Google Core Update July 1, 2021

[sk7411]

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System: The following 120 messages were cut out of thread at: https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/5037667.htm [webmasterworld.com] by goodroi - 12:10 pm on Jul 7, 2021 (utc -5)

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July Core Update has started rolling out :

[twitter.com...]


Good Luck everyone.

[Rndm]

I work in many B2B industrial niches where AdWords can work very very well. I have worked in niches where it doesn't work well at all. However, in general I would say that it works better than most types of advertising.

For everyone thinking Google has a long term master plan I would caution against that line of thinking. Google is composed of a lot of employees looking out for their own careers and most likely their bonuses. They are not going to work there forever and tomorrow's problems are the next employee's problems not theirs.

[shadowlight]

A few months ago there was a research paper from some Google researchers proposing exactly this. It was debated on this forum. They are already working on it and are publishing research papers on their progress.

In that research paper they called displaying links to third party sites in search results a "problem" that needs to be "solved".

@mzb44 do you have a link to the discussion or the paper?

[Lucas89]

I'm noticing lots of strange behaviours since the june update. In some keywords (more than 1000 impressions/day) the average CTR and clicks dropped to near zero, while total impressions and position remained the same.

[RedBar]

Since 5th July I have been seeing a much more consistent flow of slightly higher traffic, we'll see how the next couple of weeks progress.

[mzb44]

So is Google's main concern really making sure that the clicks they send to me or you convert?

I'm convinced that if they have the technology to divert converting traffic around, then they would choose to divert it to adwords users as it's them who are actually paying Google and not sites in organic.

Monopoly or not, if ads don't generate a return for advertisers then most will turn them off. They need to at least provide some ROI.

Ad blindness is also a real and documented thing. Including in the case of google's ads in search results. One of the reasons for the constant changes in ad layout (as shown in the link in one of my comments above) was because after a certain amount of time users always learned to instinctively avoid clicking on ads. Changing the layout usually reset this. This is well documented and there have been numerous studies on this.

But now they have kind of cornered themselves in with making ads look the same as organic. Eventually ad blindness will set in again - maybe a bit later than usual but it will - but now they can't really tweak the ad layout that much further.

Now they will have to try every sneaky trick possible to keep people clicking on those ads. The only avenue I see is getting them to click less on organic.

My personal opinion is that pushing all the PAA, snippets, reels etc straight below the 4 ads or 4 ads + 1/2 organic is meant to trick people into believing that they have reached the end of the page and they need to go back up if they want to click on a "search result".

[christianz]

Really wish they didn't own YouTube, 100% case of anti trust there!

YouTube is cancer. I entered search terms "stripped head nut" in Google web search and my entire desktop monitor real estate was filled with two things - YouTube (75% space) and People Also Ask (remaining 25%).

The YouTube googlespam has now ballooned to such size that it effectively took the entire above fold SERP. This is when they display the "key moments" (some collapsed some expanded).

If this is not an antitrust case, I don't know what is.

[Dooku]

if they have the technology to divert converting traffic around

They do, but it's not "technology", it's because of all the data that users feed G through all the services and apps like Chrome (and many more api's they are not even aware of). It's like handing the axe to your own executioner.......
G would be blind as a bat if everyone would stop using GA, Chrome and everything else "G" .....

[topaz]

Nothing worse than seeing a YouTuber reading your article from their phone and then ranking above you with it.

[martinibuster]

do you have a link to the discussion or the paper?

That member is misrepresenting what the paper is about. There is one paper, called, Rethinking Search: Making Experts out of Dilettantes [arxiv.org].

That paper is about a type of search query called Long Form Question Answering which is very difficult to solve.

There is also ANOTHER research paper [ai.googleblog.com] about this where they discover that the technology proposed does not adequately solve the problem, and I wrote an explainer about it here [searchenginejournal.com].

Google subsequently came out with a technology called MUM that tackles questions that cannot be answered with a single link but that might require a range of documents, images, products and videos drawn from multiple languages and translated to the language of the person making the query. Google published an article about MUM [blog.google].

MUM appears to solve the problems raised in the Rethinking Search research paper. I wrote an explainer that connects the dots [searchenginejournal.com] between the Rethinking Search paper and research papers that may explain what the underlying technologies are that power MUM. It's not just one technology but several.

Google recently said [searchengineland.com] that they will NOT release any application of the MUM technology that excludes websites, that they won't summarize content from a website and display that summary on its own. Google said that any use of MUM would be in a way that gives due credit and links to the site from which the information was sourced.

MUM is currently only in use for Covid information at this time, afaik.

[mzb44]

That member is misrepresenting what the paper is about.

Was already waiting for @martinibuster to pop in with the usual Google absolutism.

[yollo03]

Just like the rest, this update reversed the major damage that was done in December core update. There is no way telling whether the recovery will continue. I do have issues with mobile indexing since December 2020 core update, I can't see it fixed in July core update, maybe I will give it a few more days. I am still planning to launch a new site.

[ichthyous]

OK if you want to see your site advertised at the top of the SERPs (even though you'll lose money on the bit of business you'll get; if you get any) then go ahead. Just accept that most clicks will come from bots, competitors burning up your budget and schoolkids working on a project.

That's the truth...it IS mostly bots. And Google even ignores your filters too and lies about what country they are coming from. If you challenge the clicks they say that they can't go by your own analytics, only theirs, and they can't discuss locations of visitors. Who can trust them?

[RedBar]

I hesitate to post this however my visitor traffic seems to be returning to normal with far fewer single PVs and more multiple 10-20 PVs per visitor and the occasional 100+ PVs which had all but disappeared.

The G USA SERPs for my most popular half dozen widgets is still overwhelmingly manipulated towards US companies however ourside of those the results are not too bad at present ... Certainly, at the moment much better than the past three months of mess.

[shadowlight]

@martinibuster thanks for the links and explanation. Having read through all that my take is that the worlds largest advertising company wants to collate information from different sources to provide answers to users directly on its ad platform (aka serp pages) on every single topic imaginable, wikipedia style with attribution much like wikipedia...in small print at the bottom that will reduce CTR significantly (if not almost completely) while at the same time wrapping ads around & probably within the content and making more money than they already do from other peoples hard work and research while providing publishers of said content little to no value in return. I'm sure they envision just 1 page returned for every single query...an answer created using MUM with attribution placed so that the least people possible click through to the sites that somehow manage to survive financially, a few news results, google maps, youtube vids etc depending on the query maybe 1 organic to a government website depending on the query. I hope they are never allowed to do this or they crash and burn before it becomes a reality or that I am completely wrong.

Someone on this thread has already discovered that they are starting to restrict the amount of results returned:

Edit: Another naughty feature they have added is blocking navigation inside the search on mobile devices. Let's say I search for running shoes (its just an example, I doubt it will happen with those words), if you keep navigating to page 2, page 3 etc. At a certain point, I think around page 5 it will not allow you to navigate to page 6. It will just tell you try searching again.

[mzb44]

Having read through all that my take is that the worlds largest advertising company wants to collate information from different sources to provide answers to users directly on its ad platform (aka serp pages) on every single topic imaginable, wikipedia style with attribution much like wikipedia...in small print at the bottom that will reduce CTR significantly (if not almost completely) while at the same time wrapping ads around & probably within the content and making more money than they already do from other peoples hard work and research while providing publishers of said content little to no value in return.

"But no, you see, actually this is a great opportunity for webmasters!

This will ensure more traffic. It HELPS websites and users, so it's a win-win."

- @martinibuster, probably.

[yollo03]

I received some of my lost keywords back. Checking my competitors, almost all gained from this update. The next 7 days are critical, if this continues at current pace I will make a full recovery from all core updates soon. The issues I have with mobile indexing continues. My core web vitals for mobile is still zero, nothing good, nothing weak and nothing bad. Desktop web vitals all green but not all pages are under the web vitals in desktop.

[saladtosser]

>>>making more money than they already do from other peoples hard work and research while providing publishers of said content little to no value in return<<<

End game?! When there are no more pesky webmasters to deal for the 1.7 billion websites in the world, they can finally terminate the two employees (JM and Danny) they generously hired to deal with the 1.7 billion website owners around the world.

Pretty amazing how one company who relies/relied 100% on over a billion websites worth of free content to monetize only hired 2.....TWO men to loosely liaise with the people who create the content THEY monetise and rely on......while offering a multitude of contact opportunities with the ads team for anyone with so much as a PDF online!

On the plus side my youtube channel is growing faster than ever from all the free search engine traffic diverted youtubes way, just a shame I would rather be creating webpage content and not video content but I have been pushed into it because google cant monetise my informational sector....but they can monetise YouTube lol

[martinibuster]

End game?! When there are no more pesky webmasters to deal

Wow, how many decades has the sky been falling without that actually happening?

Every time Google announces a new feature some have to shout that it's designed to steal your clicks. From Hummingbird to knowledge panels to featured snippets.

How many times do those people have to be proven wrong before they wake up to life?

At what point do you see it hasn't happened and acknowledge it's just fear and not reality?

[saladtosser]

>>>At what point do you see it hasn't happened and acknowledge it's just fear and not reality?<<<

Counterpoint, at what point do you see the webmaster community of this and other sites crumbling away to a few posts a day from real webmaster (non corps) and realise it isn't happening?

[martinibuster]

I don't deny that some webmasters are suffering.

The reasons why have less to do with Google and more to do with how people use the web, how people access the web, and the changing generation of new users who do not blog, who do not build websites, and do not surf for websites.

How people get their information has changed.

As mentioned earlier by someone, video content is doing well and maybe surpassing text content. There's also social media bleeding forums and other informational sites.

Many people don't even use email anymore. How people use the web has changed.

It's not that Google is about to steal all the clicks, the web has changed largely because how it's accessed has changed.

Have you watched how young people shop online? They open up the store app they discovered through social media, they're not even on a website.

[RedBar]

How people get their information has changed.

Absolutely ... It's simply paid advetisement one after another, for many companies now if you can't afford the advertisements, you're dead meat ... Finished ... I'd nearly bet that most people do not even know there are results beneath all the frigging ads!

Google has made The Net their advertising domain, pure and simple, and they don't even NEED websites now for their SERPs, ads only will suffice.

[Rndm]

@martinibuster - This is more true than a lot of people want to hear. For example, I used to frequent several hobbies forums/blogs and it wasn't the Google algorithm that killed off the community/participation, but Instagram where it is now thriving.

[mzb44]

Every time Google announces a new feature some have to shout that it's designed to steal your clicks. From Hummingbird to knowledge panels to featured snippets.

At what point do you see it hasn't happened and acknowledge it's just fear and not reality?

There are multiple reports right here in this thread just a few pages back where multiple people say that their position 1-3 keywords that in the past performed amazingly well, now bring significantly less traffic (despite same impressions!) and lower conversions right after Google decided to insert a PAA straight below the 4 ads block for those keywords.

There have also been countless studies by many such as Ahrefs etc. that show that search features such as PAA negatively affect organic CTR. - Although I am sure you'd dispute the validity of those studies, as I've noticed you do it every time when such a study gets published.

In fact, Tim Soulo himself (from Ahrefs) recently commented on Twitter that the Ahrefs blog lost a big chunk of traffic despite no ranking changes, something they're attributing largely to the recent appearance of PAA/etc. on most of the kw's they are ranking for.

There is clear and undeniable proof that can objectively and independently be tracked and verified by anyone with a site with Search Console access, that the moment PAA shows up on some of your position 1-3 keywords, your stats are going to significantly change to the worse.

This is an objective fact that is possible to check and verify!

Sorry @martinibuster, but in this specific case you are just objectively wrong. I usually appreciate your posts and are a regular reader of your articles over at SEJ but in this specific situation you are just simply wrong and for some reason you just keep doubling down.

Edit:

How many times do those people have to be proven wrong before they wake up to life?

I'd say just once.

So far the only thing you've provided was your personal opinion that search features "stealing" organic clicks is not real, and accused others who disagreed with your personal opinion of spreading misinformation.

[Dooku]

At what point do you see it hasn't happened and acknowledge it's just fear and not reality?

That's like saying the earth is flat and continuing to do so despite the overwhelming evidence.

I really like to know if you think that ALL those "add-ons, snippets, strategies and products" from google that appeared in the last few years just happen to be a coincidence? And the effects of all those new strategies are also a coincidence?
That would be like saying all google employees are complete imbeciles and don't know what they are doing?

How people get their information has changed

Yes, absolutely, you are correct about that! But you conveniently forgot to mention that this is because of how google has changed the serp landscape. People can NOT change the way they use and influence the serp results, it's just impossible without google hearding people to use route A instead of route B. All those "changes" that google has implemented are the cause of how people now use, access and (cannot)find what they are searching for.

Have you watched how young people shop online?

Yes, they install the store app out of necessity because they are getting the run around in google trying to get them to click ads within their own environment instead of giving them the product they were looking for in the first place.

[superclown2]

Yesterday evening My Special Lady asked me why my site had vanished from Google for a search term she knew I'd been working on. I checked and I found it - It was at the top of the SERPs but buried under the usual junk.

Even the ads had multiple entries that looked like individual sites.

No-one will ever convince me that Google is not deliberately keeping searchers away from our sites, or that PAA and all the other junk is good for us. Or, since the early answers are mostly irrelevant, that it is good for searchers either.

I have believed for a long time that in view of the forthcoming legal deluge, certain people at Google are pushing the envelope way beyond the edge and cashing in whilst they can.

[saladtosser]

>>>Wow, how many decades has the sky been falling without that actually happening?<<<

I can cite many cases where the sky has not only been falling, and it has fallen through the floor for many people; I know of people from this forum I was in personal contact several years ago who were talking to me in private about suicide and then vanished....jesus I only posted the other day about a friend who's been PUSHED into google guaranteed since the last update and now uses tax payers top up money to pay for ads he didn't need the last 20 years. The sky's not falling? Maybe it is if you cant pay the rent after 20 years of being able to...

What you are saying is the sky hasn't fallen for YOU, and therefore it is all good....

Because you are guest blogger over at SEJ I get it, you need them backlinks from SEJ and WebmasterWorld, so you have to defend the machine while you grip on... we get it honestly but its insulting for you to say "the sky's not falling" when it has for a great many many people already, you just being arrogant because of your own interests..

I suppose you think all the people on this forum who have complained of going under (daily recently) over the years (and there have been a lot) are black hat spammers or exaggerating, easier for you to sleep at night, I guess.

As much as I do love me a good google apologist, even at the end days of this forum, there would be one presiding over the end; good job! FYI I noticed you quit the PAA thread. Why is that? Because the proof is in the pudding!

[edited by: saladtosser at 8:34 pm (utc) on Jul 14, 2021]

[mzb44]

I suppose you think all the people on this forum who have complained of going under (daily recently) over the years (and there have been a lot) are black hat spammers or exaggerating, easier for you to sleep at night, I guess.

I have noticed that whenever someone who is not a known name in the industry publicly brings up something like what is discussed here, the more known and senior personalities will immediately and summarily dismiss that person accusing them of either being a black hat spammer and deserving it or simply that they obviously must not know what they are talking about as they are just some "random" no-name people anyway and therefore clearly are not knowledgeable enough.

The SEO industry is extremely gatekeepey in my opinion and more senior personalities can be extremely arrogant and dismissive towards anything and anyone who does not religiously believe everything they are saying.

[mhansen]

At what point do you see it hasn't happened and acknowledge it's just fear and not reality?

It's not that Google is about to steal all the clicks, the web has changed largely because how it's accessed has changed.

In a few weeks we'll once again see Google/Alphabets earnings report. Using this logic, that people are just using the web differently, we should easily be able to see that:

1) Google search engine use is dropping similar to ours.
2) Google search revenue goes down equal or similar to that we are seeing.

If all things are equal, this should hold true as well, shouldn't it?

[shadowlight]

The reasons why have less to do with Google and more to do with how people use the web, how people access the web, and the changing generation of new users who do not blog, who do not build websites, and do not surf for websites.

It's not that Google is about to steal all the clicks, the web has changed largely because how it's accessed has changed.

Have you watched how young people shop online? They open up the store app they discovered through social media, they're not even on a website.

This would be more believable if the number of Google searches and Googles revenue from ads were either decreasing or plateauing but by all accounts both are increasing.

[yollo03]

I have a different opinion. Yes, google's main income is from advertising. As the world population increases, with a 92% market share of online searches it is only natural that the number of searches will grow. Same with businesses, more businesses join the market and some will use google ads for brand awareness for example.

But, the way people seek information changed. The younger audience receive their information from social media channels. They spend more time on social media then searching online. For example, if someone wants to know how to roast a chicken, they are likely to search YouTube than an online search.

I believe in the next 20 years things will evolve. One of the best examples is voice search. In 2019, 40% of searches in the US was voice search, no one has the time to type anymore (it's old school). It probably increased since then. You must adjust your keywords to voice search or you will get left behind soon.

[mzb44]

Edit: Why is this relevant to the core update and not off-topic? Arguably, they may have changed something in the way PAA show up after the update, that now affects organic conversions/ctr.

I am not denying that what @martinibuster and @yolo03 are saying isn't also correct. What they describe is also real.

But there are several case studies and anecdotal evidence form multiple people on this very forum that show that the moment a PAA/etc. gets added to a keyword you are ranking for, your CTR will decrease.

And as said by several others above me, if the biggest reason why clicks decease is because of a change in searcher behaviour, then this should also be reflected in Google ads revenue deceases as well as less Adwords traffic overall. Both of this are verifiably not happening, in fact, the opposite is happening.

Edit:

Honestly, why is it 'speculation' and 'controversial' to state that the more search features there are the lower organic CTR will be?

Every webmaster who ever in their life ran an A/B test or used a heatmap/scroll map tool will 100% attest that as you scroll down a page the lower the % of people who viewed that content will be. It gradually decreases as you go down. Every time. Every website.

I'm sure it's just a coincidence that Google plasters every imaginable search feature right above the fold, often even before any organic serp.

And to anticipate @martinubuster's likely retort: If PAA/etc. were to help the searcher refine their search, then why are they most of the time added either right before any organic or at best after the 1st or 2nd organic result? How can the searcher 'refine' their search when they didn't even had the chance to review the organic listings? (of course, conveniently, and also totally coincidentally, these will never get added above or between ads ;-) ).

[Abaros]

If PPAs/videos/etc were so relevant and users were the first thing G thought about, G would put them on top of the ads.

But no... they're on top of the organic results.

G puts ads first, a poor quality site that doesn't even show up in search can be first if it pays. Second it puts the content that G has scraped and we worked so hard to create.

If G continues like this, at some point the organic results will disappear altogether. Maybe G thinks that search has changed so much... so much... that organic results are no longer needed, but they will continue to scrape our content.

[saladtosser]

What does google actually do with its profits (after expenses/tax) as they don't pay this to shareholders (as far as I know). Does it just sit in a bank account someplace gaining interest?

[shadowlight]

If G continues like this, at some point the organic results will disappear altogether. Maybe G thinks that search has changed so much... so much... that organic results are no longer needed, but they will continue to scrape our content.

There wont be a great deal of quality content from websites left to scrape the way things are progressing. Although, G probably have complete copies of every web site that has ever been in existence so they will probably aggregate data from sites long gone as well as wikipedia who they have started to pay and sites that actually do still exist along side copies of non-fictional books/encyclopedia's etc that they have copied and any other sources they have access to.

It should be made illegal for any "search engine" to aggregate excerpts from different content sources in order to produce and make money off this content in the form of answers to questions or full articles regardless of whether or not they attribute the source of the content.

A search engines job is to index the content of others and provide access to the content of others in the form of SERP's it is not to aggregate the content of others in order to answer users questions or create full articles from other peoples content which removes the need to go directly to the source.

[Rndm]

Also, I am not saying that people consuming info differently (such as Social Media) is the only change. There are definitely other factors (such as PAA). SE's are changing and not just G. Bing looks essentially the same. Change is inevitable. They are not going to return to the old days.

I do feel for those above who are so dependent on organic search traffic, but it's hard for me to understand because while I have worked in digital marking for over 10 years I have never worked for a company where this was true. It seems like the writing is and has been on the wall that this organic only strategy is not sustainable.

[System]

The following message was cut out to new thread by engine. New thread at: website_security_webmasters/5042573.htm [webmasterworld.com]
3:35 pm on Jul 15, 2021 (utc +1)

[samwest]

Multiple Pinterest listings now occupying position 2 and 3 across a wide range of terms...AGAIN! I thought this was fixed, but it's back in force. SERP layout is changing daily and every time it changes, it destroys converting traffic which to date, is down over 90%.

[Dooku]

What does google actually do with its profits (after expenses/tax) as they don't pay this to shareholders (as far as I know). Does it just sit in a bank account someplace gaining interest?

Alphabet is just for show and to separate the search engine from the other part(before some government will demand that).
The actual structure of G is built upon dozens and dozens of "mailbox companies" in tax haven countries.
This is off course for tax evasion purposes. That fact alone makes them an utterly despicable company with total lack of any care for society.
Instead they only suck money away from society, public services and businesses as google is acting as a gatekeeper.....like the good old toll collector.

[samwest]

Page one, zero traffic. How?

[golderberger]

@samwest yeah, this is a disaster. I'm actually tired of monitoring this crap. G simply want us out of business and out of the way. There will be a class action for that but many of us will not live long enough to see it finished.

[mzb44]

Also, to give credit where credit is due, I believe one of the best core update related write-ups was actually done by @martinibuster.

You can read it here: [searchenginejournal.com...]

It contains and even cites many of the grievances voiced here in this thread.

I really liked this piece.

[superclown2]

What does google actually do with its profits (after expenses/tax) as they don't pay this to shareholders (as far as I know). Does it just sit in a bank account someplace gaining interest?

Some of it goes on paying fines for their various abusive practices. The French hit them for half a billion euros a couple of days ago, for using other people's news without paying for it. G have two months to mend their ways or face a daily fine of 900 million.

Now about the data they are scraping from our sites and using for their own profit .............

In the meanwhile the PAA seesaw continues. Yesterday it actually dropped below the third organic result and I had the best day for weeks. Back to normal today under the 1st organic which is always a certain price comparison site for just about any query imaginable, and traffic has been cut by around half. QED.

[samwest]

@superclown - those odd ON days are likely just a reboot of the AI, few and far between. In my vertical, the SERPs juggle daily, our position moves slightly , but the ASF, AA and spam Search for blocks just keep changing and every time they do, traffic and conversions disappear for a few days, rinse and repeat. GB is right, they just want us gone and want to grab it all for themselves. I just about ready to pull the plug after 21 years. 1 visit every 15 minutes can not support any business model.

[shadowlight]

As I said on the previous page, Google Ads for ages had a feature that allows you to automatically bid higher in case of traffic that it deems to have a higher chance of converting.

And here I mean on a traffic level and not keyword-specific level.

i.e. you bid for the keyword "buy backpacks online" and set a max bid of $1 per click. There is a feature that if selected allows Google to bid higher than $1 in case it believes an individual user has a higher chance of converting.

Why am I saying this? - It proves Google always knew (at least to some degree) the potential conversion probability rate of an individual searcher.

Therefore, what if now when they detect such high-value traffic they make sure to display the maximum number of ads possible, all with the maximum possible ad extensions, followed by 'people also asked', 'featured snippet', news articles, image reel etc. but do all these less in case they detect a lower 'buy' probability searcher?

So now the adwords users get a higher percentage of quality traffic while 'non-performing' traffic gets directed to organic.

My point is that the features to make exactly this happen have kinda existed before. It doesn't take making up wild conspiracies to imagine the above.

[searchengineland.com...]

[frankleeceo]

I have had the chance to really getting into the paid media part of the search business this year. It opened up my eyes to search from a completely different perspective.

It's not a conspiracy. It's really just business. Good for google business.

Sooner or later (or I would reckon, it's "now"), the best traffic that is prone to convert, will become purely paid to play. The organic part of the traffic, will still be available, but it will carry much less "value". Cold traffic and for users way up higher in the funnel.

And I don't think Google is subtle about it neither. Read between the lines and follow the development of things.

[yollo03]

The most irritant part is controlled traffic. Traffic is flowing until a certain point and then reduced or brought down to zero. This act is an artificial intervention in the AI's magic numbers. I can't tell the scale of this, I will only assume that past a certain domain rating the controlled traffic is removed. it's like shared hosting vs dedicated server in terms of domain rating.

[samwest]

As a goof, I activated Google Adwords "auto ads" on my page, holy $#it! what a mess! It even managed to slip an ad into my slider! What a bunch of garbage. I thought they didn't like spammy sites, but they seem to LOVE spammy ads. What a poor user experience.

[samwest]

Wow, after seeing the latest mess that is Google SERPs, it's DDG from now on. I am done with Google.

[golderberger]

The most irritant part is controlled traffic. Traffic is flowing until a certain point and then reduced or brought down to zero.

I couldn't agree more.

[superclown2]

Just when I thought G couldn't get any worse:

The core update may be over but there is another shakeup in the UK today with 'authority' sites given yet another boost. I just checked one out to see how it got there; the main word in the search term appears once only, near the bottom, in a form that has no relevance whatsoever for the full search term and yet the site sits at the top of the SERPs! Is it really a coincidence that this particular site spends a fortune on advertising?

I have to agree with Samwest. Google is a lost cause until the legislators finally bring it under control; or their visitors get sick of seeing the same sites over and over again for every possible search term.