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I, amongst others am not interested in your sites fall from grace in this thread, but your analogy of the situation as whole.
So has google screwed up, or
a master plan
It's good business.Keeping industry people, as those in this forum, in the dark and causing unnecessary anxiety just isn’t the smartest way to go.
Right on, Taos47. Way back when I was in college, I worked as a purchasing agent. When I saw problems with the products I purchased or realized room for improvemnet, I would inform the vendors of those products. It was the best thing to do to take care of my customers. I would have been fired for approaching it differently.
Our websites are the products that Google sells. Get a clue, G.
in my industry, I often see Chinese sites rank top 10.
there are even completed chinese site shown top 10 on english phrase search.....
Google is selling information. How they structure the information is up to them, how they present that information is also up to them.
If google selected not to include any domains beginning with the letter Q then they would be perfectly within their rights.
Now what Google has to satisfy is the general public. Those people are searching Google and if they do not get relevant results then Google is failing and will know about it.
There is scant evidence to suggest that Google is failing the general public. There is no outcry, no CNN breaking news.
IMO, the only people who think that Google is broken are people who have spent many hours optimizing their sites for Google only to find that the incremental work has all been undone by...the unknown.
If Google tells everyone "June 4th" it will all be done, then everyone will stop and hold their breath and wait.
IMHO setting timelines in internet time is a most unrewarding activity. I prefer to develop on my timeline and then release features as developed, rather than rack myself on a date.
I used to rack myself on a date...but then i'd get "abuse" when I did not meet the date. I could put up with general whinging, but what would happen was that my competitors would use the fact that I had missed a date against me.
I'm sorry, I just don't believe it's better to be so ambiguous about a major change to the most widely use search engine on the web.
It wasn't Google that came in and announced that this would happen. Only GG responding to the revelations by members of this forum as to the nature of this new index. Not a very proactive approach.
Peter
my site is a PR7, has been top 3 for about 6-8 months, nothing considered unethical by SEO or Google standards, no doorways, duplicate sites, hidden anything, no guestbook links, just the largest and most comprehensive site in the industry that has been linked to by many news publications, etc...
Anyway, I'm not that worried about it, but:
The main page of the site has disappeared from the listings, it's still a PR7 and it still show #1 for allinanchor:main keyphrase with hundreds of pages showing for allinurl, up from last month, but for some strange reason, they have the main page of the site listed over and over: www.domain.com - [domain.com...] - www.domain.com - index.shtml - www.domain.com?trackingurl, etc., etc. - All in all it's listing the same page 6 or 7 times with different urls. I hope they are not counting the same page as duplicate content of itself, it is one file, one unique page, that others link to several different ways.
All of the internal pages still rank well for their perspective search terms, just the home page is completely gone. In it's place however are PR4's, doorways and even some links that no longer exist.
Like I said, I am not that worried about it, though it is a major part of my income, I saw this same thing happen a couple weeks ago when -sj made the first change, once they started updating -fi my rankings improved from where they were. I also see that it's not just me, in my area there are a couple major international corporations who have always been top 10 results, they are also gone.
I really doubt this is where things will settle. I see GG told us it would take a while for everything to be brought back in, the directory is badly out of date and has links to categories that don't even exist. There is way too much else wrong with the results right now for me to be too worried about my site too much.
I'm sure over the next couple weeks we'll see what has really transpired.
my3cents
IMHO setting timelines in internet time is a most unrewarding activity.
Well said, MetropolisRobot.
One assumes that the Google developers have a target date for each phase of this current project (which we're calling the "Dominic update").
But, since there are so many factors that could have an adverse impact on these dates, I frankly would be shocked if Google made these dates public. Not only do I not think they have any obligation to specify dates, but I think it would outright foolish.
And, sure, like everyone else, I would love to know. But I'm pleased that googleguy has given us as much information as he has.
Uh, no flames, please.
Beth
Not true. Our websites are only the raw material Google harvests to make a product. We are no more a product to Google, than iron ore is a product to Ford. It is there in abundance and up to G to select what it wants. And if people drive Yahoo instead, they can/will change the SERPs.
I have been in SEO for a long time and have no illusions of a "partnership" between G and webmasters.
I really disagree with any argument that google owes webmasters anything. They are a search engine - their focus is on providing quality results so that people keep coming back and so that advertisers then spend money on adwords. Quality search is their focus - not being a service for webmasters. Given their willingness to be as open as they can, to give some updates on what to expect, when they have no need nor obligation to do any of that - shows they are fairly decent people too (well at least until the IPO then they will turn evil I'm sure)
Joe surfer doesn't have any clue of what is going on - they use google to find what they need - if they don't find it on the 1st page they goto the 2nd and so on. 99.999% of people usingt google would simply look at you funny if you said "google is broken" - it's not broken - they are doing something new & we get to see back stage.
Like you I am not worried but some of my experience mirrors yours. HP completely gone from main keyphrase search, still page 1 on allinanchor search, all other indexed pages generally doing as well (or better) for individual keywords.
It's also still #1 for the same phrase on google.co.uk for UK sites.
The site was dropped completely for a month earlier in the year, and I have seen a lot of talk about it being an earlier index, or indications that different indexes may be being "mixed up" to produce the current setup.
Most of my referrals - and actually the ones I want - are from thousands of specific searches, and we're not reliant on Google traffic for success. But it is perplexing.
I am taking a couple of weeks off, but I won't be too surprised if I find that this is still being puzzled over when I get back!
Id love to see some of the opinions give some concrete support. I even read one that said "people probably lost jobs over dominic"... he must work in Google HR?
Is this really opinions based on any fact, on should this be titled "I'd like to hear your unfounded guesses!"?
Joe surfer doesn't have any clue of what is going on
Hey NovaW, we offer Google results on some of our sites. Click thru's on one site I care a lot about are down by about 6% - in a category where we can SEE that the obvious #1 site (not ours) has dropped to #8 from #1, and a few spammy sites are on page one.
I can only assume that Google's "extensive quality testing" has revealed that there are *more* categories in which the opposite holds true...either that, or they should *not* have gone live with this until the bugs were worked out.
The limited number of categories in which I work cannot be taken to quantitatively reflect the new system/index at large, but at least where I'm looking, the new SERP's are inferior, and it's not a subtle thing.
Ironically, our sites - in total - are up a bit...it's giving me an identity crisis, because I can see that the results overall are of a lower quality...I'm starting to fear that it means our sites are not as good as I thought they were ... ;-)
When I read how Google works I was totally surprised that it takes so long to get listed and that the whole main index only gets updated about once a month!
Hello! This is the internet! Things happen now and changes take place all the time! If someone somewhere puts some piece of information online I don't want to find out about it in a couple of months, I want to be able to find out about within let's say 24 hours of it being put online.
And I think maybe that's what they realized... or maybe at least someone will realize this one day.
The internet is being updated all the time, it's constantly evolving and growing, and the index (a SE) that is used to access it should evolve, grow and move with it with as little delay as possible.
For me the 'up-to-dateness' of the information returned from a SERP is equally important as the relevancy of what I see. When I was studying to become a programmer (about a thousand years ago... animals could still talk back then) I learned that one of they key factors that turns 'data' into 'information' was that it should be up-to-date!
Maybe the 'dance' as I got to know it recently will never really happen again, maybe it will just be a continuous process from now on? Maybe the functionality of the 'freshbot' and 'deepbot' will merge and produce/adapt ranking and relevancy in real time?
If what is happening right now is just a phaze that google is going through to become better then so be it! Google is just a company that wants to stay ahead of the competition. An IT company should constantly evolve and improve or the competition will make them obsolete.
Just my 2 cents (and maybe not even relevant).
(and if my english looks like 'kiddie english' it's because I'm not a 'native' english speaking person)
GoogleGuy... Can you answer this yes or no question? Is there still going to be additional data from the April DeepCrawl cycle added in? I know that you had said earlier that backlinks, etc. would be added in over time but many of us have had pages crawled that still aren't present in the index so will some of them be added?
I have made a few observations, however...
1) My rankings have gone back to where they were 3 months ago (high rankings on secondary key phrases, "ok" rankings on primary keywords)
2) New sites (i.e., less than 6 months old) are at the top of the serps...especially some with tons of guestbook sigantures
3) Older sites that had been seemingly penalized for spam techniques are at the top of the serps.
I seem to recall a post from Googleguy a while back where he said sites with higher PageRank may suffer for a while--which may explain #2. This may mean that most of us will regain our positions very soon.
[edited by: crobb305 at 9:29 pm (utc) on May 21, 2003]
I doubt that they will be 'gradually added' - I beleive this translates to "yeah next month but we will use May's deepbot info"
Also I doubt there will be any 'continous' update. The delay allows more control over what the SERPS will look like.
So that's it until June 10-15th people. What you see is what you get and the rest is just hype.
Googleguy is the 'heat man' for Google ;)
My search was basically for a commercial site's company name...the results I got had a PR2 site as #1, and the company I was looking for (a PR5 site) as #2. Furthermore, the #1 site didn't have the keywords in its title, and the #2 site did.
Like I said...bizarre. This is *definately* something people will be noticing.
Peter
[edited by: Critter at 9:35 pm (utc) on May 21, 2003]
He's not going to be able to answer it in this thread because it has run its course. Once again we are spinning our wheels, rehashing the same non-information that has been in every other Dominic thread.
Until the new and improved Google is unveiled, we are done.
