Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I think Google is weeding old or stagnant pages out of the index to make way for new pages, it is the only way they can keep up with the internet IMO. I recently did a search for a topic from 2002 and it was like going back into the stone ages in search. Everything now is what is happening today, not years ago. I don't know what all your sites are about but even on the top sites it seems they weed the pages.
For example I ran a search for an electronics product from 2000, only 8 years ago. You can barely find traces of it in the sites I searched via Google. Now do the same search from a product from today, say the iphone. There is probably a billion pages on that. Now I am not saying they are doing things wrong, but with the millions of pages added every day to the internet they have to delete or else run out of space perhaps. I just wish they had the ability to search the archives easily for the topics or products that are "old". Right now you can do that with Google news but not Google search.
Anyway my point is I think Google looks at a site and compares all the content, then keeps some of the most recent content in the results including the higher PR stuff and puts the older stuff in supplemental. That is only a guess but seems to be what is happening.
Since the older stuff I looked for was probably dropped into the deepest parts of these sites I couldn't find it with Google anymore.
Maybe though this is the way the internet search will be, you use if for todays content only. If they had to archive all our sites I don't think it is possible, not with all the pages being added.
[edited by: tedster at 4:46 pm (utc) on Sep. 1, 2008]
That could be a real kick in the teeth. Are you certain your url is gone completely for the singular form of the word? In other words, have you looked all the way through to the last page of the SERP.
I'm thinking this might be the dreaded over-optimization penalty (the -950 penalty [webmasterworld.com].) The thresholds for that penalty get recalculated from time to time, and your site might be just over the edge now, whereas it never was before.
When we are talking about single words, there is often a difference in user intention between the singular and the plural form (informational intent, versus buying intent and so on) and Google continues to work on ways to disambiguate those two results.
It's common to see a set of "Searches related to:" results at the bottom of a single keyword SERP. Sometimes comparing the differences between the singular and plural pages in that area can bring an insight as to how Google is currently disambiguating the two word forms.
[edited by: tedster at 2:58 am (utc) on Sep. 18, 2008]
[edit reason] make keywords generic [/edit]
Another thing I’m seeing is they’re getting rather very heavy with the You Tube and Amazon ads in my sectors. In fact based upon the above it is very predictable.
Any ideas what this could be?
[edited by: tedster at 6:50 pm (utc) on Sep. 25, 2008]
[edit reason] removed specific keywords [/edit]
Yeah, I've never seen SERPs more cluttered than they are now. Suggestions at the top, suggestions at the bottom, and two Youtubes in the middle. On top of the suggestions in the toolbar.
Would it kill Google to have an on-off toggle button for suggestion links? Youtube links? News links?
p/g
Mind you I suppose every link to another google page keeps you on google and removes another natural search result from someone else. It's mostly about the ad money rather than a search experience these days.
I have seen it and I am sure you have too, many websites are doing bad things and getting away with it and getting quick results, it used to be where these sites were up there for months but now it's turing into years.
I would have thought a google update would have got rid of this, but instead it's fuelling it.
Would it kill Google to have an on-off toggle button for suggestion links? Youtube links? News links?
Couldn't agree more. You should be able to toggle off all of G's intrusions. If you want to search G books, videos, maps, news, god-knows-whats-next, you can do it through the appropriate categories - you don't need it in the main serps.
I work with a large site - 10 year old domain but wasn't crawlable until late June this year. For a couple of months we sat at about 400,000 indexed pages in G (I am only referring to the public count, not the one via WMT). We have thousands of top-5 rankings - true long tail at work. The pages are very lightweight.
With this update we have over 2.5 million pages in the index.
I haven't noticed any sudden rise or fall in organic visits.
I think people who have spent the last few years concentrating on building links as their main strategy, no doubt a large percentage of white hats included, are going to start noticing sites drop if the majority of the links are being marked as artificial.
The above quote demonstates the arbitrary distinction between hat colors.
Link exchanging is extremely time consuming, and something no one would ever bother to do except for SEO purposes.
People will try to justify the practice, arguing that the links benefit the site users, but nearly all webmasters put the outbound links somehwere that users won't find because they look ugly and often point to embarrassing places. Hardly any traffic is directly generated by reciprocal inbound links. They are there only for the SEO boost.
[edited by: Small_Website_Guy at 1:31 pm (utc) on Sep. 29, 2008]
< continued here: [webmasterworld.com...] >
[edited by: tedster at 11:31 pm (utc) on Oct. 1, 2008]
