the SAME LivePerson Account Number!
If I can figure it out, why cant they?
JDFHWUGHEUIFGPG&!T#R&*@#$R#$&!
Damn...makes me mad just thinking about it...
... of course they will be looking to improve their earnings, but what you suggest is for them crossing a very dangerous line. Google is known as a web search tool. If something like this is proven against them it will be a total disaster ....
All I am asking is, why do they cut off some of the best quality content pages with at least PR 5 from Google traffic 100% every now and then for a bunch of months and replace them with garbage results. Why does their support not even respond? It is the same content and I do not even bother to change it to get Google traffic back.
Why does Google make biggest bucks with high traffic ( Alexa top 5000 ) junk sites that offer nothing but adsense? It would be so easy for them to only accept real content providers and to set up a better directory like ODP.
Instead they stick adsense everywhere and weaken their results like mad from time to time.
... a serious effort to bridge the gap between webmasters and Google engineers ...
G deserves much respect for a lot of achievements, no doubt. But for my current feel it is now that they either lost control caused by faulty strategy and concept, or a real trickster business aimed at making more bucks with sites that only offer adsense.
How else could one explain this current situation?
