Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
The backlink has indeed been devalued, however selectively.
.gov backlinks are still strong as is yahoo directory and other large authority type sites.
backlinks that are showing up all seem to have one thing in common - they also have the url in text. This fact would suggest that the text url is now very strong as its outweighing the negative effect of the actual backlink on the same page.
Its no secret that google has been going after paid linking and I think that this is part of their strategy to tackle it, where it will lead is anybody's guess.
I think you are correct about the search volume effected industries.
Taking it further, although text url is the obvious exploit of the moment, its also possible the algo is doing a correlation on the numbers between what IT considers to be a legitamte link from its list of sources and other sites which at a certain point is assuming paid linking or heavy seo and imposing backlink penalty.
I don't think its about "juice" to good links. I think its about penalty to bad and the ratio between good to bad links.
[edited by: tedster at 7:38 pm (utc) on Oct. 1, 2007]
This is what I see:
- pages where there are changes in SEO objects, like outbound links, meta title, keywords, etc, have dropped straight out of the Index
- pages which have no changes have remained as they are
is it a new trick: make changes and get your page out for 1 update, they restore with a true rank in the next, but by that time you have panicked so much that you have fiddled with your site so you go into a perpetual catch 22!
[edited by: Namaste at 5:13 pm (utc) on Oct. 4, 2007]
This is exactly what has happened to me since May!
Dont touch it unless your really have to.
ARC
See Robert Charlton's comments here:
[webmasterworld.com...]
A while back I was changing some, what I thought was spammy TAGS to be less spammy and got dumped to the last page. Someone else has a post here at WebmasterWorld abolut changing a title, reverse some words, and got dumped. Changed them back to what it was and was back within a week. I am guessing that he was in a "lucky loop" with indexing so it didn't take him too long to get back.
In my ignorance I thought this would help you, and it might in the long run, but right now it hurts. Who knows how long, hopefully not 1.5 years, before the page(s) come back. Some pages that I didn't change but should have, are still ranked pretty good even though they should have been change but now I don't dare touch them.
I guess, "If it aint broke, don't fix it" is what Google like. Seems like the other SE's liked what I did since they picked up.
Seems like they are playing a major role right now.
I suspect the trick is they reset are resetting the page's timefactors back to zero and sandboxing it. So it'll take 1.5yrs for the page to come backSee Robert Charlton's comments here:
[webmasterworld.com...]Whoa! This is making much to much of my comments, which were about "possibly" resetting the time factors related to link age by constantly playing with link anchor text to a page. In my post cited, I'm suggesting that frequent change of link anchor text is definitely not going to be helpful, and, because most algo aging factors are link related, it very likely will result in problems.
I continue to experience, though, very clear benefits from onpage changes. Eg, optimizing a page title, or adding new content, appear still to be helpful. I don't fiddle with these things, though.
And, obviously, if you change a title or content the wrong way, your ranking is likely to drop.
There has been some talk that if you change a page enough, Google might assume that it's so different from what your inbound links are about that it's no longer the page that was linked to, and those links will get discounted. I assume this involves a major relevance change in page content, enough to cause the inbound links to be off-topic.
The question of content change setting back the algo clock is a theory I'm open to hearing more about... but I wouldn't say in general the changing page content will put you in the "sandbox" for a year and a half.
The title element is technically not a meta element. Re changing it, see my comments above. I would not hesitate to change a title on a badly performing page.
I tune my meta descriptions to improve snippets or description returned as a page achieves new rankings. It creates no problems at all.
Meta keywords make absolutely no difference whatsoever. They have been discussed ad infinitum, tests have been run, and they simply don't appear to be affecting rankings on Google.
What I see is:
1. Pages that changed outbound links dropped out of index
2. Other stayed as they are
Regardless of whether G is sandboxing, peanlising, etc, they are certainly messing with outbound link change on page.
What I'd like to understand is when does the page come back. 6 months, 1 year, 2 years!
I have changed titles, descriptions, headings, and content with no adverse affects. This is a red herring
So have I, and not had a problem. But many other times I have seen rankings drop after changes to title or description. I believe it depends on many factors, but mostly on trust the page has.
In my experience the rankings have come back after a few weeks. Some suggest a few crawl cycles.
Of course not. PR has zero to do with content. And changing content will help the value of a page, if done with any sort of moderation. Google's patents have been clear on this. One patent talked about something like daily changes of a trivial nature not being valued, but regularly freshening of a page (weekly, monthly, three-monthly) is a good thing, and obviously follows the general "what is good for visitors is good for search engines" idea. Pages that have apparently been examined/changed/improved recently certainly should never be valued LESS than pages ignored for years.
Keeping pages fresh and making changes the bots notice so they crawl more often is still one of the fundamentals of good (visitor-neutral) SEO.
If you change
Red Widgets at Example.com
to
Welcome to Example.com
you are going to rank worse for [red widgets] searches.
If you change it the other way, you'll rank better.
Just saying "change" says nothing.
But do you really think Google likes SEO's to keep tinkering with title to see what ranks best?
Change your title from "a", to "b", to "c", then back to "a" - and you will PROBABLY lose rank for a period of time.
It'll take a week or two before it stabilises.
Why? That doesn't make any sense, beyond what the Google patent talked about... change is good, but constant trivial changes is not a positive.
Google wants you to title pages properly. They absolutely don't care if you experiment with:
George Bush: US President
versus
US President George Bush
There is nothing wrong with changes like that to see what improves ranking, and there is no reason to be scared of such changes. Sure making such a change every day for a year will likely not be viewed favorably, but a page with 25 similar titles in a year is nothing to be worried about or ashamed of, assuming they are all accurate.
209.85.139.107
72.14.253.107
72.14.255.107
On pages where there have been onpage tweaks in keywords, link addition (not replacement), the list has remained as is.
Pure speculation here but could whats going on be called "link memory"? The pages indexed in Google (page A) were reached from a link on another page (duh) (Page B). Is it possible that now when a crawler visits page B again, and doesn't find a link to page A it removes page A from the index?
Let me explain why this may work. Over time a page would be found from many locations, lots of paths, so a few could disapear without page removals.... there is still a path on record. BUT on a new page with nearly no links leading to it (internal or otherwise) if Page B loses the link, page A vanishes since its out of crawled paths.
or maybe AN ANTI BLOG FEATURE! heh, maybe. Blogs are notorious for their "similar articles" feature in which the links are always changing. Sites with this feature on their index artificialy pump up those pages only temporarily, until new articles push the link off page A. The link vanishes, perhaps so does the page the link led to until Google finds another path?
Getting way ahead here... but its all that fits 100% right now besides "its ghost action and testing"
[edited by: JS_Harris at 7:34 am (utc) on Oct. 5, 2007]
...until new articles push the link off page A. The link vanishes, perhaps so does the page the link led to until Google finds another path?
No way. If that were the case, I could do a TON of harm to another site (if I wanted to).
I have never relied on an outside source to have Google find any of my content.
This is all done with proper onsite navigation and sitemaps.
[edited by: kamikaze_Optimizer at 8:23 am (utc) on Oct. 5, 2007]
There is something new, I got that feeling right off the bat but can't localise it, not enough info.
I am with you on that ... german index has shifted tonight and something is up with backlinks counting!
P!
It would just make sense that if a link leading to a page disapears, and there are no other links crawled (yet) leading to it, that the page not return in the serps. This would affect blogs most since they link from their front page articles a lot and have the "similar article" links that are always changing.
Keeping pages fresh and making changes the bots notice so they crawl more often is still one of the fundamentals of good (visitor-neutral) SEO.
I have just released two sites with complete versions of two books I published 15 and 17 years ago. Of course these sites are and will always remain static and I intend to never ever delete them as the books are not being reprinted.
Does that mean I will be punished over time as G might devalue the sites over time if never touched?
The reality is that pages that never, ever change their html... navigation, background color, nothing... have a chance of being abandoned.
Does that mean I will be punished over time as G might devalue the sites over time if never touched?
Yes/No. No: If you have a 'few' very good links, such as *.edu or *.gov links; then you will be OK. Not knowing how you have this site organised...., you could put a "comment" box that would enter new content on each page and/or an update block in a side bar that you updated with fresh content.
Otherwise: Yes.
