What about the little guy with just information to share

Google seems to be giving preferance to commercial sites

[annej]

The current serps seem to have pushed a great many commercial sites above informational ones. I'm not saying that every site that offers primarily information on a topic is totally wiped out but somehow in the algo they have been bumped below many commercial sites. This means students, teachers, hobbyists, and others trying to do some research on a topic will have to wade through a lot of commercial sites first.

I know they didn't just put their heads together and say lets dump the informational sites. It's got to be a result of some change in the algo. It looks to me like root level homepages are given preference. Many edu sites among others have valuable information in sub directories and on other deeper pages. Also if preference is being given to key words in the domain name older established sites are left out. I know I can’t afford to change my domain name and lose the outside backlinks that I already have. There must be other things affecting this as well. Little algo changes. Any ideas?

If those of us with information sites can figure it out perhaps we can get our pages moved up a bit in the serps.

[dwilson]

My own experience is that Google is pretty good on non-commercial searches. In fact, I rarely make commercial searches myself (I'm usually after technical data).
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It's interesting to note that Google finds pages in the msdn site quicker than the local MS search engine does! I think that says a lot about Microsoft.

Same experience here, Kaled. Not only does Google find the MSDN pages FASTER than MS does, it finds pages MS' engine just can't!.

I run a small informational site on geocities, and have found Google ranks me fairly high -- beating some bigger, more commercial sites.

[annej]

Well my dropping my H1 and H2 tags on the homepage of the site I mentioned earlier in this thread doesn't seem to have made any difference. The changes are now showing up in the cache. I figure if it doesn't make a difference I might as well have the more attractive gif title at the top of the page.

I do wonder if H1 & H2 were ignored because they had been re-sized with CSS.

Unless things change with Google I'm just going to concentrate on rating well on 2 and 3 word searches since the one word search has gone commercial.

[TeofenGL]

Annej, for the moment, Google is not looking at CSS. There have been threads here regarding this - it's questionable whether internal CSS is parsed, and it appears that no external CSS was requested.

[twright]

I echo the sentiment on this thread about information only sites. Most of the sites I optimize for are information only sites and I've never had any trouble with Google until this last month. I have one site that launched three weeks ago and Google hasn't even sent a spider there. Not sure what the deal is, but the site is already being linked to by reputable media sources (there was a story about it in the NY Time, for gosh sakes), but Google still hasn't found it. I bought a small Adwords campaign for the site thinking that might help, but it's been a week and still no sign of Googlebot, Freshbot or the others. I'm starting to get frustrated and wonder what's going on. I've probably done 50 other sites just like this one and always had no problem showing up. Heck, from a listing in Zeal we became number one on our main keyword in MSN in just two days.

I'm wondering if Google isn't staying away from the informational sites right now. Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

[borkus]

Have you checked your competition?

Page Ranking is a relative measurement, not an absolute. It may be that the 20 or so sites between you and your old position have improved their ranking.

Look at the Google cache for some of the sites between your current rank and your previous ranking. That will show you any repetition of keywords, etc. Also, you may find that your competition is putting up cloaked text, etc. The cache gives you a good way to see how google views their site.

[annej]

may be that the 20 or so sites between you and your old position have improved their ranking.

If you mean ranking in the serps, yes, far more than 20 commercial sites have gone ahead. If you mean PR, no, I still have a PR6 on the page and the sites ahead of me are a mixture of PR5 & PR6 just like it's always been. Geez, I just found a couple of PR4s

As far as cloaking and such is concerned there may or may not be any but it doesn't really matter from my point of view. They've passed me up either way.

I'm starting to notice it in searching now. I was looking for medical information and found mostly stuff that is being sold like herbs, etc. in the top 10.

[apollo]

I am not sure if it is related but I think a problem is emerging with government and educational insitutions beginning to google optimise across their general area.

This will expose an inherent weakness in the google algo because of the way these types of sites have not so far been "greedy" about their google placements (i.e. they have not realised the power they have to position themselves across a range of keywords in their general area). That seems to be coming to an end now as the importance of google is penetrating into the most conservative areas of website development.

[hurlimann]

I don't think Google gives a dot if a site is commercial or info based.

Of all our clients the one with the highest PR site is a non commercial 5 page site with no SEM or anything other than a few PR 8 sites linking to it as it has great content.

That said I guess they have algos to deal with the keywords for commercial areas they know spam to the extent they damage the results. ( We will find out soon as a charity client with a PR7 domain just lost it when they forgot to renew. Less than an hour after release it was a lead in to a sex site!)