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]
Ann
Ours have been volitle as well. We're an ecomm site and things were looking up for us until tuesday night. the results I'm seeing for our site have alot of cache dates from august, so I'm thinking that there has been some sort of rollback. 64.233.167.104
Searches that previously returned 800-900 total results in my sectors are now showing a maximum of around 550, with many sites ranking in more than one position when you click through the paginated sets...
From what I've read, right now we're guessing that it's:
a seasonal thing
a Google beta testing thing
Google is cleaning their index
a new patent is influencing the results
did I miss any?
so I'm thinking that there has been some sort of rollback
-Tambre
How can I figure out which IP I'm pulling from
Use Firefox and install the ShowIP extension. This is a more certain approach than using a ping. In the split second between making a search and making a ping, Google's load balancing can shift you to a different IP.
How can I figure out which IP I'm pulling from
Just mouse-over cached in the results and look at your system tray at bottom of screen in IE. Shows the IP.
The SERP's are still a mess and I can't see anywhere where there is a good result. No IP I have checked have anything that even resembles what used to be. It seems that Google think it is OK since it's been a month now with this tye of results (at least for me).
Has ANYBODY seen ANY good come out of it? Better ranking? Better overall results? Anything positive to report?
Has ANYBODY seen ANY good come out of it? Better ranking? Better overall results? Anything positive to report?
Ours have been volitle as well. We're an ecomm site and things were looking up for us until tuesday night
It always goes up when they start it if you are later in the queue to be kicked, as the others get shot to bits before you.
This time, I seemed to have only lost 500 visitors on one site, but PI doubled on two sites, another two sites unaffected.
Wikipedia copied the web and offline books, Google goes after out of copyright books, the BBC takes the UKs money .. the big old newspaper and TV channels seeded with offline money, forums get big by users posting..
Yeah there is possible some money in content, but if it would be really lucrative Google staff would actually write something instead of running of and hardlink to answer.com and scan in books.
It's like the Klondyke Gold rush, the money is in buying and selling, the grocery stores, the entertainment, transportation. There might be the odd one that finds the big nugget and keeps the myth going, but most just fail miserably.
Hmm, Google, Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon, Myspace, Facebook, Flickr etc went all big by writing their own content .. yapp..
Yeah there is possible some money in content, but if it would be really lucrative Google staff would actually write something instead of running of and hardlink to answer.com and scan in books.
The size of the publishing industry makes it clear that there's plenty of money in creating "content," but that doesn't mean there isn't money in distribution, advertising, and related businesses, too. The people who run Google are smart enough to know where their skills lie, and that they can leverage those skills to add their own layer of value. (It's no different from, say, the supermarket business: Kraft Foods and Coke earn a ton of money by making macaroni and cheese or soda; Safeway and Wal-Mart earn a ton of money by putting the stuff on shelves and selling it.)
This past week seemed not to be nearly so full of significant changes as recent weeks for the terms I watch. Page 2 and Page 3 were particularly volatile in the recent past but that seems to have settled out a bit for the moment.
You get a feeling Google doesn't want to touch anything otherwise something bad will happen.
Even the one word searches, while still moving around some, are far less volatile than a month ago.
There was some major jumping around in single-word searches about a week ago [webmasterworld.com], but it stopped after a couple of days and things have calmed down.
In fact, I haven't noticed many changes since then for two and three word searches either.
So I checked each Google TLD from where these websites are and I was surprised to see that the former well ranked US sites still do well.
More than that when searching for "pages from [country]" looks like Google understood the true location of each site but still serves a lot of foreign based sites to the US.
I don't see any improvement for the past 4-5 weeks. But one thing some sites that got hit have in comon is that they are not fully indexed anymore, that's why I thought that Google has a major indexing issue.
We had that on a couple of sites previously hijacked through proxies, but I've noticed the same indexing thing on other sites.
Another thing site that got hit have in common is the major scrapping they've been victim of.
Every time I check their backlinks on site explorer, sites got hit exactly on the keywords the scrapper has targeted, right between the eyes.
The same sites that seem to loose some value apparently have been copied many times, which may indicate that Google still has major problems - maybe now more than ever because of their content tweaks - with finding the real document owner.
On one of our minor keywords we have 3 japanese or chinese, can't make the difference, pages in the top 10.
That Google make some taxonomy changes is ok but looks like the rest of their algorithm doesn't follow to me.
They need to improve they scrapping filters and be able to detect real valuable links.
One site I pay more attention to got out of the 1st page, along with 3-4 others, and was replaced by websites that from the webmaster standpoint have all to do with over seo: spammy title, spammy description, spammy content where sentences don't make any sense - or by websites with virtually no content again.
The most disturbing is to see all the old SEO tricks on-page working like wonders again, and that very few cheap websites providing a link can jump up ranking on many keywords.
Maybe there is both a lack of quality check and some indexing issues together...who knows.
I think that I've seen so many things I thought dead in SEO or spotted by Google for a long time, working in the past few weeks that I can tell SEO is well ALIVE and kicking a.. like it never did for a ver long time for many :)
Good for them, now can regular businesses trying to promote correctly get back or are we condemned to pay per click?
...........
The same sites that seem to loose some value apparently have been copied many times, which may indicate that Google still has major problems - maybe now more than ever because of their content tweaks - with finding the real document owner.
I discovered another cache of some search engine cache in my adsense panel that says it ain't reachable. Its the url of the cache not my url. Google must see these as equivalent, why would it show up otherwise in the adsense panel? I also get sucked on a regular basis, basically my second hobby to cut them off.
As to old school SEO is live and kicking, I have the feeling Google tests out for a while how a slightly reversed index looks. It also gives them the chance to get more user generated spam reports. I recently also reported a porn cloaker that used my video pages to cloak to his human reproduction pages. They were gone within a week.
It came up #2 for a three word search on Wednesday. The cache date shows June.
Yesterday it came up #1 for the same search, but it now is a 404, since I have removed it from the server.
An interesting mix of fresh and stale pages I would say.
Today I noticed some interesting differences between the singular and the plural searches of a major 1-word search.
For a few months or so I had SERP #3 for "widget" and SERP #10 for "widgets." Now Google seems to make less distinction between the two; I get about the same SERP for both.
p/g
I often see the results at one IP being hard-wired to the cache at other IP, often on another completely different Class-C block.
The ShowIP extension for Mozilla Seamonkey/Firefox is a much more reliable method.
< continued here: [webmasterworld.com...] >
[edited by: tedster at 5:12 pm (utc) on Oct. 17, 2007]
