Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
About time, I'm fed up with seeing cheap tricks win rankings, maybe all those spam reports are finally being processed.
All the best
Colin
their SERP's were better in 2002 than they are today.
No question about it; makes you wonder what they are chasing. Generally speaking when an update happens you can eventually get the gist of what they were trying to accomplish, a new signal of quality they were enamored with. Last two, no idea what it was. Lots of people saying it was to combat spam, fix canonical problems, put the kibosh on link swapping, but there’s no evidence of that.
Jagger is still a total mystery to me, if anyone has a thought on that, it would be interesting to hear.
their SERP's were better in 2002 than they are today.
There was no AdSense or even AdWords in 2002. And SERP's in 2002 can't be applied to 2006. Time has changed.
or you could say that google have created their own problems by chasing the $'s
>> my site has gone from 445,000 indexed to 654 on the test DC? Can anyone clarify that this could be correct! <<
I see an osCommerce site that has dropped from 37 000 pages to about 950 too (site really has about 30 000 pages). No major changes for any of the other sites that I have checked out.
And? One might have hoped that their results would be better now than three years ago. Instead, very often I turn elsewhere now, as I see which SE is good at returning what kinds of results.
Of course the Web is larger today by multiples than it was three years ago, and the spammers are far cleverer now. But G makes choices, and IMO, their choices have led them so far into the battlefield of fighting spam, that they've lost site of the forrest for the trees.
Hey, I couldn't do better. But happily it's not my job to do better.
The mere fact that the meta SE's are currently returning generally better SERP's than any of the individual SE's suggests that improved quality is not some vague, impossibly complex pipe dream. Three years ago, I almost never chose a meta SE over G ... at that time, IMO, the inclusion of the other SERP's in meta results just dragged down G's quality. No more.
Reasonable minds may differ.
;-)
Google gets targetted and has to respond because it's the biggest and I'd say still the best. If MSN or Yahoo got to be the biggest, they'd get hit with the same attacks, and they'd have to defend themselves in the same ways.
Google deserves a lot of criticism, first off for their stupid don't be evil slogan, craigslist has that too, but they actually try to do it, they didn't do the venture capitalist thing, or any of the other money stuff google got sucked into, it's too late for google, they already made the real mistake.
How about we give google a christmas present and blame ourselves for the next few days? Then we can go back to complaining about supplementals in the serps to our heart's content.
Anyway, if you ignore the supplementals in the serps, which I do, since they make no difference I can see in the keywords I track in any industry, the new data center is pretty decent.
One thing I have noticed: that data center does not have all the pages indexed of several sites I'm following, although they have fixed the 8.5 times page inflation, but now the indexing isn't correct, in one case, only 1/3 of the site's pages are indexed. In another, it's about 60 or 70% of the pages.
But overall I'd be happy if those serps became permanent.
What I want to figure out is what exactly this new data center is looking for, and why it let that site back in. I have one or two good guesses, but they are only guesses at this point.
Another site lost a really good ranking for a keyword phrase it is number one for currently, very high serp counts, but to be honest, I really never understood why it was ranking for that in the first place, even though it was nice getting that type of positioning, but I'm happy with what's left, it's solid.
hearing seos complain about google serps when seos are the ones directly responsible for most of the issues google has to deal with is slightly odd, it's like pickpockets complaining about the quality of local police protection in their neighborhoods at night because the police had to assign extra shifts to patrol the pickpocket's turf during the day - triangle links schemes, fake link farms, text link sales, blog and forum link spamming, scraper sites, fake city scripts to boost site page counts and keyword city stuff, fakes sites, you name it, seos do it, and google has to deal with it.
This particular comment seems to involve an assumption that all SEO's are alike. If I were overly sensitive, I get upset at being likened to a pickpocket. Hehe.
FWIW, I am a site publisher, a marketer and site optimization consultant. When I work with clients, everything I do is transparent and above board, and I do not hesitate to submit client sites to SE's for review (though rarely have reason to do so). I do not run fake link farms, scraper sites of any kind, or participate in blog spamming or similar tactics.
BTW, I have no issue with those who do; none at all. Because in case you had missed it, G is the ultimate scraper site.
I do buy text link ads. I buy banner ads too. Like I said, I'm a marketer. Text link ads perform better than most banners. I also unfortunately run an occasional triangular link exchange between related sites, because there is some evidence that G actually doesn't care for related sites straightforwardly linking to each other because they have something in common, which I have no patience for.
FWIW, when I comment on the SERP's it must be generally removed from how my sites are performing. If I cheered the algo every time my sites went up and booed every time my sites went down, I'd have zero credibility with my partners, clients and friends, and I'd be contributing nothing but noise to WebmasterWorld. ;-)
Jagger is still a total mystery to me
There was never any real end of Jagger where we had a thread discussing what the changes in the algo were and how to adjust. Instead it just fizzled out very, very slowly.
I really can't face another update already.:( Oh for the good old days with the traditionl Google Dance each month. It was all over in just a few days and we had a chance to improve things on our sites then to see how they did the next month.
I should have used the word most, but you notice, even a guy who is fairly clean still uses some of the techniques I mentioned, in order to try, usually I'd assume with success, to manipulate the serps.
And I could mention more, and you'd be using some of those too, you'd have to be, or you wouldn't get your clients ranking.
I wasn't talking about the complaining about specific results because your site isn't in them, I know you don't do that, it's one of the really good things about your postings.
It's the overall thing, google is forced to react in sometimes painful ways because so much effort is focused on them, sometimes that means the serps have problems as they try to dump the spammers etc. It's the overall practices that cause this. This is the direct result of all the seo aimed at google. That's the pickpocket analogy, it's like, who, me? I've never seen any professional seo who doesn't use at least some of these methods.
No spam, much less algo tweaking. Zero backlink spam and google would never have changed their PR ranking mechanism at all. They were forced to change it because seos took advantage of its relatively pure, some might say naive, format. Nothing wrong with doing it I guess, google isn't a moral thing, it's just another company trying to make some money.
Anyway, way off topic, sorry, I like this new update, it's moving in a pretty clear way from what I can see, it will be interesting to see who complains the loudest I have to say, that will be revealing.
