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My observation for this update: More of the same old, same old. No dramatic changes from last month. Inbound anchor text in particular seems to be very important. However, I rarely look at spammy SERPs, so those who are familiar with those would be better able to evaluate whether Google is doing better or worse on squishing spam.
edit for typo
[edited by: NotePad at 2:25 am (utc) on April 13, 2003]
If anyone has an answer to this please sticky mail me as I will probably not go back through this thread (It's starting to appear that it will go on for at least 10 pages=)
Nothing New seems pretty much the same as the last update. I second that the Domz key word link text is as important as ever and it holds alot more value than higher pr pages elsewhere and that the longer a page has been in the index it is given a leg up over new sites. I have been getting hit both ways on this one. Site structure very important it is now at the stage where the key words have to be built into the whole site not just optimising the page. Don't know on that key word density I think that the acutal link text on the page is very important and dare I say it linking to the no 1 serp page with your key words for the result. Of course that won't work if you are number one.
makes sense to me, a reciprical link shouldn't carry much wheight at all, but a one way should.
Past 2 updates I've seen huge inbound anchor text importance. I try to get my primary two keyword phrase in all inbounds and have noticed that even when a third or fourth word is added to this two word phrase in searches, I remain ranking highly.
Anyone know if adding words to inbound link text dilutes them.
Example:
Current inbounds: wireless widgets (main keyword phrase)
Future inbounds?: sony wireless widgets for sale
I don't see any updates in the algo at all.
The title of your pag and the link anchor text - are the 2 main factors.
As a result in my industry amoung top 20: 17 uses "link exchange", which is actually link farms. The reason is simple ... you can get "needed" anchor text and a lot of links to your site.
I've just requested an update for my DMOZ description as it does NOT match any of my keywords... (Great Ha :-) ) --- and, my site just went up from #3 to #1 --- and no, DMOZ have not updated my description yet...
which is last on the first page (didn't see there was more...).
Well, it looks the same to me. Bad thing is: many dmoz editors are aware of this and "try to destroy" this effect. Last week i submitted a new site to dmoz. It took me two days to finally find a good title and description that *could* be accepted by the editor of the cat without big changes - i thought. Good thing is: the site has been accepted within a couple of days. What drives me crazy is: they totally messed up link text and description - it now reads like written by a 4 year old child. Allthough the domain is 100% the keyword, the title and the whole theme of the site is dedicated to the keyword (which is also the exact name of the cat), they removed EVERY instance of it. Not even a similar or describing word about the content. Just blah blah.
>Google may really give a lot of weight to a DMOZ listing
Bad move if this holds true. fast allready goes this wrong way ...
>Google may really give a lot of weight to a DMOZ listingBad move if this holds true. fast allready goes this wrong way ...
Same, same... just a recognized quality link, as any other quality link.
Have some sites with 30+, and some with none... and they all do fine in their respected topics.
<changes>
A site newly posted on March 29, 2003... refreshed in less than 24 hours... and in this month's update... is a big change from the norm.
No PageRank is currently shown (Unranked)... but pages are in and shown high in ranks (in less competitive topics).
</changes>
I would go along with that. Most of my sites have only moved by one or two places on serps.
Interestingly one site I was playing around with got spidered without title tags, and that made no difference to its high ranking on a competitive search keyword. They must have a delay of some sort built in to the algo.
are you sure its in the main index? Does the page have backlinks?
Everflux sometimes shows pages without the Fresh date.
And differences between the above 2 searches seem to be mainly due to page title, heading tags, PR, and other lesser SEO techniques.
..on www-sj, I am seeing really good spam free results, and, as this datacenter doesn't seen to be live now, wondering if this is a shot at a new algo with some good spam filtering.
Anyone else see this?
Overall, I'm happy with all the server center's results this go around except -in, which as was discussed seems to not be updated yet.
I know this thread is about the algo (sorry rfgdxm1), I was just wondering if things were really finished yet, or if something else was up at google. We haven't seen GG here lately, and I have a small suspicion that we are commenting on something that may not be done yet... but as it says to the left of this message, I am a junior (read rookie) member...
Before the last update I had a page within one of our sites listed in the DMOZ and Google recognised this with the directory information below the listing, but the relative position of the page did not change significantly.
This month prior to the current update I had the home page of a site listed in the DMOZ and again Google recognised this with directory information below. This time though the results for related keywords in the DMOZ listing and even the category name have performed worse than before the DMOZ listing.
Could it be that it really takes two Google updates for the DMOZ listing to really have an impact?
Google is not limited to tweaking the "search" part of the algo, or running a filter on the index, at update time. I would swear that they made a tweak to the search algo in mid January.
vitaplease,
When I did a search on SARS a few days before the update I noticed that most of the pages had no date, but they included the *latest* major news dates of early april on the pages in the cache. Many of the sites without fresh dates did not exist at the time of the previous crawl.
Have I been sleeping, or has this just changed?
( edited below )
Also, I'm noticing that google is apparently trying to parse tables by row. I have a site with two columns. The first column I use to plug a few highlighted pages via image links and a small text description. The second column I use as a content position.
Imagine my surprise to see google results from the RIGHT hand column ( closer to the bottom of the table than the top ) displaying google description content PARALLEL to left! Not only that, but visually parallel.
Have I been sleeping, am I dreaming, or are these new methods google is employing?
- Silent Partner
A very good summary, but one thing conflicts with what I am seeing.
1) PR 6,7,8,9,10 have been made harder to achieve. Many sites have fallen off their PRs at these levels
2) Lower PRs of 3,4,5 are not affected. Sites have remained at these levels and infact many new sites have joined at these levels
It has been widely reported that backlinks have dropped. The main "wisdom" on this is that many PR 4 & 5 sites have dropped to PR 3 and so are no longer being counted as backlinks.
I agree with the idea that we have seen PR drop, but I think that the drop *has* trickled down to the lower PR just not to the same extent as the higher PR values (due to the non linear nature of PR?).
