Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
the SERPs were different in the past few days for sure.
changed mid day today.
That just seems like a ton of work to me and makes things more complicated than they need to be
Have you heard my speech about lazy SEO lately? =P
If you want to try and keep up with the Gorgs algo then for sure that sort of research is needed, but, since the algo is ever changing you may never get the answer you are seeking.
And answers ARE apparent.
(See below)
I never do well playing chess against computers, but people I beat all the time... know what I mean?
You may beat the other competitors, but suddenly the ALGO
throws a -30, -950, Yo-Yo, #6 bug or Update at you and one is SUDDENLY LOST.
Scrambling around on SEO boards looking for advice....
Begging Gorg Employee #1-#3 to impart some FUDDY info...
I also suspect that you haven't/can't used your knowledge to GROW YOUR BUSINESS and DIVERSIFY
into 10s to 100s of other industries and keyword terms.
That's leaving money on the table considering it takes a MINIMUM of effort/money to translate ALGO-WIDE knowledge into keywords/industries profits you might not even care about.
BTW - the better than average chess player can only think 4-5 moves in advance, the computer algo chess player thinks 8-9 moves which is consider "Master" level and necessary for "3rd Tier thinking"
When I fail, I try to look at my website from a search engines perspective "If I was google, and I were trying to filter out the nonsense, what measures would I take? hmmm....first of all if all my links are coming from only directories, or only blogs, that most likely looks artificial".
Google is not going to straight up tell you what can get you penalized. Ignore link packages, link schemes, 1000+ link packages etc...if they really worked then everyone would be on that wagon.
If there is anything I have learned is that buying links is not a good gameplan. Buying content / tools that produce natural links is a much better investment. You are still buying links, just not directly. Sorry for babbling.
Whitenight makes good points in that you must work smarter, not harder. Its the little things that can add up to make all the difference in the world rather than just having tunnel vision and getting to aggressive with links.
Anyway...I wish google would fully roll out this update so I can sleep at night and stop haveing nightmares about getting a penalty haha.
if anybody is interested in seeing caffeine results, try different proxys until you see caffeine results and then you can see what you should be in store for.
If the answer is the former than you must resolve yourself to the fact you have to do better and this is sometimes daunting as a site beats out my site by 10:1 in traffic and brand recognition. Wouldn't be a challenge then would it!
Cheers!
There is the possibility that Caffeine changes are making access to accurate link data
problematic on Google's back end. That's one kind of correlation that just might be in the picture
Do you suspect that problematic link data during this Caffeine transition could cause temporary -30/-50/-60 penalties?
That fact certainly does not rule out a deeper bug in the process right now, because something out of the normal run of things does seem to be going on. Google is moving a lot of data around, and sometimes the data imports are buggy. However, I would not assume that any ranking drop that lasts more than a few days was an error.
[edited by: tedster at 2:47 pm (utc) on Jan. 18, 2010]
Like anyone who has been and continues to thrive in this business, it becomes much like anything else you intend to master - immerse yourself in it. Good teachers might give you the occasional useful tip. Masters might give you a rare gem.
Whether you take screenshots daily, sift your logs 10 times a day, collect and analyze a rank of websites covering the top 50 queries, study how to be more effective in connecting with authority webmasters, or simply just read - you are moving towards, taking steps, turning stones - and as you pointed out, really BEING SEO.
And anyone who does this will be successful in this game, let alone any adventure they choose in this book called life.
And anyone that enter into it just for money might reach some success, but will likely never glean the same level of impacts, or personal enjoyment, as those who love doing it, to an obsessive level, every day.
Makes me think, we almost need to create a thread on own WebmasterWorld version of Jeff Foxworthy's "You might be a redneck"
:)
How about WebmasterWorld's "You might be an SEO"
[209.85.225.103...]
and the other ones that have been mentioned instead of Caffeine results.
I am seeing results from the regular google.com on this datacenter
[209.85.225.103...]and the other ones that have been mentioned instead of Caffeine results.
Help me out here: what is the search string (search?q=) in this url doing? With it (using the url you provide), I see an index I have never seen before. Without it (going straight to 209.85.225.103 and performing my search), I see completely different results; I see the index I have been looking at for weeks/months.
That just seems like a ton of work to me and makes things more complicated than they need to be. If your objective is to get ahead of other sites in the serps then it is much less work to watch them, not 100's of unrelated stuff.
Kelowna, whitenight's point was not as I understand it to be about JUST beating your competitors, it was about acquiring a sophisticated system whereby one can henceforth be able to predict future G* ranking ahead of time. It is a ton of work and does make things complicated (in the beginning of the learning curve, which is understandable), but imagine if after years of study, testing and application, you are then able to predict even with 20% margin of error a ranking mechanism or be it the algo pattern upon which the SE itself is built, then you have hit a diamond mine on your own owned land!
whitenight's point is about standing away from outside your own sites and look at how G* works with any and all sites, a point I referred to on one or two threads before when people are praising G* as "Got it spot on" when their own sites and client's sites are doing well, and "G* is absolutely poor" when they are not doing so well. In short, his/her point is about being PROFESSIONAL not EMOTIONAL about SERP changes and G*'s algo.
There are more complicated things for which it is difficult to produce any accurate forecasting, stocks and shares, the weather, economic growth and decline and so on, those are in my view a lot more difficult as they entail a lot of outside and inside variables, pressures, forces, macro and micro as well as political decisions, climate change etc. BUT we have the science for it and that's called operational research or statistics and probability. Historical events which requires data gathering over the years, study and analyze the data, add or take away possible outside influences and in time you have a fairly reliable model
I am seeing results from the regular google.com on this datacenter
[209.85.225.103...]
and the other ones that have been mentioned instead of Caffeine results.
Looks like they were showing results from the regular google.com for about an hour.
Do you remember what I said was the reason back then?
So here's the question for you, IF as MC said Caffeine was "ready" a month and half ago, where is it now?!
We're halfway done with January...what's the hold up?
As I'm too "lazy" to find the original thread where I pointed out the issues, I'll point to my first and second post in this thread
Are they "testing" or simply screwing up?With the Caffeine datasets being LIVE (ie sending actual and large amounts of traffic) for periods of time, one wonders what the hold up is....again.
.....
IMO, The Caffeine infrastructure update is a complete mess right now.
(which is probably why they are hesitant to rollout the dataset now)As several threads indicate and I observe,
If the old infrastructure is called "Big Daddy 1.0"
And Caffeine is "Big Daddy 2.0"
(aka superfast indexing, etc)
Then, again, after trying to roll out Big Daddy 2.0 in mid Dec, it was such a disaster that they reverted back to Florida 3.0!
Which is the nonsensical indexing and updating that's been occcuring for the past month or so.
Psst. I said back in Oct Goog was having MAJOR problems with getting Caffeine rolled out.
It's been over 6 MONTHS since dev.goog was showing Caffeine
(and according to MC in a NATIONAL interview, the engineers had ALREADY been working on it for months before),
you figure it out...
------------------
I'm not even going to go into why the current Caffeine showing is an OLD Caffeine dataset compared to what was shown on Tues and Weds.
Hmm, how would anyone be able to prove that? =P
[edited by: tedster at 12:12 am (utc) on Jan. 16, 2010]
My 0.02:
1)
Watching UNrelated words FORCES you to get out the "rankings changes cos I did this and he did that" mindset. You also notice when crap sites appear/disappear from competitive/uncompetitive SERPS [thats a diagram with 4 cells], as well as when certain techniques work better or get slammed, and when attributes like internal structure are particularly useful (such as when Google needs to sticky-plaster poor SERPs). Most importantly, you are automatically aware when churn is related to you and your niche, or to some structural algo change.
2)
Google cannot do a glorified SEO affiliate scheme. What would happen to their reputation when "approved" SEOs using "approved" techniques get slammed by an algorithmic oversite? And what information would they have over their "hotline"? Same tripe they peddle through existing channels, or actual truth like "our core business sometimes goes tits up- but don't worry, it isn't noticable to the average user"?
[edited by: engine at 12:56 pm (utc) on Jan. 14, 2010]
[edit reason] See WebmasterWorld TOS [/edit]
A visual change.
So I am not sure we will be able to see as big of a change as some folks are looking for... I would guess much of what folks see (changes, etc) are also probably linked to personalized search results.
It is just too difficult to say anything with certainty about SERPs today, except maybe that there is no certainty. ;-)
When did the max width columns start to appear?
i've been seeing these on an off for well over two months now, pushes the number one organic serp well down, absolutely horrible. Fills the page with Google's products and leaves nothing else.
Vimes.
As i said before, WAIT UNTIL IT RELEASES if you're losing sleep over "what's going to happen next".
OR
try to gain some knowledge by watching the screw-up to see what patterns you notice.
Great advice, both timely and historic. Patience truly is a virtue in SEO.
