Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Google is giving SERP #2 in a very competitive sector to a site that uses browser "hijacking" (back button disabled by redirects/forwards to same page). Not sure if it's a javascript trick that loads when you hit the back button. This site also has a mirror site in the top 20! lol.
Shouldn't Google by 2009 be able to detect and not reward these old-as-the-hills schemes?
p/g
[edited by: tedster at 3:43 pm (utc) on Jan. 1, 2009]
This doesnt look as fundamental or as widespread. Trust was completely discarded for a while back then, sitelinks disappeared, rubbish was everywhere and some major domain homepages weren'tt returnable in SERPS (and appeared as though their existance was completely discarded when ranking other pages).
definitely a shift in whats in and whats out,
i'm seeing some duplicate pages in the serp's indented duplicates at that, the first of these has a cache date of over a year and the indented results has a cache date of a few days.
some of the pages that i witnessed drop out of there serp's on the 23rd Dec are suffering from this issue but not all, i'm assuming at the moment that this was the problem for those web pages,
still seeing some funky page totals return for some very competitive search terms first page displaying 25 mil results return but if you dig deeper there are only 500 pages before the "omitted results" link comes up.
nothing concrete yet i'll do some more digging
Vimes.
It occurs to me that I wasn't fortunate enough to see whitenight's ghost dataset. Wanna weigh in on that buddy?
lol sorry, haven't been reading as much lately.
Busy taking advantage of the ghost dataset. ;)
Since only a few saw it, i can give this piece of advice.
Get links from them and watch your rankings soar.
The first few sites I have tested this with have also gotten tons of sitelinks for multiple keywords virtually overnight.
I WILL try to pay more attention to what's currently going on with the SERPS so I can give my usual enigmatic advice. :)
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FWIW - This minor update "looks" like the continuation of the Nov 4th update that was never completely finished.
I expected it a bit sooner after New Years.
But hey, Goog has more than one thing to do at a time, so I guess a week or two off isn't unforgivable.
I'm looking for new (or at least improved and defensible) theory since my last stab at an explanation was met with rapturous silence (apart from an encouraging critique from the afore-summoned whitenight)
lol, not sure how to answer this other than I already have.
The REASON is utterly unimportant. (and 50 people are going to argue against me anyways)
The SOLUTION -- i gave in the first 2 posts of that thread.
Get BETTER links.
Not more... BETTER. MUCH BETTER.
If you can do this and you're STILL yo-yo-ing, you're over-optimized SOMEWHERE.
De-optimize THAT and you'll find yourself "stuck" where you want to be.
Because I can study it dispassionately, I'm able to avoid the "why is google punishing me" and "I must be special somehow" mentality that yo-yo-ers tend to get. Also, I'm in no particular hurry to figure it out, I'd rather just learn all I can, and I'm happy chasing tangents as I discover them. Also, as I'm not yo-yoing (and have no intention of deliberatly causing a yo-yo), I can only watch others trying to escape. BTW, most people I've watched try to escape the yo-yo by INCREASING KW denstity, particularly in tags, and by increasing internal links to the page in question. My observations suggest that not only does this not help, but internal links might spread the disease (although that might be due to other co-occuring factors)
Better IBLs you reckon? Better due to relevancy or better due to authority/trust? Or just prosaic PR? Going by the attributes of the Ghost Dataset, I'm guessing authority. Interesting... thats sparked off a line of thought about 'Good Neigbourhoods' (as opposed to the well-known 'bad neighbourhoods'). I guess thats more backlink research that needs doing. Yey :)
BTW, a whole bunch of of URL-specific (i.e not domain based) penalties got lifted over the weekend. Actually, that will be where some (most?) of the rubbish has come from. So, it might be semi-permanant until URL gets penalised again, or very temporary if the penalties have been suspended rather than lifted.
BTW, a whole bunch of of URL-specific (i.e not domain based) penalties got lifted over the weekend. Actually, that will be where some (most?) of the rubbish has come from. So, it might be semi-permanant until URL gets penalised again, or very temporary if the penalties have been suspended rather than lifted.
Interesting.
Depending on whether they are re-penalized or continue to be set free will tell alot about what direction the algo is going.
Keep us updated.
I know what you're referring to whitenight, in terms of the links...it would have been great to push the dataset through our internal tools to see all the commonalities. *sigh*
It does remind me of a saying I'm fond of; quality links are akin to getting a shot of penicillin -- it can cure a variety of problems one isn't even aware of having.
For example, one site that's ahead of me doesn't have too many pages but it has a certain phrase in the title of many pages (whereas it's just about only on my site title/home page). It also has sitelinks for the competitive phrase.
I'm hoping one day to learn how to kick a site off its sitelinks. I'm guessing site titles/domain names are a fairly big factor for who gets the top spot.
Has anyone here caused mayhem and whacked a site out of first place and taken its sitelinks? :)
p/g
Knocking a site out of #1 -- for a generic keyword, I assume -- and acquiring sitelinks of your own for the same term? That would really be something. Can't say I've had the pleasure.
I know what you're referring to whitenight, in terms of the links...it would have been great to push the dataset through our internal tools to see all the commonalities.
Joe,
Just be vigilant and ready for the next update.
I probably won't announce it play by play, but there's a strong likelihood, you can see the important sites again. ;)
of the sites i follow, i am seeing weaker sites showing increased traffic and stronger sites with a decrease. all of this seems to be in the longtails - the stronger sites seem to have actually moved up in the serps on their primary keywords but overall traffic for them is down about 20% - conversely, the weaker sites have slipped on their primary keywords but have enjoyed big traffic increases.
i am looking at the longtails and specifically how google blends in the sup results - i think those dials have moved quite a lot since friday
Some quite random rubbish floating around (especially mid-tail), but some high ranking competitors that I have always thought weak have gone, and some good sites have just broken though to page 1 (watched them come up slowly, so good for them!)
All in all, this is an evolution not a revolution.
Most unpenalised pages remain unpenalised, although a couple have been dropped (I stopped looking after 10 pages cos they're not mine).
The thing is, search traffic has not dropped, and I know that more pages than that are indexed because I can't find any page (out of millions) that isn't indexed.
Anyone have any idea what that might be?
Webmaster Tools > Sitemap > Overview
Sitemap stats
Total URLs: #####
Indexed URLs: #####
It's getting stupid--there's an awful site that has sitelinks for several phrases. It is by no means the authority on the subject, has very little value, uses stolen images, and the site itself commits Adsense TOS violations. (Ads appear right below a site heading.)
I wouldn't care if the website had content 10x better than the competition's for every search phrase, but it doesn't.
p/g
P.S. Meanwhile after more purging of my site I'm seeing 950 recovery for one of the few remaining penalized phrases. Top 25 after oblivion.
It is an on/off thing. One month they'll have sitelinks for several phrases and the next, sitelinks don't appear at all - not even on a domain search. Sometimes they'll have sitelinks for several search phrases but not have any sitelinks for the primary keyword. At other times the number of sitelinks shown is reduced to only 4.
Looks like Google has decided to make some changes to when Sitelinks are shown but are having some difficulty with the implementation.
Am i worried for no reson or would it be that I am being punished for something?
It is very strange as other top keyprds are still there, I am talking about 2-3 keywords which have dropped 5-6 places (down to second page).
[edited by: tedster at 5:42 pm (utc) on Jan. 26, 2009]
[edit reason] moved from another location [/edit]
The top 10 results in at least 2 verticals we work in are dramatically different over the weekend. The top ten in one vertical, for the very broadest term, 'widgets', has always been a mix of sellers, reviewers, and some manufacturers. This weekend a slew of big name manufacturers are now in the top 10, and the retail sellers are all on page 2. We see this is 2 different industries, both with lots of SEO and link building activity by the sites that used to be in top 10.
Searchers for 'widget reviews', 'widget sales', 'buy widget' are not populated artificially with these Big Name manufacturers, only the broad term.
Anyone else seeing this? eljacko, is the top 10 now populated with manufacturers or other big players in the industry?
We have some theories on how and why it is happening, this could be massive.
Were the manufacturers publically traded companies?
