Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Any fool can slap their favorite keywords into the navigation, and millions do, and it doesn't work for them.
It depends whether you are talking money (competitive) keywords or just made up words / uncompetitive keywords. I agree with santapaws regarding the unique or made up words - you can be ranking in no time just by slapping them in the nav, title, h1, url, etc.
But... when it comes to the money making terms the theory still applies regarding the keyword in navigation but you also need an array of other SEO factors thrown in on top, i.e. high PR, matured inbound links preferably consisting of similar keyword anchor text as the phrases you’re targeting and for those links to be coming from similar themed sites, etc.
What I'm afraid *might* be happening with this update is that due to Google’s new more efficient file structure they are now digging deeper, scraping the very bottom of the internet barrel which is churning up lots of low quality pages (and in turn many more links) that once had to be disregarded.
So a site that has e.g. 3000 poor quality inbound links pointing to it is benefiting much more than a site with only 75 high quality links, which to me seems like Google has shot itself in the foot.
[edited by: tedster at 4:07 pm (utc) on Nov. 1, 2009]
I'm sure if people check their logs, they'll find traffic coming from keywords that rank well on the 66.102.7.XX's
but not on the old/current SERPs.
66.102.7.XX's
Exactly how do you know that is Caffeine. Surely all you know for sure is that this DC group has different results. It could be Caffein or it could be that team that test thousands of changes every year playing around on some DCs. They're not going to stop trials just because they don't have the new infrastructure yet and its a bit early to decamp to Vail.
Cheers
Sid
The truth is out there ... but will we know it when we find it ?
Exactly how do you know that is Caffeine. Surely all you know for sure is that this DC group has different results. It could be Caffein or it could be that team that test thousands of changes every year playing around on some DCs. They're not going to stop trials just because they don't have the new infrastructure yet and its a bit early to decamp to Vail.
Again, the datasets on 66.102.7.XX's are sending me traffic.
According to PAST observations from hundreds of OTHER webmasters, that DC is the dataset that was on sandbox.google.com
which was told to us -- by almighty GOOG itself --
to be the CAFFEINE dataset
not 3 days earlier.
[edited by: tedster at 10:49 pm (utc) on Nov. 19, 2009]
We agreed on that already, remember?!
This is it for sure, did some checking on all my sites and they all check out.
Yeah life is good! All SERPs are still increased!
I'm also thinking that engineers might use some Google IP address and try to emulate or parallel the Caffeine results using the legacy infrastructure. They might do this in order to smooth the transition in January, or in order to give their human quality raters a place to access predictably. Unless you compare a whole lot of data, you may not notice as the two results sets begin to drift over time.
One thing people have noticed is that, in contrast to the sandbox, Caffeine generated results now are going live to a segment of the users who go to google.com.
Yes this is how I found it on 209.85.225.103
Interesting you see it too. I work with a website that actually portrayed a VERY unique issue that segmented this issue distinctly between two sets of data.
Searches for particular phrases from the homepage in quotes showed no results at all.
Other specific keywords showed the same homepage at position one, while further searches showed an incorrect page 'inheriting' the homepage qualities.
I spoke with Matt at Pubcon about this and he did address the issue in the SERP's, but there was no doubt in my mind after speaking with him extensively that it was a specific issue related to new data being mixed in.
I am seeing this on Google from several different nations.
Are you seeing this for some of the keywords that you search or many of them?
It just seems to have changed.
I am no longer having to reload a few times to get the results.
In fact, we show up in position #5 with a note saying "18 hours ago." In my mind this helps validate the speed Google is trying to achieve with Caffeine - waking up the SERPS to something fresh each morning.
If it is caffeine, is very bad for me so far. My big keyword on best site is #45 there, #6 in google.com, and was solid #3 in the sandbox.
Serps for many other keywords look similar to google.com.
I'm seeing some different results that appear to correlate between recent updates (code edits by me from 11/19+) to a page's serps and the page's cache date between:
[209.85.225.103...]
and
google.com
I'd like to know if others are seeing that or if they are just unfiltered results as suggested earlier.
The worst part of the whole story is they still do not index new sites properly, old sites are loosing massive traffic because of the poor indexing.
Sorry to say, but it means you're doing it wrong or your sites are thin affiliate/scraper/100,000 pages on launch.
I pump out about 1-2 sites a month and have had no problems getting them indexes after rolling them out ... note "rolling them out" ... not slapping thousands of pages in front of Google bot, tweaking them daily and screaming "hurry up Googy!" ...
[1]That was a generalisation of complaints I've heard in forums recently, not specifically aimed at SEOPTI. [1]
