Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Once again this was a site previously proxy hijacked months ago and quite heavily copied.
I've counted at least 7 major pages that are totally our of the index.
Even sil.y directory listings or forum posts would rank above the site itself for a search like domain name + widget. And that's only on Google.com
I looked into it even more and found out that the same was happening to a couple of competitors. Even worst as 1 of them have their homepage that is not cached.
It's like Google that keep on hitting and hitting again websites that were already victims of scrappers and hijackers. Just like if it was not sufficient to have our copies infringed and Google not being able to recognize the real author.
Really disconcerting. and only on Google.com.
I start wondering if I should ask for re-inclusion. That would totally su.k as I will have to admit we did something wrong and that's not the truth.
I have the feeling that some people have found ways to manipulate Google weaknesses somehow.
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[edited by: tedster at 5:13 pm (utc) on Oct. 17, 2007]
I see a LOT of cr@p showing up again and it seems, like always, it has to do with locations again.
I could not agree more!
As a matter of fact I had to travel this week. And when performing my regular test searches and I didn't see some of the totally shocking results I see from within the US on Google.com.
Since this morning there is even a couple of scrappers outranking one of our sites on a keyword that we used to rank for very well (by keyword stemming).
The crazy stuff is that one of the scrappers scrapped.....OUR site on many pages. And I am not even talking sophisticated scrapping, only: scrapping + content spinner software + adsense to spice up revenues. That's just so ...gross.
I can't find any sign of quality on the new sites Google seems to love for over a month on US results.
Actually worst, when I check with Yahoo's site explorer I find stuff that would usually turn up a flag so red that even santa claus could not compare on xmas day.
And again sites that went down all have been scrapped or had hijacking issues, at least ours and some competitors, maybe not be the main factor though. It's like Google.com penalizes some sites for things that they can't control, only Google can stop this and they don't.
Not sure what triggered the fact that some sites have lost their values, but for sure replacement can't compare in terms of quality.
It feels like we are going backward in time, homepage backlinks from totally unrelated themes are marvelous as long as they mostly say the same thing, don't bother with branding just go straight for keywords. Welcome to the New branding world!
As far as textlink buyers, well all is fine again. They eventually switch to less obvious like blogroll links, still paid text links but less obvious. They do better than ever.
By the way I used to see those so poor quality sites and sites from overseas flooding the top 30 for a month, but only on keywords that don't generate much traffic. Now I think that it's spreading a little....SEO's learn quickly Google's weaknesses apparently. Good for them, terrible for the rest of us.
And still no comment from Google.
I also don't understand why some sites see their PR down and keep doing well. What said above must be true, pagerank could be a total myth for rankings, not sure what Google's credibility in the webmaster community would be if it was true?
.....
- PageRank is just one factor in SERP rankings.
- Toolbar PR isn't necessarily an indicator of actual PageRank at any given moment in time.
- Search results and PR changes aren't necessarily in synch at any given moment in time.
- As others have suggested, a manual toolbar PR reduction could be about the ability to transmit PageRank.
- Google may be less interested in "credibility in the webmaster community" than in depriving PageRank sellers of their appeal to PR buyers.
[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 4:40 pm (utc) on Oct. 28, 2007]
Age of your site and age and quality of your inbound links could also be a factor. MSN and Yahoo both are more literal about page content and page titles than Google is, and have different ways of weighting inbound links.
In my opinion, Google is much better, overall, in determining the quality of an inbound link than MSN and Yahoo are.
In my opinion, Google is much better, overall, in determining the quality of an inbound link than MSN and Yahoo
I think that's the general consensus. Google is indeed, technically, likely to be the best at determining those things.
However whatever tweak added to their algo, in order to major or minor the value applied or not to a website remains weird to me for the past few weeks.
For example, taken from 2 of our websites:
> Page A: 3 y/o, a few dozen relevant incoming links including a totally natural .edu (from sponsoring a student event)>>> page has a grey bar now and usually can't be found anymore like if it is dropped from the index.
> Page B: 9 months old, total of 1 nofollow social bookmark with no PR and 3 buried forum links with grey bar >>> page has a PR 3 and started ranking among the stars back a few weeks ago.
Both pages have unique content but nothing sensational. All other factors: traffic, location and more are very similar. Technology used is different though that should not factor in.
I understand gehrlekrona, why grey bar when you don't do anything wrong while super obvious textlink buyers/sellers and spammers keep doing well? As far as the industries I am watching go, all obvious manipulators do better...they used to be set back on page 3-6, now they are back on page 1 on many search terms like a regular authority. What am I missing there?
Backlinks generated from "free templates" and "site counters" also seem to make their owners happier for the past few week. I just don't think that this is either natural nor relevant or simply is even close to Google's talk regarding ethics in the webmaster community.
It's also difficult to understand how some US based sites do well, as they used to, on all english-based Google around the world but got their rankings hit on Google US - eventually replaced by blogs, automated content generation iste, foreign language sites, almost empty pages, and sometimes even scrappers.
It sounds like hitting everything that is not an authority or perceived so. At least this is based on observing low to medium volume widget searches.
I just hope Google doesn't see paid per click revenue before relevancy that's all.
Yet the whole grey bar, pages without cache, cache dates stuck back months ago is very weird. That's making a lot of assumptions on Google's end. There's been weird stuff like this since March or April this year but it's the first time it translates sometimes into ranking roller coaster.
[edited by: SEOPTI at 4:44 pm (utc) on Oct. 30, 2007]
p/g
I've found that a lot of my sites which are supposed to be cached according to "site:domain name" don't seem to be cached at all, unique search terms within the sites don't show up in the serps even when enclosed in commas. Anyone got any observations on this?
I've found that a lot of my sites which are supposed to be cached according to "site:domain name" don't seem to be cached at all, unique search terms within the sites don't show up in the serps even when enclosed in commas. Anyone got any observations on this?
100% what we are experiencing with a website.
Must be temporary - has to be.
< continued here: [webmasterworld.com...] >
[edited by: tedster at 5:12 pm (utc) on Nov. 1, 2007]
